I think it must be about ten years ago that I first came up with the notion that there were only five ways of writing adverts.

In those days I used to mention it so often it got a bit boring, I felt, but I was giving a little talk at the end of last week, and when I mentioned it I noticed many in the audience were either drawing cartoons of each other or making a note of my list.

So maybe its time to bring it back again. The five ways of selling that work, and the one that doesn’t.

  1. Sell by price
  2. Sell by benefit
  3. Sell by asking an interesting question (What’s the simplest way of increasing your response rate in direct mail?)
  4. Sell via emotions
  5. Sell through humour

That’s the list – I’ll write a little about one or two of them in the future.

And the way that doesn’t work at all…

Selling through making an announcement.

More anon.

Tony Attwood