Modern Business Writing: A Study of the Principles Underlying Effective Advertisements and Business Letters
A 1921 textbook from The Century Co. by Charles Harvey Raymond, who taught business English at the University of California.
What it is
A 1921 textbook from The Century Co. by Charles Harvey Raymond, who taught business English at the University of California. It treats the advertisement and the business letter as one craft. Part I builds the selling appeal: know the prospect, choose one central selling point, as Ivory's 99 44/100 per cent pure does, then pick a route. The Reason Why appeal takes a deliberating buyer through four steps: accept the product type, accept your standard of comparison, agree yours is best by it, act. The Short Circuit appeal works by suggestion: wake a memory and tie its feeling to the product, as in a Libby's apple butter ad or a Savage rifle ad that opens on a charging grizzly. Six elements follow: beginning, description, proof, persuasion, inducement, clincher. Part II treats adjustment, credit and collection letters as sales letters and quotes house rules for correspondents from real firms.
Why read it now
The four steps of the Reason Why appeal are the most useful part. They tell you to start where the buyer already is: if he has not accepted the product type, educate first; if he already favours your brand, ask for the order. Eugene Schwartz built his stages of awareness on the same logic in 1966, and funnel-stage targeting follows it now. Raymond's split between deliberation and suggestion anticipates the central and peripheral routes of Petty and Cacioppo's Elaboration Likelihood Model. One central selling point per piece remains standard in agency briefs. The four kinds of proof, performance record, users, guarantee and trial, map onto reviews, client logos and free trials, and his warning that weak products had worn out the money-back guarantee still applies. What has dated: the psychology rests on racial memories and instinct theory, which psychology dropped long ago, and the hunting ad he praises now reads as brutal. Use: before writing a landing page, decide which of the four steps your buyer is at, and write the first screen for that step only.
Passages worth keeping
It usually is best, therefore, in an advertising campaign, in any one sales letter, or in a series of sales letters, to limit yourself to the development of a single central selling point.
ركّز الحملة أو الرسالة على سبب شراء واحد، فكثرة المزايا تشتت القارئ.
Cause the prospect, in the light of his own needs, to agree upon a standard of comparison by which to measure your product against competing products.
المشتري المتأني يقارن، فاجعله أولًا يتبنى المعيار الذي يتفوق فيه منتجك، ثم تأتي المقارنة لصالحك.
Since the prospect's emotional desires are based upon memories formed by his past experience, he will have no desire to possess a product of a type with which he is not familiar.
المشاعر لا تبيع منتجًا من نوع لا يعرفه الناس، فعرّفهم بالنوع بالحجة أولًا، ثم خاطب عاطفتهم.
This method of Proof has so frequently been employed by manufacturers of goods of relatively little merit that it no longer is as effective as it formerly was.
كثرة استعمال ضمان استرداد المال في بيع السلع الرديئة أضعفت ثقة الناس به.
The Adjustment Letter fundamentally is a sales letter. Its real purpose is to "re-sell" the man to whom the goods were sold, and thus to re-create a feeling of business confidence that paves the way for future sales.
الرد على شكوى العميل فرصة بيع جديدة، وغايته أن يستعيد العميل ثقته فيشتري مرة أخرى.
What it teaches best
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