Breakthrough Advertising – Book Review

By Lorenzo Ayres

Eugene M. Schwartz

Category: Marketing and Demand

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When Eugene Schwartz, the author of Breakthrough Advertising, died in Manhattan in 1995 at age 68, The New York Times wrote about him as an art collector. He and his wife Barbara had built one of the most serious private collections of postwar American art – Hans Hofmann, Morris Louis, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Milton Avery – and they had bought most of it well before anybody else had worked out that those names were going to matter. There’s still no Wikipedia article about him. He has roughly 50 academic citations to his name. And he wrote what I’d call the most important book about demand that anybody has ever written. Almost nobody outside of direct response has heard of it, and for about 50 years, you couldn’t get hold of it at any sensible price.

Let me correct the thing everybody says about this book, including the version of me who talked about it a year ago. It’s not out of print. It sold only a few thousand copies when Prentice-Hall published it in 1966. Boardroom reissued it in 1984 and again in 2004, and by then used copies were going for anywhere from about $300 to $1,600. That’s the origin of the legend. Since 2017, Brian Kurtz’s company has held the rights jointly with Schwartz’s widow and sells a new hardcover for $125, a word-for-word reproduction of the 1966 manuscript. So the correct advice today isn’t to hunt down a photocopy. It’s to spend the $125.

The argument starts on page three, and it’s one sentence: “Copy cannot create desire for a product.” Now, this sounds like modesty, but it’s actually the opposite, because what follows is a claim that the entire force that makes advertising work comes from the market and not from the writing, and that your only job is to channel and direct something that already exists. He proves it with car companies that tried to fight the tide. Chrysler built a shorter, roomier car in 1948 when the market wanted longer, lower, and wider. Ford spent millions on safety in 1954 while every buyer in America was comparing horsepower numbers, and the next year, Ford went and built its highest-horsepower engines. And then there’s the Edsel. His definition of mass desire is on page four, and it’s the cleanest sentence in the book: “It is the public spread of a private want.”

From there, he builds the thing everybody has stolen from him without attribution: the awareness scale. His question isn’t what your product does; it’s how much your prospect already knows. At the top is the customer who knows your product, knows what it does, and knows he wants it, and for that person, the ad needs little more than the name and a price. Below that is the customer who knows the product exists but doesn’t want it yet. Below that is the customer who wants the result but doesn’t know a product exists that delivers it. Below that is somebody with a need rather than a desire, who hasn’t yet put words to it. And at the bottom is the completely unaware market, where the prospect won’t admit the need, or can’t say it out loud, and where Schwartz says the headline can’t mention the price, the product name, or even what the product does, because none of those things mean anything yet. His line about the whole scale is that “Each of these stages is separated from the others by a psychological wall.” I’ll say plainly that the tidy five-label version that circulates online, unaware and problem-aware and solution-aware and so on, is a later paraphrase by somebody else. It’s faithful enough, but it’s not his, and his version is more useful because it’s about knowledge rather than about labels.

Chapter three is the one I reread the most. It’s about sophistication, meaning not what your prospect knows about you but how many people have already made him the same promise. There are five stages here too. If you are first into a market, he says, “Be simple. Be direct. Above all, don’t be fancy,” and you state the claim flat: “Now, lose ugly fat.” If you are second, you take the claim that’s working and you enlarge it to the limit, which is how you get from losing fat to losing up to 47 pounds in four weeks, and how the seed catalogs went from 25 roses to 600 mums to 17,000 blooms from a single plant. That stage ends when believability breaks, when customers start discounting every claim by half, and, in his words, when the government begins to investigate. At the third stage, nobody believes any promise, so you stop selling the result, and you start selling a new mechanism, which means the how rather than the what. At the fourth, competitors copy your mechanism, so you elaborate it: easier, faster, surer, no diet. And at the fifth, the market doesn’t believe your advertising at all, and the only door left is identification, which is where the Marlboro Man comes from.

Now let me tell you why I have this book on the desk rather than the shelf. We repositioned our off-road park, and in Schwartz’s vocabulary, that wasn’t a messaging change; it was a move down the awareness scale, and it took the business from roughly $1.5 million to around $6 million. The old customer owned a machine, towed it, knew exactly what a trail rating meant, and had been shopping this category for years. He’s already near the top of Schwartz’s scale, and you sell him on terrain and acreage. The new customer, who is most of our revenue now, didn’t know this kind of vacation existed. She isn’t comparing us to another park, she is comparing us to a beach trip, and if you put the word RZR in the headline, you’ve already lost her, because that word means nothing to somebody who has never sat in one. The headline for her has to call her in rather than describe us. That’s the wall Schwartz is talking about, and I ran into it face-first before I had the words for it.

Here’s a second example, and it’s the problem I’m working on right now. Our organic reach is enormous, and it’s mostly men ages 25 to 44, spread across the whole country. Our buyers are couples booking three nights at around $1,800. Those aren’t the same people, and they aren’t close. In Schwartz’s terms, this is an identification failure: the content is calling one crowd into the headline and the offer is built for a different one. The fix isn’t more reach. It’s asking which version of themselves the couple is supposed to see in the first three seconds, and right now the honest answer is that they are seeing somebody else’s version.

And a third: the sophistication ladder applied to a category rather than a company. Every operator in off-road promises trails and machines, which means the category is sitting at the third stage, where no promise gets believed anymore. The all-inclusive model, where you show up with nothing and we hand you the keys and the food and the guide, isn’t a better promise. It’s a different mechanism, and that’s the only thing that works at the third stage. When somebody copies it, and somebody will, Schwartz says exactly what happens next: you elaborate the mechanism rather than shouting the promise louder.

I’m not going to pretend the book is comfortable. The cigarette walkthrough in chapter three runs the entire industry up the sophistication ladder – Camel and Lucky Strike and Pall Mall and then “nine out of ten doctors prefer Luckies” as a fourth-stage tactic – and Schwartz doesn’t stop to say anything about it. Then the whole cycle runs a second time for filtered cigarettes after the cancer scare of the late fifties. I hated reading that section, and I say that as somebody who makes his living doing a gentler version of the same thing. The machinery is completely indifferent to what it’s selling, and Schwartz offers no view anywhere in 236 pages on whether a product should exist. The one place he flinches is a short section called “A Personal Note,” where he says he knows exactly how it feels to have an approach you sweated over copied overnight, that he shares every ounce of that feeling, and that he’s listing these strategies not as recommendations but as possible strategies to be chosen or rejected. That paragraph is the whole ethical content of the book, and it is about half a page long.

One last thing, and it’s the detail I like most. In the preface he wrote for the 1984 reissue, Schwartz says that when he sat down and reread his own book 18 years later, he discovered he had written an entirely different one than the one he thought he had written. Not a book about advertising; a book about how to open a new market for an old product, and, in his phrase, a book full of customers. Then he adds that of all the people who had come to him over the years to say the book had made them millions, not a single one of them was a copywriter. And at the very back there is an epilogue called “A Copy Writer’s Library,” where he lists what else to read: Claude Hopkins, John E. Kennedy, Robert Collier, David Ogilvy, Rosser Reeves, John Caples. Half of my own shelf is on that list. I had assembled most of it before I noticed that the man had written the reading list in 1966 and I had just been slowly rediscovering it.

If you only read two chapters, read two and three. And read them thinking about your own market rather than your own copy, because the useful question Breakthrough Advertising asks is never “How do I say this better?”; it’s “What does my buyer already know, and how many other people have already promised her the same thing?”

About Lorenzo Ayres

Lorenzo Ayres is a business builder, dealmaker, and founder of America’s Outdoor Adventure Park in Jay, Oklahoma. Here he reviews books on investing, deal structure, marketing, and business strategy.

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