“How the Grecian Mother Bathed her Baby”
“Fine oils were cleansing agents for young and old. The Grecian mother used nothing else to bathe her babies, together with soft, tepid water. Modern science prescribes the same method for new-born infants.“
That’s from a 1915 ad for Palmolive soap. The ad was written by Claude Hopkins, who was on the Palmolive account back then.
Copywriters today are told to study Hopkins’s ads like this one. For the intriguing headline that gets attention… for the appeals to self-interest… for the proof in the form of reason why copy.
Fine. That’s all important stuff.
But you know what? Hopkins wasn’t primarily a copywriter. Primarily, he was a scheme man.
That was the term at the time for somebody we might call a marketer today. Because what marketers today do is really just apply and adapt ideas that guys like Hopkins invented at the start of the 20th century.
For example, do you know how Claude Hopkins took Palmolive from a product with almost no sales… to the biggest soap brand in the U.S.?
He didn’t do it with clever copy. He did it with a scheme.
Local grocery stores at that time didn’t stock Palmolive. Why should they? Nobody had ever heard of Palmolive, and there were plenty of other decent soaps.
So Hopkins ran ads. First, in one local market. Gradually, all over the country.
“This Coupon Gets You Something Worth 10¢”
The “something” was a bar of Palmolive soap. It cost 10¢ in 1911, and that was something. Something women wouldn’t throw away. Something they would demand from their local grocer.
Hopkins knew that they would do this… so he sent the same ad to grocers before running it in the newspaper. The message was clear:
“Women will come to you asking for their 10¢ gift of Palmolive soap. If you don’t have it, they will still get it, even if they have to go across the street to your competitor.”
So grocers stocked up on Palmolive soap before the newspaper ad ran.
And Hopkins’s initial Palmolive campaign… after the free giveaways were paid for… well, it created a 4-to-1 return on ad spend. With that kind of math, Hopkins soon had almost every woman in America holding a bar of Palmolive in her hand.
Frighteningly clever.
Because at the heart of it wasn’t the appeal to the fine “cleansing agents for young and old.” Sure, Palmolive soap was good enough for women to keep buying. But that wasn’t the key thing that sold it in the beginning.
It also wasn’t the free 10¢ Palmolive bar giveaway. That was important, but it wouldn’t have worked if women couldn’t get their hands on the actual soap.
No, the key was something else.
The key was the fear that Hopkins drove into the hearts of grocers across the country.
Because Hopkins didn’t try to appeal to the grocers’ greed. He didn’t say, “We have a great new soap. Stock it and you will profit.”
Nope.
He effectively threatened. “Stock Palmolive,” he quietly said, “or else you will lose your existing business.”
That’s a scheme. And if you’re a marketer, it’s a scheme that might be worth applying and adapting to your own brands and businesses today.
Anyways, that’s just one foundational thing I’ve learned from Claude Hopkins.
And clever as it is, it’s not nearly the most important thing I’ve learned from him.
The most important thing is something I wrote about in Commandment VI of my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.
That commandment is not about copywriting tactics… not about marketing schemes… but about something much more fundamental that Claude Hopkins preached.
And yet, if you follow this one commandment, you will become a success… even if you’ve failed in everything until now… and even if you make all the mistakes you want going forward.
But you gotta read the book to find out the full story. Because if you don’t, other copywriters will. For more info: