Printers' Ink, April 25, 1912 (Vol. 79, No. 4)
A New York advertising weekly from the week after the Titanic sank.
What it is
A New York advertising weekly from the week after the Titanic sank. The cover is an N. W. Ayer & Son ad comparing an agency to a physician. The lead editorial blames the disaster on the chase for free press publicity and asks newspaper publishers to stop printing press-agent stunts as news. The main piece is the Sphinx Club address by Charles R. Wiers, chief correspondent of the Larkin Company, on form letters: know the product, drop the fake personal "I", put the concession first, never argue, refund fast, settle old complaints on the customer's word. Also here: Arthur Brisbane on editors and business managers, O'Sullivan's Rubber Heels running different copy in eleven classes of media, a trunk maker who kept his guarantee out of the ads, Goulds on follow-up for farmers, and an editorial on a "money back plus twenty-five per cent" offer.
Why read it now
Wiers's rules are the part that has aged best. Answering the customer's request in the first line, never arguing, and refunding without strings are what service-recovery studies still support, and his two cases end with the complainers sending new orders of $15 and $23. The evidence that a fixed complaint makes a customer more loyal than no complaint at all is mixed, so treat his cases as anecdotes. His attack on letters where a president claims to open every order himself fits automated emails signed by a founder who never saw them. The editorial on the money-back-plus-25-per-cent offer makes a lasting point: a claim that sounds unbelievable costs trust even when true, and hurts belief in advertising generally. Willard's piece on separate copy for each medium matches writing natively for each platform. What has dated: the editorial's certainty about why the Titanic sank, the farm stereotypes, and Stark's choice to hide the guarantee, which most sellers now state up front. Use: rewrite your complaint and refund replies so the answer sits in the first sentence.
Passages worth keeping
You must live, eat and sleep with a subject before you can write a telling letter about it.
لا يكتب رسالة مقنعة إلا من عاش مع المنتج وعرفه من الداخل، ولهذا يفشل الكاتب الخارجي مهما كان أجره.
If you are asked to accommodate a customer in a way entirely foreign to your complicated system, just take care of the customer first and let the system come trailing along afterwards.
إذا طلب العميل شيئًا لا يناسب إجراءاتك فخدمه أولًا، ثم عدّل الإجراءات بعد ذلك، فالعميل يريد حلًا لا شرحًا للنظام.
it's worth while to adjust old complaints strictly on a customer's word, even though you may not have a scrap of paper to prove the right or wrong of the claim.
من المفيد أن تقبل شكوى العميل القديمة بناءً على كلمته، حتى لو لم يكن لديك دليل مكتوب، لأن العميل الراضي استثمار يعود بالربح.
We wanted to give the customer something more than he expected.
ترك البائع الضمان خارج الإعلان ليكتشفه المشتري عند الشراء، فيحصل على أكثر مما وُعد به ويصبح داعيًا للمنتج.
A statement of truth in terms which make it sound like a lie, might just about as well be a lie as far as the results in the minds of its readers are concerned.
الحقيقة التي تُصاغ بطريقة تبدو كذبًا تفعل في ذهن القارئ ما يفعله الكذب، فالمهم ما يصدقه الناس لا ما هو صحيح فقط.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
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