How Did Claude Hopkins Advertise Schlitz Beer?

David Senra, reading Claude Hopkins, says Hopkins advertised Schlitz by printing purity steps the brewery had treated as ordinary. Schlitz had the fifth most market share. Four other beers were outselling it, and the company hired Hopkins to raise sales. He treated research as the first step of a great ad and walked the brewery.

He saw plate glass rooms where beer dripped over pipes in filtered air so it could cool in purity, filters filled with white wood pulp, pumps and pipes cleaned twice a day, every bottle cleaned four times by machinery, artesian wells that went 4,000 feet down for pure water, beer aged six months, and an original mother yeast cell developed through 1,200 experiments. The brewery said every good brewer did the same things, so there was nothing to tell. Hopkins replied that others had never told the story, that it amazed everyone who walked through, and that it would startle everyone in print.

He put those rooms and the other purity steps into the ad. It was a story common to all good brewers, and it had never been told. Schlitz went from fifth place to neck and neck with first place in a few months. The maker is too close to the product and sees only the ordinary. Facts that seem commonplace inside the plant can still give the first company to say them a lasting distinction.