With chapter 21, titled “Good Business”, we’ve come to the end of “Scientific Advertising” by copywriting and marketing pioneer Claude Hopkins.
As you might expect, this chapter is something of a recap and restatement of Hopkins’ prime idea.
That is…
…advertising and marketing can (and should be) an activity conducted using tested and proven principles and where results are measurable.
This is what he meant by the term “Scientific Advertising”.
Hopkins was appalled by what he saw as the huge amount of money wasted in poor advertising.
Of course, the industry was still relatively young and Hopkins may well have simply seen this as unavoidable in the early days.
But by his time, the techniques of testing and tracking (in his terminology “keyed ads”) were clearly understood and for Hopkins this was the way of the future.
It was almost incomprehensible to him that it could be any other way.
And at the end of the book, he envisaged…
“The time is fast coming when men who spend money are going to know what they get. Good business and efficiency will be applied to advertising. Men and methods will be measured by the known returns and only competent men can survive.”
And he envisaged that the “Old School”, unscientific approach and its practitioners would fade away.
Well, Hopkins may have known all about advertising but perhaps he didn’t know everything about human nature.
Because although his approach has become widely accepted in what we now call direct response marketing, the old style of advertising remains and millions of dollars are wasted every year on advertising and marketing that fails to produce results.
So, the hard won lessons and the message from Hopkins in “Scientific Advertising” remains as true today in the 21st century as when it was written in the early part of the last century.