Many people believe that marketing has changed a lot since the internet came along.
But that’s totally false.
Believe it or not, the marketing principles that today’s top companies use were being used back in the 1930s.
Don’t believe me? Then keep reading…
The Marketing Genius Behind the Success of “How to Win Friends and Influence People”
Victor O. Schwab is considered to be one of the top copywriters of all time.
He was a marketing master.
Many people don’t know it, but he was the copywriter who helped Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People become a best-seller.
Schwab was also the man behind the ads for the famous body-builder Charles Atlas.
Not only that, but he was a copywriting pioneer.
He would use coded coupon ads to test and track ads.
He would use the codes to track which ads the coupon came from, which headlines, appeal, etc. was used in that ad, etc.
Powerful Example of How Victor Schwab Tracked Ads
Besides the work I mentioned above, Victor Schwab was the man who managed the advertising account for Sherwin Cody’s famous ad, Do You Make These Mistakes in English?
In fact, Schwab considered this ad to be an example of the scientific approach to advertising.
Schwab wrote an article in the September 1939 issue of Printer’s Ink Monthly titled, “An Advertisement That is Never Changed,” which explained why he thought of this ad in this way.
In that article, he gave a ten-year comparison of the responses to two different headlines:
- Do You Make These Mistakes in English?
- How to Speak and Write Masterly English
And he revealed that the response rate was near three times better for the ad that asked readers about their mistakes.
Testing ads via split testing (like Schwab did) is something that all of the top companies and marketers still do today.
So you see? Marketing really hasn’t changed that much.
Marketing tools have changed but the fundamentals of marketing have remained the same and many of the techniques have stayed the same too.
If you’d like to know how you or your business can tap into the fundamentals of marketing and harness the power of techniques that have proven themselves for decades, then contact me.
