Copywriting Trends in 1901

Advertising, Kennedy told Lasker, is ‘salesmanship on paper.’ Instead of merely drawing customers to the store, Kennedy now asserted, an ad should say in print precisely what a good salesman would say face-to-face to a customer. Instead of general claims, pretty pictures or jingles, an ad should offer a concrete reason why the product was worth buying. Not charming or amusing or necessarily even pleasing to the eye, a good eye was a rational, unadorned instrument of selling: ‘True “Reason Why” Copy is logic, plus persuasion, plus conviction all woven into a certain simplicity of thought—pre-digested for the average mind, so that it is easier to understand it than to misunderstand it.’ Like Bates, Kennedy warned against aiming copy to high for the public to grasp. The average person, he urged, was uneducated but not stupid, with a shrewd but persuadable openness to appeals made by sensible arguments. Advertising needed to find a delicate middle ground, high enough for rational dialogue but not over the public’s head.”

Stephen Fox on Advertising in 1901

Joel York on the One SaaS Marketing Strategy to Reduce Churn

“There is only one SaaS marketing strategy to reduce churn: increase use.

Some people think SaaS churn is something that happens when a customer comes up for renewal, it isn’t. The causes of SaaS churn occur much earlier in the customer lifecycle; cancellation is simply the finale. The battle against SaaS churn begins in product design. Long before a SaaS customer decides to cancel, a SaaS marketing professional decides to create a product that is hard to adopt and easy to switch by paying more attention to product features than to customer value that encourages expanded and habitual use.”

Joel York

Jennifer Senior on a New Script for Parents

The one mantra no parent ever questions is, “All I want is for my children to be happy.” And don’t get me wrong: I think happiness is a wonderful goal for a child. But it is a very elusive one. Happiness and self-confidence, teaching children that is not like teaching them how to plow a field. It’s not like teaching them how to ride a bike. There’s no curriculum for it. Happiness and self-confidence can be the byproducts of other things, but they cannot really be goals unto themselves. A child’s happiness is a very unfair burden to place on a parent. And happiness is an even more unfair burden to place on a kid. […]

Absent having new scripts, we just follow the oldest ones in the book – decency, a work ethic, love — and let happiness and self-esteem take care of themselves. I think if we all did that, the kids would still be all right, and so would their parents, possibly in both cases even better.”

Jennifer Senior

Alan Watts on Wiggly, Straight & How We Make Things

The physical world is wiggly. Clouds, mountains, trees, people, are all wiggly. Only when human beings get to working on things-they build buildings in straight lines & try to make out that the world isn’t really wiggly. But here we are, sitting in this room all built out of straight lines, but each one of us is as wiggly as all get-out.”

Alan Watts