Herschell Gordon Lewis

451 Heritage Drive, Suite 215

Pompano Beach, FL 33060
phone: 954.782.1750
fax: 954.785.3391
e-mail: hglewis1@aol.com
Web: herschellgordonlewis.com

Herschell Gordon Lewis on Copy

Mirror, mirror on the wall – a good way to waste money

For all I know, you really do offer the best bargain, the most scenic area, the

most experienced and friendliest counselors, and the most memorable experience of

any camp, on this planet or on Mars.

Want to lose campers to a less ego-driven competitor? Sure. It’s as easy as

relying on “We are the greatest” chest-thumping as your primary promotional

weaponry.

Want to grab campers who otherwise would defect to a less ego-driven

competitor? Sure. It’s as easy as explaining, in terms catering to the experiential

backgrounds of family decision-makers, why you’re the greatest.

Unproved and unexplained claims of superiority are rampant. Facebook,

Twitter, and YouTube have added immeasurably not only to the clutter originated

in more traditional media but to overall consumer skepticism. So an apparent

appeal to logic and/or to rational assumptions will have heads nodding “Yes” and

generate the phone calls and e-mails that happily result from such nods.
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Claiming “Best Camp” status is easy. All it requires is a captive friend or

associate or free-lance writer or whoever: “Named Best Camp of 2011! by Sample

Extralongname.” And there’s the claim, apparently valid.

Who says what about you?

A simple rule for superiority-claim: What you say about yourself is less

effective than what an apparent outsider says about you.

But even if the claim is actually valid, how salesworthy is the loose term

“Best” in a civil war for campers, against a comparative that clearly shows, on a

level parents and potential campers will recognize, genuine superiority? We’re in

the second decade of the twenty-first century, and “I am the greatest” doesn’t have

the wallop it once had.

What does a satisfied parent say? What does a satisfied camper say? What

does an educator or someone whose credentials have validity say?

If you were a car dealer and not a camp operator, you’d never waste

promotional dollars on nonspecific claims of superiority. You’d find and exploit a

point of superiority; and no matter how trivial that claim might seem to you, the

test of its validity is how significant is seems to your target-group.

We see, every day, in multimillion-dollar campaigns by major marketers, the

inability to distinguish the attitudinal differential separating “seller” and “sellee.”

The seller’s concern: what it is. The sellee’s concern: what it will do for me.

Don’t fall into that trap. Inevitably, a competing camp will have more

acreage. A competing camp will have more activities. A competing camp will beat

your rates. So what? Competition exists in every area of commerce (to our dismay

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sometimes excepting government, which increasingly reflects the commercial

interests of elected officials).

Load up with ammunition. Then fire.

A guiding supposition that can help any vendor of recreational activities to

avoid tumbling into the “So what?” slough: If you were hiring a salesperson whose

job it is to visit families in their homes and not leave without a signed agreement

and a check, what ammunition would you give that person?

No sales-oriented supplier of services would turn loose a representative who’s

unarmed and unable to compete in an open marketplace. Taking the semi-skeptical

position of an unconvinced parent and unconvinced child, the alert camp operator

would ask the representative to present the sales argument just as he or she would

present them out there in the field. The dry run-through will expose weakness.

That’s the point.

Ah! The key, which opens the competitive door, isn’t just exposing weakness

in the sales argument. It’s replacing weakness with competitive strength.

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Herschell Gordon Lewis is former chairman of Communicomp, a full-service direct

marketing agency with clients throughout the world, now renamed as a division of
the advertising holding company Interpublic. He now heads Lewis Enterprises,
through which he writes and consults individually. He is arguably the best-known
direct response writer and consultant in the United States.

Mr. Lewis' background includes more than 20 years as adjunct lecturer to graduate
classes in Mass Communications, Roosevelt University, Chicago.

Among his books are Hot Appeals or Burnt Offerings (Racom), Copywriting Secrets
and Tactics (Dartnell); Direct Marketing Strategies and Tactics (Dartnell); Big
Profits from Small Budget Advertising (Dartnell); Herschell Gordon Lewis On the
Art of Writing Copy (co-published by Racom Communications and the Direct
Marketing Association); Direct Mail Copy That Sells (Prentice-Hall); More Than

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You Ever Wanted to Know About Mail Order Advertising (Prentice-Hall); How to
Make Your Advertising Twice as Effective at Half the Cost (Bonus Books), Open Me
Now! (Bonus Books); Sales Letters That Sizzle (National Textbook Company); Silver
Linings – Selling to the Expanding Mature Market (Bonus Books); The
Businessman's Guide to Advertising and Sales Promotion (McGraw-Hill); How to
Write Powerful Fund Raising Letters (Pluribus Press); How to Write Powerful
Catalog Copy (Bonus Books); and How to Handle Your Own Public Relations
(Nelson-Hall). He is the co-author of Symbol of America: Norman Rockwell. With
his wife Margo he authored Everybody's Guide to Plate Collecting.

Other books by Herschell Gordon Lewis are Selling on the Net, co-authored with
Robert Lewis (National Textbook Company); The World's Greatest Direct Mail
Sales Letters, co-edited with Carol Nelson (National Textbook Company); Cybertalk
That Sells, co-authored with Jamie Murphy (NTC); and The Complete Advertising
and Marketing Handbook (Bonus Books). Other recent books are another co-
authorship with Carol Nelson, The Advertising Age Handbook of Advertising (NTC
Contemporary Books) and Catalog Copy That Sizzles (NTC). A new edition of
Herschell Gordon Lewis on the Art of Writing Copy has been co-published by Racom
Communications and the Direct Marketing Association.Together with Ian Kennedy
and Jerry Reitman, Mr. Lewis is producer of the video, "100 of the Greatest Direct
Response Television Commercials".

For 200 consecutive issues Mr. Lewis wrote the monthly feature "Creative
Strategies" for Direct Marketing Magazine, He currently writes "Burnt Offerings"
for The NonProfit Times, "Curmudgeon-at-Large" for Direct, and is the copy
columnist for Multichannel Merchant. He also writes "Copy Class" for the UK
publication Direct Marketing International, catalog critiques for the UK publication
Catalogue & eBusiness, and creative features for the Australian magazine
Marketing. For years Mr. Lewis conducted the copy workshop at the International
Direct Marketing Symposium, Montreux, Switzerland, and he has appeared
frequently at the Pan-Pacific Symposium in Sydney, Australia.He also has
addressed national Direct Marketing Associations in countries such as England,
France, the U.K., Spain, New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Austria,
Switzerland, Brazil, Singapore, and South Africa ... and has been engaged to
present copywriting seminars in many countries, including Mexico, Holland,
Belgium, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Dubai. He is frequently called on to
speak at meetings of the Direct Marketing Association, in the United States and
has been named to the Direct Marketing Association Hall of Fame.