Augusten Burroughs Quotes

You can stick a BMW badge on a dead cat - and people would still buy it.

We use Ann sparingly right now so that people don't get tired of her.

If people have the ability to see it, and you spend the money to put the wow factor into it, they will reward that entity or that team or that business, and they will then say they appreciate me, they appreciate what I'm about, and they will support it.

There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid.

I don't like the word "brand." When I see people creating a brand, it feels disingenuous.

More and more people now have jobs that require them to confront the risk of appearing stupid on a regular basis.

It's not my job. The Weinstein company, it's their job to convince people. My job was to make the movie. That's what I did. I know what we did in France was to have the maximum screenings just to let people talk about the movie and say they enjoyed the movie.

Find out where the people want to go, then hustle yourself around in front of them.

It is slightly chilling to realize there are rational, functional people up there employed to spot, nurture, and exploit those down here among us who are irrational and can barely cope. If you want to know how stupid you’re perceived to be by the people up there, count the unsolicited junk mail you receive. If you get a lot, you’re perceived to be alluringly stupid.

There are now unmistakeable signs of a trend in favor of superior products at premium prices. The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.

Advertising is like learning - a little is a dangerous thing.

I'm just looking forward to doing these videos with AXE. Doing more directing, collaborating with them, finding ways to kind of like tap into temptation with their market and their audience and mine and find cool, creative ways to get the brand out to people. And I think they're doing a really, really good job. So we've got some cool stuff coming up.

People will buy the car just because it's a great car. We want them to think it's excellent value for money and then, oh yeah, it happens to be electric.

Perhaps marketing is about to transition to a new kind of profession, one that requires insight, dedication and smarts.

To be a success in advertising you must want to fill other people with a passion for possession.

No matter who you are or what kind of company or organization you work for, your number-one job is to tell your story to the consumer wherever they are, and preferably at the moment they are deciding to make a purchase.

Advertising is a symbol-manipulating occupation

Marketers know that if people you respect - perhaps laughably including entertainers and athletes - say they like a product, you're more likely to buy.

Corporations are totalitarian institutions. Board of directors at the top of managers give orders, everyone follows orders..... At the very bottom of command, if you are lucky you can rent yourself to it and get a job , and if you are sufficiently propagandized you may even buy some of the junk they produce and so on.

I know of a brewer who sells more of his beer to the people who never see his advertising than to the people who see it every week. Bad advertising can unsell a product.

The ideal of having a real job that you risk your soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-righteous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals. Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public fifty years ago; in our era of risk-insured semimonopolies and advertised vices it would be met with a ghastly stillness.

People buy ideas, they don't buy photographs.

The plot details of B movies are irrational: accept that people do things that are contradictory, against their own best interests, have short term aims & limited attention span, and do incredibly stupid things while things blow up. Apart from things blowing up, this is just like the music industry.

Here's how Apple does marketing in a nutshell: Make a great product, then let people know about it. That's it. Neither aspect of that is easy, but the important thing is it has to happen in that order. It all starts with a great product.

Industry prospers when it offers people articles which they want more than they want anything they now have. The fact is that people never buy what they need. They buy what they want.