1장
The Art of Breakthrough Advertising: Channeling Human Desire into Sales
Eugene Schwartz's "Breakthrough Advertising" stands as one of the most coveted marketing texts ever written, with used copies once commanding over $900. First published in 1966, this masterpiece has helped countless readers generate millions in sales-remarkably, most of them weren't even copywriters. What makes this book so valuable? Unlike theoretical marketing texts, it was written by a man whose livelihood depended directly on producing measurable profit from the written word. Standing at 6'2" with charm and wit reminiscent of Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead, Schwartz was a genius whose fingers flew over the keyboard creating brilliant ads that sold products directly through mail order-the greatest copywriting school in the world, where every word's effectiveness is measured in dollars and cents. Even after suffering a stroke in 1978 affecting his right side, Schwartz continued writing with just his left hand, proving his dedication to the craft. Beyond copywriting, he served as a business consultant, published multiple books, and with his wife Barbara, built a remarkable art collection featuring artists like Hans Hoffman and Morris Lewis before they became famous. This is no mere book about advertising-it's a comprehensive guide to developing entirely new markets for products by harnessing the immense natural forces of human desire.
2장
Mass Desire: The Force That Makes Advertising Work
The fundamental power behind advertising comes not from clever copy but from the market itself. This is Schwartz's first crucial insight: copy doesn't create desire-it channels existing desires toward specific products. No advertiser can afford to create mass desire; they can only exploit it.
Mass desire is simply the public spread of a private want-when enough individuals share the same desire to make selling to them profitable. These desires develop from social, economic, and technological forces far greater than advertising itself. This gives advertising its remarkable amplification effect where $1 spent can generate $50-$100 in sales.
Two categories of forces create mass desires: Permanent Forces (mass instincts like attractiveness and health that never fade) and Forces of Change (emerging trends, mass education, and shifting preferences). The copywriter's job is to detect these desires and harness products to them.
To channel mass desire onto your product, follow this three-step process: First, choose the most powerful desire applicable to your product based on urgency, staying power, and scope. Second, acknowledge this desire in your headline-the bridge between prospect and product. Third, show how your product's performance satisfies that desire.
Remember that your product is actually two products-the physical product (materials) and the functional product (benefits). People pay for what the product does, not what it's made of. Physical attributes only justify price and document performance quality after the primary promise has been established. Every product contains multiple performances, but your headline can effectively tap only one desire at a time. Your job is to find that one dominant performance, squeeze every drop of power from it, and convince readers that satisfaction comes only from your product.
3장
Your Prospect's State of Awareness: The Key to Effective Headlines
After defining your market's mass desire and selecting your product's most compelling performance, you must understand your prospect's state of awareness to craft an effective headline. The headline forms the critical bridge between market and product, beginning with the market and leading inevitably to your product.
Your headline has only one job-to stop your prospect and compel them to read the second sentence. Each subsequent sentence has the same singular purpose: force the reader to continue. The more of your story they read, the more thoroughly you can sell them.
Markets progress through five stages of awareness that determine your headline approach:
1. Most Aware: The customer knows your product, wants it, but hasn't purchased yet. Your headline needs only the product name and a bargain price.
2. Product-Aware But Not Convinced: The prospect knows your product but isn't ready to buy. Your headline must either reinforce desire, sharpen their image of satisfaction, extend usage scenarios, introduce new proof, announce new mechanisms, eliminate limitations, or differentiate from competitors.
3. Solution-Aware: The prospect recognizes they want what your product does but doesn't know your product exists. Your headline must name the desire and its solution, prove it can be accomplished, and show your product contains the mechanism.
4. Need-Aware: The prospect has a need but doesn't connect it to your product. Your headline must name the need/solution, dramatize it vividly, and present your product as the inevitable answer.
5. Completely Unaware: The prospect doesn't recognize their desire or need. This requires an identification headline that echoes emotions and attitudes rather than selling directly, gradually building awareness through carefully crafted paragraphs.
For completely unaware markets, eliminate these elements from headlines: price (meaningless to someone who doesn't want your product), product name (meaningless or potentially damaging), and direct statements of function or desire (won't work). Instead, write identification headlines that echo emotions and attitudes, defining prospects to themselves.
Effective approaches for unaware markets include giving words to hidden dreams ("THE UNIVERSITY OF THE NIGHT"), exploiting hidden fears ("WHY MEN CRACK..."), or leading into unacceptable problems through universally accepted images ("WITHIN THE CURVE OF A WOMAN'S ARM").
The classic "THEY LAUGHED WHEN I SAT DOWN AT THE PIANO. BUT WHEN I STARTED TO PLAY!" creates a narrative where the reader identifies with transformation from social embarrassment to triumph. Rather than directly selling correspondence courses, it dramatizes the end result-social admiration-through a vivid story of a man surprising his friends with newfound musical ability.
4장
Market Sophistication: Adapting Your Approach to Competition
How many similar products have your prospects encountered before? This critical question determines your advertising approach-the less exposed your market, the more direct you can be. If you're first in your market, you're dealing with completely unsophisticated prospects who will be more enthusiastic and believing.
Being first in a market is every advertiser's dream. This advantage comes from technological breakthroughs creating new products, radically better products, or dramatically lower prices. It can also come from advertising insight-applying existing products to new markets, reaching markets through untapped media, or discovering new product benefits. When you're first, your approach should be simple and direct-name the need or claim in your headline, dramatize it powerfully, introduce your product, and prove it works.
When you're second in a market where the direct claim still works, the strategy is straightforward: copy the successful claim but enlarge it. Push it to its absolute limit and outbid your competition. In the reducing field, headlines like "LOSE UP TO 47 POUNDS IN 4 WEEKS-OR RECEIVE $40 BACK!" demonstrate this approach. But inevitably, this process disintegrates as claims become overworked and prospects grow skeptical.
At this point, your market has heard all the claims and extremes. The desire still exists, but prospects no longer fully believe the old approaches. What's needed now is a new mechanism-a fresh way to make old promises believable again. The emphasis shifts from what the product does to HOW it works. Headlines like "FLOATS FAT RIGHT OUT OF YOUR BODY!" demonstrate this strategy.
When competitors introduce their own mechanisms, the market enters the Fourth Stage-elaboration focused on the mechanism rather than the promise. Headlines like "FIRST NO-DIET REDUCING WONDER DRUG!" show how mechanisms are made easier, quicker, and surer with extra benefits.
In the Fifth Stage, your market no longer believes your advertising or wishes to be aware of your product. The emphasis shifts from promise and mechanism to identification with the prospect. You must bring prospects into your ad through identification rather than desire.
The cigarette industry perfectly illustrates all five sophistication stages. First Stage featured simple taste claims ("I'D WALK A MILE FOR A CAMEL!"). Second Stage expanded to broader comparisons ("LIGHT UP A LUCKY, AND YOU WON'T MISS THE SWEETS THAT MAKE YOU FAT!"). Third Stage introduced new mechanisms ("LUCKIES-THEY'RE TOASTED!"). Fourth Stage elaborated on mechanisms ("PHILIP MORRIS-ALL THE HARSHNESS BAKED OUT!"). Fifth Stage abandoned claims for pure identification with virility (Marlboro "Virile Men" ads).
5장
Strengthening Your Headlines Through Verbalization
Once you have your basic headline idea, you can dramatically increase its impact through precise wording-the art of VERBALIZATION. While simply stating a claim works for first-in-market products, competitive situations require reinforcing your claim by binding other images to it. Verbalization transforms ordinary statements into memorable, action-driving messages that not only capture attention but compel readers to engage with your advertisement.
Here are powerful techniques to transform basic claims into compelling headlines, each with specific applications:
Quantification Techniques:
• Measure size with precise numbers ("20,000 microscopic filter traps catch even invisible particles")
• Measure speed with specific timeframes ("Feel better in just 30 minutes!")
• Compare with exact metrics ("Six times whiter washes than leading brands")
• Use percentages ("97% of users reported visible results in two weeks")
Emotional and Sensory Appeals:
• Metaphorize to create powerful imagery ("Banishes corns like magic!")
• Sensitize through multiple senses ("Tastes like you just picked it from your garden!")
• Create vivid demonstrations ("At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in this Rolls Royce is the electric clock!")
• Dramatize results with storytelling ("They laughed when I sat down at the piano-but when I started to play, they couldn't believe their ears!")
Problem-Solution Frameworks:
• Create intriguing paradoxes ("How a bald-headed barber saved my hair!")
• Remove limitations with alternatives ("Shrinks hemorrhoids WITHOUT surgery!")
• Address common objections ("Yes, you can learn French - even if you failed language classes before!")
• Present before-and-after scenarios with specific outcomes
Authority and Credibility Builders:
• Leverage expert testimonials ("Recommended by 9 out of 10 dentists")
• Use case histories with real results ("How Sarah lost 30 pounds without giving up her favorite foods")
• Associate with aspirational values ("Join the elite 1% who invest like professionals")
• Reference scientific studies or research findings
Engagement Techniques:
• Pose thought-provoking questions ("Why do some people never get sick?")
• Offer exclusive information ("The hidden truth about cholesterol your doctor won't tell you")
• Challenge readers with direct calls-to-action ("Test your financial IQ in 5 minutes")
• Create urgency through limited-time offers ("Only available to the first 100 respondents")
Remember that effective verbalization requires:
1. Specificity in claims and promises
2. Authenticity in presentation
3. Relevance to your target audience
4. Fresh approaches to familiar benefits
5. Clear connection to product advantages
The possibilities for creative verbalization are infinite, but success demands pushing beyond conventional approaches with each new product. True copywriters must continually innovate, finding unique ways to express benefits and capture attention. In advertising, as in science and art, the most effective solution often lies in discovering new ways to communicate timeless truths about human desires and needs.
6장
Inside the Prospect's Mind: Building Desire, Identity, and Belief
Your headline's job is simply to stop your prospect and focus their attention on your first paragraph. From there, your body copy does the selling by creating a new world where your product fulfills the dominant desire that made them respond to your headline.
To create this world, your copy must alter one or more dimensions of the prospect's mental world. The length of your ad depends on three factors: how much copy you need to build desire to maximum strength, how much to make them feel comfortable and complimented by the product, and how much to make them believe your claims despite existing prejudices.
These three questions determine not only length but also structure, development, style and pace of your ad. Each relates to a separate dimension of your prospect's mind:
1. Desires: These are physical, material, and sensual wants that drive your prospect. You can't create or diminish them, but you can expand, sharpen, and channel them toward your product.
2. Identifications: These are the roles prospects want to play and personality traits they want your product to help them build or project. They complement physical desires by making purchases serve double duty-not just buying a low-calorie food to become thin, but to build an attractive personality; not just buying a car for transportation, but to project success and prestige.
3. Beliefs: These are the opinions, attitudes, prejudices and conceptions of reality your prospect lives by. You can't argue with or change them-you must accept them and build from them using the prospect's logic, not yours.
These three dimensions-desires, identifications and beliefs-must be woven together to create a simple, fluid path from the beginning to the end of your ad.
7장
Intensification: Thirteen Ways to Strengthen Desire
Desire is the fundamental force that creates sales, and the art of salesmanship is expanding this desire-both horizontally among more people and vertically by sharpening it until it overcomes skepticism and price resistance.
As the literature of desire, advertising's job is to transform vague, indistinct emotions into concrete images that show every possible way these desires can be fulfilled. You must multiply their strength by suggesting numerous satisfactions.
A copywriter needs imagination and enthusiasm to be the script writer for the prospect's dreams, showing in vivid detail all the tomorrows the product makes possible. The sharper the pictures and the more legitimate satisfactions presented, the more the prospect will demand the product and the less important price becomes.
Schwartz outlines thirteen specific techniques for intensifying desire:
1. Present your claims through thorough, detailed description of appearance or results.
2. Put the product in action, showing exactly how it works.
3. Place the reader directly in the middle of your product-in-action story.
4. Transform your demonstration into a specific test the reader can visualize performing.
5. Extend your reader's vision further in time, showing a continuous flow of benefits.
6. Introduce other actors besides the reader to provide fresh perspectives.
7. Use experts and professionals to reaffirm product benefits.
8. Compare and contrast with competing products to prove superiority.
9. Paint the problem you're solving in full black color before presenting your solution.
10. Emphasize the simplicity of using your product in contrast with its powerful benefits.
11. Move beyond raw facts to dramatize benefits through metaphor and imagination.
12. After exploring various perspectives, use the "catalog" technique to deliver a final punch.
13. Transform your guarantee into the climactic summary of your product's performance.
Your prospect will take only one dominant image from your ad, but each additional fresh presentation of that idea makes it sharper and builds emotional weight. You must avoid both market sophistication (phraseology the prospect has seen before) and internal repetition within your own ad.
8장
Identification: Building a Saleable Personality Into Your Product
While Intensification addresses obvious desires that announce their wants and needs, Identification taps into a more subtle dimension of human longing-not for satisfaction, but for expression. This represents the human need to define oneself to the world, to express valued qualities and attained positions.
Identification works with subtler, partly unconscious desires for self-expression. This technique requires building the proper personality into your product that allows customers to define themselves through their purchases.
Every product should offer two distinct reasons for purchase: the fulfillment of a physical need (satisfaction) and a particular method of fulfilling that need that defines the buyer as a specific kind of person (role). Modern consumers select products not just for function but for what they communicate-being "up-to-date," "youthful," "sophisticated."
Character roles are usually expressed as adjectives like "progressive," "chic," or "well-read." Achievement roles are status positions created by society and earned by individuals-expressed as nouns that serve as titles. For men: "Executive," "Home Owner," "$20,000-a-year-Man." For women: "Wife," "Fashion Setter," "Good Mother."
Products become status definers beyond their physical functions-they announce achievements and document success. When products perform similarly and price isn't a factor, the prospect's choice depends on which offers the better role-identification.
Every product has a pre-existing personality-its primary image in the prospect's mind. Your job is to use this accepted image as raw material to construct multiple images that incorporate more desirable roles. You can either intensify an already positive primary image or tone down negative/neutral images.
Despite their power, identification images have strict limits. Two key questions determine believability: Do people already believe your product has these character traits? And can they identify themselves with these traits? If either answer is "no," you need a believability-bridge-starting with what prospects already believe and building toward your desired image.
9장
Gradualization: Building Belief Step by Step
After exploring desire and identification, we now turn to belief-the third dimension of persuasion. No matter how intense the desire or how demanding the need to identify, both must fuse with belief to produce the ultimate goal-absolute conviction.
Belief is a complex fusion of thought and emotion-your prospect's mental picture of the world and the emotional security derived from it. These accepted facts and values provide comfort in a predictable world that makes sense. The need to believe is as powerful an emotional force as any physical desire.
The basic rule: if you violate your prospect's established beliefs in the slightest degree, no promise can save your ad. But if you channel the force of belief behind even one small claim, it will outsell all half-questioned promises your competitors can write.
Every claim, image, and proof in your ad has two sources of strength: its content and the preparation made for it. You can strengthen statements by intensifying their content (making greater promises) or by changing their sequence (strengthening the groundwork for belief through preceding material).
Gradualization starts with statements that will be immediately accepted, building a chain of acceptances leading to a goal conclusion the reader wouldn't have accepted without preparation. This begins with your headline, which must awaken interest while being accepted as true.
A Television Repair Manual ad from 1951 illustrates gradualization perfectly. The power-claim headline "Save up to $100 a Year on Your TV Repairs!" failed because prospects didn't believe they could repair TVs themselves. The successful revision began with "WHY HAVEN'T TV OWNERS BEEN TOLD THESE FACTS?"-tapping into existing suspicion without making claims. It built acceptance step by step, starting with an inclusion question ("Was your set purchased after the spring of 1947?") that 95% would answer "yes" to, establishing a habit of agreement.
Six specific techniques for building belief include:
1. The Inclusion Question - placing prospects in a "yes-answer group"
2. Detailed Identification - cataloging problems that match the prospect's situation
3. Contradiction of Present (False) Beliefs - challenging limitations
4. The Language of Logic - using words like "therefore" and "because"
5. Syllogistic Thinking - proving your product works through logical reasoning
6. Structural Techniques - arranging claims for maximum credibility
10장
Redefinition, Mechanization and Advanced Techniques
Time and again, you'll need to sell products with built-in handicaps that repel prospects. Redefinition-giving your product a new definition-removes these roadblocks before the prospect even knows they exist.
The classic redefinition example is Lifebuoy soap in the 1930s. It had a horrible medicinal odor that couldn't be removed without affecting cleaning power. The B.O. campaign transformed this liability into an asset by focusing on body odor that drives people away. The medicinal smell became proof of Lifebuoy's "odor-destroying power."
For overcomplicated products, redefinition must simplify the prospect's perception. When a product lacks broad appeal, redefinition through escalation gives it greater importance in the prospect's eyes. For products that cost too much, psychological redefinition shifts the price comparison to make it seem reasonable.
Mechanization addresses the vital question "How does it work?" by demonstrating your product logically in words. This "Reason Why" copy convinces prospects your product actually works. Mechanism can function at three levels: as a simple word or phrase when people already understand how your product works, as descriptive proof when people need reasons to believe, or as your primary selling point when you have an exceptionally strong mechanism.
Concentration directly addresses competitors rather than ignoring them. It's particularly effective when your budget is smaller than competitors' or when prospects are already loyal to competing products. But Concentration is more than mere attack-it's proving other solutions ineffectual while showing your product provides what others lack.
Camouflage involves borrowing believability from trusted sources where conviction is already stored in society. By matching a publication's look and adopting its phraseology, you can tap into readers' ingrained trust.
11장
The Final Touches: Creating a Cohesive Persuasive Experience
After mastering headlines and body copy techniques, you must focus on weaving these elements into a cohesive unit that maintains attention from beginning to end. This requires additional devices that tie everything together into an effective whole.
Verification means strategically placing proof elements throughout your copy. While gathering compelling statistics, tests, testimonials and authorities is essential, their placement matters as much as their content. Rather than isolating proof in separate sections, interweave it with promises and other elements for exponentially greater emotional power.
Reinforcement combines emotional images for multiplied impact. The classic Avis campaign demonstrates this: "We try harder" gained tremendous power when reinforced by "We're only second." These two ideas created combined impact far greater than either statement alone.
Interweaving blends emotion, image and logic into the same sentence. Pack your sentences with multiple elements that reinforce each other. This creates richer, more powerful copy that says more in less space and builds multiplied impact throughout your message.
Sensitivity requires empathy-you must be both writer and reader simultaneously. You need to anticipate when your reader thinks "I've read enough about this" and shift the copy's direction accordingly. This architectural skill determines whether your ad sticks together or falls apart.
Momentum-building devices keep readers engaged through long copy. Actual momentum phrases serve as transitions that signal what follows: "Here's how," "Let me explain," "For example." Incomplete statements create curiosity by raising questions the reader must continue reading to answer.
Words and rhythms establish emotional tone so subtly readers never realize where the excitement or conviction originates. Successful copy uses image-sharpeners that create visual pictures and emotion words that tell readers what to feel about those images. The rhythm matters too-from rich, poetic cadences to staccato, machine-gun sentences that build momentum through rapid-fire claims.
These techniques represent Schwartz's contribution to the craft of copywriting. He encourages readers to study other masters like Claude Hopkins, John E. Kennedy, Robert Collier, David Ogilvy, and Rosser Reeves. Keep writing, he urges, and always aim high-"shoot for the moon-it's one of the few real thrills left today!"
