The Art of Conversion

Rosser Reeves, Bill Bernbach, and the future of creative success. By Paul Kramer. Today’s creative process is both an art and a science. The art is designed to build irrevocable bonds between consumers and brands, while the science is about precisely understanding the shopper’s conversion into a buyer. This is not a new tension, but one that is steeped in history and the confluence of great thinkers of marketing’s recent past.

In the earliest days of “pre-modern” marketing, the idea was simple: Identify the brand proposition; get the word out through a limited number of channels and mass publications; and let the monolithic public beat a path to the brand. This was the basic formula for success until the early 1960s when two competing schools of thought began to grapple for the mantle of communication leadership … read >>