Bill Bernbach - Product Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

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Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it.

Bill Bernbach
No matter how skillful you are, you can't invent a product advantage that doesn't exist. And if you do, and it's just a gimmick, it's going to fall apart anyway.

Bill Bernbach
You've got to believe in your product... you've got to believe in your work. Only a deep belief will generate the vitality and energy that give life to your work.

Bill Bernbach
A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad.

Bill Bernbach
You've got to live with your product. You've got to get steeped in it. You've got to get saturated with it. You must get to the heart of it. Indeed, if you have not crystallized into a single purpose, a single theme, what you want to tell the reader, you CANNOT be creative.

Bill Bernbach
We think we will never know as much about a product as a client. After all, he sleeps and breathes his product. He's built it. He's lived with it most of his life. We couldn't possible know as much about it as he does. By the same token, we firmly believe that he can't know as much about advertising. Because we live and breathe that all day long.

Bill Bernbach
To succeed an ad (or a person or product for that matter) must establish its own unique personality, or it will never be noticed.

Bill Bernbach
Dullness won't sell your product, but neither will irrelevant brilliance.

Bill Bernbach
Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise... not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message.

Bill Bernbach
You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You've got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don't feel it, nothing will happen.

Bill Bernbach
Be provocative. But be sure your provocativeness stems from your product. You are NOT right if in your ad you stand a man on his head JUST to get attention. You ARE right if you have him on his head to show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.

Bill Bernbach
Getting a product known isn't the answer. Getting it WANTED is the answer. Some of the best known product names have failed.

Bill Bernbach