Quotes about Strategy

Most campaigns are too complicated. They reflect a long list of objectives, and try to reconcile the divergent views of too many executives. By attempting to cover too many things, they achieve nothing. Many

It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.

Sales are a function of product-value and advertising. Promotions cannot produce more than a temporary kink in the sales curve.

When someone is made the head of an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, I send him a Matrioshka doll from Gorky. If he has the curiosity to open it, and keep opening it until he comes to the inside of the smallest doll, he finds this message: If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants. Even

Most campaigns are too complicated. They reflect a long list of objectives, and try to reconcile the divergent views of too many executives.

My brother Francis wrote a letter in Greek to the headmasters of private schools, selling cooking stoves. When some wrote back that they could not read Greek, he sent them another letter — in Latin. This produced orders.

Sound an alarm! Advertising, not deals, builds brands.

Don't bunt. Aim out of the ballpark.

Enemies make you stronger, allies make you weaker.

Of course I don't have a big serve. I have other weapons. That's why tennis is a nice sport.

Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it... You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.

Hate, emotionalism, and frustration are not policies.