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Consumers do not buy products. They buy product benefits.

David Ogilvy

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David Ogilvy
Age: 88 †
Born: 1911
Born: June 23
Died: 1999
Died: July 21
Businessman
Businessperson
Economist
Writer
West Horsley
Surrey
David MacKenzie Ogilvy
Consumers
Product
Benefits
Products

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It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money.
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Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from proclaiming its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.
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The consumer isn't a moron she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.
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The trouble with many copywriters in general agencies are that they don't really think in terms of selling. They have never written direct-response they have never tasted blood
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I admire people with gentle manners who treat other people as human beings.
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Study the methods of your competitors and do the exact opposite.
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Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous.
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Good products can be sold by honest advertising. If you don't think the product is good, you have no business to be advertising it.
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The pursuit of excellence is less profitable than the pursuit of bigness, but it can be more satisfying.
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It is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy.
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I have an inviolable rule against employing nepots and spouses, because they breed politics. Whenever two people get married, one of them must depart - preferably the female, to look after the baby.
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Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left. It's totally dishonest.
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Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing to each of them a letter on behalf of your client.
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The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.
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We all have a tendency to use research as a drunkard uses a lamppost – for support, not for illumination.
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Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand.
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Unless your campaign has a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.
David Ogilvy
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If you have all the research, all the ground rules, all the directives, all the data - it doesn't mean the ad is written. Then you've got to close the door and write something - that is the moment of truth which we all try to postpone as long as possible.
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It is the inescapable duty of management to fire incompetent people.
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Leaders grasp nettles.
David Ogilvy