Printers' Ink, June 2, 1897 (Vol. 19, No. 9): Can an Advertising Man Be a Christian?
The June 2, 1897 issue of Printers' Ink, the weekly trade journal for advertisers.
What it is
The June 2, 1897 issue of Printers' Ink, the weekly trade journal for advertisers. It opens with Claude C. Hopkins's essay "Can an Advertising Man Be a Christian?", whose real question is whether advertising can be truthful. Hopkins argues that the public discounts advertising because falsehood and piled-up adjectives have discredited it, and that the truthful advertiser wins over time. His evidence is a run of cases: a plain-spoken buyer he trained who now runs two firms, Chas. F. Jones at Rothschild's store, the plain ads of Marshall Field & Co., and the line "Morgan & Wright tires are good tires." The rest of the issue covers an $8 typewriter that sold about 21,000 machines on $5,000 a year of magazine space, a druggist explaining why he pushes substitutes, a Canadian trade-mark piracy case, advice on opening a new store, retail ad criticism and ready-made ads.
Why read it now
Hopkins's core claim holds: buyers discount inflated claims, so words like "the best" and "the finest" carry almost no weight. Research on persuasion knowledge (Friestad and Wright, 1994) describes the same thing: people learn the tactics of advertising and correct for them. His answer, the plain statement a reader can check, became the specific-claim method of his later book Scientific Advertising. What does not hold is the moral arithmetic that honesty will largely measure success. Dishonest advertisers of his own era grew rich, and Hopkins himself later wrote patent medicine copy. Honesty protects reputation and repeat buying; it does not create demand on its own. The druggist piece is still current: when a brand squeezes the retailer's margin, the retailer steers the customer to a substitute, which is how pharmacies and supermarkets treat thin-margin brands today. To use it: take your current ad, delete every superlative, and put in its place a fact the buyer could check, such as a count, a price, a warranty or a named customer.
Passages worth keeping
It is as natural for people to doubt a too emphatic advertisement as it is to suspect a too emphatic man.
الناس يرتابون في الإعلان الذي يبالغ في التوكيد كما يرتابون في الرجل الذي يبالغ في الحلف، فالمبالغة تُضعف الثقة بدل أن تقويها.
Every deviation from fact harms an advertisement, in the long run. Every exaggeration weakens it.
كل خروج عن الحقيقة يضر الإعلان مع الوقت، وكل مبالغة تنقص من قوته ولو بدت مفيدة في لحظتها.
People accept such a statement without discount, and it is, beside, a startling innovation in an age of bombast.
العبارة البسيطة الصادقة يقبلها الناس كما هي دون أن يخصموا منها، وهي فوق ذلك لافتة لأنها تخالف ضجيج المبالغة المحيط بها.
A permanently successful advertiser not only can be, but must be, honest; and the measure of his honesty will largely measure his success.
يرى هوبكنز أن النجاح الدائم في الإعلان يشترط الصدق، وأن مقدار الصدق يحدد إلى حد كبير مقدار النجاح.
Manufacturers of proprietary articles who are fair and are willing to let the dealer have a decent profit have very little cause for complaint on account of substitutions.
الصانع الذي يترك للتاجر ربحًا معقولًا لا يعاني كثيرًا من بيع البدائل، فالتاجر يدفع بالبديل حين يضيق هامشه.
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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