David Ogilvy Quotes

We have a divine discontent with our performance. It is an antidote to smugness.

It is the inescapable duty of management to fire incompetent people.

To keep your ship moving through the water at maximum efficiency, you have to keep scraping the barnacles off its bottom. It is rare from below is always for adding. If the initiative for barnaclescraping does not come from management, barnacles will never be scraped.

It is important to admit your mistakes, and to do so before you are charged with them.

Our offices must always be headed by the kind of men who command respect. Not phonies, zeros or bastards.

Do not summon people to your office – it frightens them. Instead, go to see them in their offices. This makes you visible throughout the wanders about his agency becomes a hermit, out of touch with his staff.

A lot of successful advertising was created before POSITIONING campaigns are based on optimum positioning but are totally ineffective – because they are dull, or badly constructed, or ineptly written. If nobody reads your advertisement or looks at your good to have the right positioning.

The most important decision is how to position your product.

The personality of a product is an amalgam of many things – its name, its packaging, its price, the style of its advertising, and, above all, the nature of the product itself.

It takes uncommon guts to stick to one style in the face of all the pressures to “come up with something new” every six months. It is tragically easy to be stampeded into change. But golden rewards await the advertiser who has the brains and the stability to stick with it over a long period.

Most manufacturers are reluctant to accept any limitation on the image of their brand. They want it to be all things to all people. They want their brand to be a male brand and a female brand. An upper -class brand and a plebeian brand. They generally end up with a brand which has no personality of any kind, a wishy-washy neuter. No capon ever rules the roost.

Every advertisement must contribute to the complex symbol which is the brand image.

It pays to boil down your strategy to one simple promise and go the whole hog in delivering that promise.

Scores of great advertisements have been discarded before they have begun to pay off.

What you show is more important than what you say.