All your customers care about is how your offering is going to change their life for the better. If they don’t see an immediate benefit that’s significant enough to make them read on, they’ll leave. So it pays to have the most persuasive part, which is the greatest perk, first. You skip the introduction, preface, and forward because you want to skip straight to the action. You've been hoping this book will give you the tools you need to save your struggling advertisements.

Marketing is just applied psychology. Those that are best at getting people to buy know the most about human nature. So what is it that they know that the rest of us don’t? Whitman's writing style can be grating at times; could be described as "arrogant/condescending" throughout and sometimes overly so. Nonetheless, this is a useful compendium that I can see keeping close as a reference whenever writing new ads. The book hasn't necessarily aged so well in the era of digital marketing, however, and could use an update. Latest edition at time of this writing is '08-09. The chapters on direct mail and physical coupon cutting aren't necessarily so relevant to most businesses nowadays. Digital advertising has grown a lot since '08. Whitman states in the book that the principles of print ads covered herein can just be transferred to digital, nothing really changes. But that's glossing over too much. Modern digital ad platforms present new opportunities and constraints re: text & image limitations, video & digital media, myriad placement options, myriad ad format options, etc. An updated edition could consider these new realities. The principles mentioned above are complete topics individually. But I am sharing with you one of the most convincing principles, which is “The Fear Factor.” Now we enter some very heavy psychological and sociological theory, specifically related to advertising and marketing. We start with “The Fear Factor – Selling the Scare” being the most basic, and transition into “Ego Morphing – instant identification”, “The Means-End Chain”, and “Examples vs. Statistics”. Drew chews out those ads by saying "Advertising is persuasion. And the most crucial time to persuade is when you're asking for action. Always feature deadlines to discourage response-killing human inertia." Then he lists chapters about how you can do exactly that, using nothing but words.Market Yourself as an Authority (Wear the same coat of influence: Give seminars, hold workshops, create educational products, write a book, etc) First off, if you’ve read any other business books or taken a psychology class, you know all this information already.

Social acceptance – We want to “fit in”. We want people in society to see us as part of them. Maybe doesn’t have to be the masses, but a select or elite group. To be part of this group, to fit in and be accepted. Member of a group, and treated as equal or part of them. How to Install Persuasive Images in People's Brains --Learn how to direct how people think about your products and services. Freedom – to be free of pain, danger. No one wants to feel they have to endure things they don’t like. If you can sell in your message that using the solution you are selling will get them out of pain and help them escape danger, that is a good angle to leverage.More sales come from these eight motives than every other human want combined. This is because when these needs aren’t met we feel tension pulling us to satisfy them. Hunger, for example, makes us eat, thus fulfilling our need for food. The pattern here is simple: Even more importantly, this is one of the few books that I will keep by my side on every new marketing campaign.