Latest / The Copywriting Podcast with Fexingo: Sales Letters, Headlines, and Persuasive Writing / How Claude Hopkins Sold Beer With Science Not Poetry
Transcript
- Lucas: Claude Hopkins was selling beer in the 1920s, and he decided the best way to do it was to scrub floors. Luna: Scrub floors? That doesn't sound like the kind of thing a copywriter does. Lucas: It was the kind of thing he did. Hopkins was the most famous copywriter of his era — he wrote for Schlitz beer, and before that he helped launch brands like Pepsodent and Quaker Oats. But his approach was almost the opposite of what we think of as 'creative' advertising. He hated poetry in ads. He hated cleverness. He believed the only purpose of an ad was to sell, and to sell you needed facts, not adjectives. Luna: So he literally went to the Schlitz brewery and asked to see the manufacturing process? Lucas: Exactly. He toured the plant, and he noticed something. The floors were spotless. The equipment was gleaming. The brewers were constantly scrubbing down the vats. To the brewers, that was just hygiene. To Hopkins, that was the headline. He realized that most beer ads at the time were just pictures of smiling people holding glasses. Nobody was talking about how the beer was made. So he wrote an ad that started with the headline: 'The beer that made Milwaukee famous.' And then he filled the copy with specific, verifiable facts: that Schlitz used pure artesian water, that every bottle was sterilized with live steam, that the brewers aged the beer for months longer than the law required. Luna: And that worked? A bunch of factory details sold beer? Lucas: It worked incredibly well. According to Hopkins's own account, Schlitz went from fifth place in the market to first within a few months. The campaign ran for years. And the key insight wasn't that the facts were unique — most breweries had similar processes — but that no competitor had bothered to talk about them. Hopkins called it 'salesmanship in print.' He believed that every ad should be a one-on-one conversation where the copywriter proves the product's value, point by point. Luna: But wasn't that approach seen as a bit... unglamorous? Other ad men were writing poetic copy for things like perfume or cars. Lucas: Oh, it was seen as very unglamorous. The famous ad man of the day was someone like Earnest Elmo Calkins, who wrote elegant, literary copy. Hopkins was considered a hack by the agency crowd. But Hopkins didn't care. He was a pioneer of what we'd now call direct response — he insisted on tracking results obsessively. He was one of the first to use coupon codes and split testing. He'd run two versions of an ad in the same newspaper, and if version A got a 1 percent response rate and version B got 1.5 percent, he'd drop version A and double down on B. That kind of data-driven approach was revolutionary in the 1920s. Luna: So he was basically a martech nerd before there was any tech. Lucas: Exactly. And his book, Scientific Advertising, published in 1923, is still read in marketing courses today. But I think the most powerful lesson from the Schlitz campaign is simpler than the testing methodology. It's about the question Hopkins asked himself before writing a single word. He said, 'I do not ask what kind of ad will people like. I ask what kind of service will people want?' He wanted to find a genuine benefit that the customer could verify. The sterile bottles weren't a gimmick — they genuinely made the beer safer and more consistent. Luna: That's a good question. But how does that apply today, when we're not selling beer but maybe software or a subscription box? Lucas: It applies perfectly. Let's take a modern brand like Hims or Dollar Shave Club. Dollar Shave Club's launch video in 2012 — 'Our blades are f*ing great' — that's not poetry. That's a direct claim backed by a specific offer: four dollars a month, delivered to your door. They're not saying 'the razor of your dreams.' They're saying 'the blades are great and here's the price.' That's Hopkinsian. Hims does the same thing with telemedicine: they lead with a specific problem — hair loss — and a specific solution — a prescription that costs about $30 a month. The copy is clinical, almost boring. But it converts. Luna: What about a company like Apple? Their ads are famously emotional and minimalist. Would Hopkins have approved? Lucas: That's a great question. I think Hopkins would have liked the early iPod ads — the silhouette dancing with the white earbuds — because they clearly demonstrated the benefit: you can carry a thousand songs in your pocket. That's a specific fact. But the later 'Think Different' campaign, with black and white footage of Einstein and Gandhi? I think Hopkins would have hated it. There's no specific claim. It's pure brand image. And brand image ads are very hard to track for direct response. But I don't think Hopkins would dismiss all emotional advertising. He just insisted that the emotional appeal be tied to a concrete reason to believe. Luna: So what's the one takeaway for someone writing copy today? If they're writing a landing page or a sales email, what should they steal from Hopkins? Lucas: The one question: 'What evidence can I give that this product does what I claim?' Don't just say 'high quality.' Say 'we use a 30-step quality check that rejects 2 percent of units.' Don't say 'fast shipping.' Say '87 percent of orders arrive within two business days.' The specific fact is always more persuasive than the superlative. And that's true whether you're selling a $5 beer or a $5,000 software subscription. Luna: I love that. And it's also a good test for whether you actually believe in your product. If you can't find a single verifiable fact to put in the headline, maybe the product isn't that good. Lucas: Exactly. Hopkins used to say that the best advertising is just the product itself, demonstrated. He'd tell clients to send free samples rather than run ads. But if you have to write copy, make it a sample in words. And I think that's a much harder standard than most modern copy meets. We're so used to writing 'revolutionary' and 'game-changing' and 'next-gen' — those words are empty. Hopkins would have scratched them out with his fountain pen. Luna: Alright, so episode one was about Ogilvy, episode two is about Hopkins. Who's next? David Ogilvy's ghost is probably listening and getting jealous. Lucas: Ogilvy actually worshipped Hopkins. He called Scientific Advertising 'the best book on copywriting ever written.' So I think he'd be fine with us doing Hopkins first. But next time, maybe we'll talk about the most controversial copywriter of the 20th century — Gary Halbert. And why he called himself 'the prince of print.' Luna: Now that sounds like a story I want to hear.