The Classic Marketing Product Story

I talk a fair bit about using stories in copywriting and marketing and one story that has assumed almost legendary status in direct response circles is that of the Schlitz Beer company.

Jay Abraham often mentions this story as a great example of the idea of pre-emptive positioning (I’ll expand on that later).  No surprise that it involves the great Claude Hopkins.

As with many things, many people “know” about the story but fewer have actually read the original.  It’s actually in “My Life In Advertising”, not the better known “Scientific Advertising”. So here it is…

Schlitz Beer was another advertising campaign which I handled for J.L. Stack.  Schlitz was then in fifth place.  All brewers at the time were crying “Pure”. They put the word “Pure” in large letters.  Then they took double pages to put it in larger letters.  The claim made about as much impression on people as water makes on a duck.

I went to brewing school to learn the science of brewing, but that helped me not at all.  Then I went through the brewery.  I saw plate-glass rooms where beer was dripping over pipes, and I asked the reason for them. They told me those rooms were filled with filtered air, so the beer could be cooled in purity.  I saw great filters filled with white-wood pulp.  They explained how that filtered the beer.  They showed how they cleaned every pump and pipe, twice daily, to avoid contaminations.  How every bottle was cleaned four times by machinery.  They showed me artesian wells, where they went 4,000 feet deep for pure water, though their brewery was on Lake Michigan.  They showed me the vats where the beer was aged for  six months before it went out to the user.

They took me to their laboratory and showed me their original mother yeast cell.  It had been developed by 1,200 experiments to bring out the utmost in flavor.  All of the yeast used in making Schlitz Beer was developed from that original cell.

Pretty amazing huh?  I’ve read that passage many times before but I still think “Wow…this must be some special beer!”  Hopkins thought so too…

I came back to the office amazed. I said: “Why don’t you tell people these things?  Why do you merely try to cry louder than others that your beer is pure? Why don’t you tell the reasons?”

“Why,” they said, “the processes we use are just the same as others use.  no one can make good beer without them.”

“But,” I replied, “others have never told this story.  It amazes everyone who goes through your brewery. It will startle everyone in print.”

As indeed turned out to be the case and Schlitz went from fifth place to neck-and-neck with first place in a few months.

Back to the idea of pre-emptive positioning.  Everybody pretty much made beer the same way…

…but Schlitz claimed the “purity” position FIRST.  And once you’ve got that position, it’s hard for a competitor to dislodge you. Even if they manage to compete with you, you still have (and cannot lose) the “original purity” position!

As well as the strategic positioning lesson in this story…

…note the tactical copywriting lesson of telling the story behind your product in a way that is meaningful and interesting to your prospect.

And Hopkins gave an example of how powerful copy like this can be.

He tells of how a businessman who had never drunk beer was so impressed by the ad, that he ordered a bottle of Schlitz.  He wanted to taste a product made under such ideals of purity!

Stories are very, very powerful ways to engage the reader and get under the radar to talk about your product or service.  Well worth studying examples like the Schlitz Beer story and seeing how you can apply the power of stories in your marketing and copywriting.