How a beer became famous by describing what every other beer already did
Claude Hopkins didn't invent anything. He just wrote down a brewing process and made Schlitz readers feel they'd discovered something that had been there all along.
In the early twentieth century, Schlitz beer was struggling. It ranked fifth in American sales, in a market where every brewer used roughly the same ingredients and largely the same methods.
Advertising pioneer Claude Hopkins toured the Schlitz brewery and was fascinated by what he saw: the glass-lined tanks, the pumps cycling filtered air through the rooms, the plate-glass rooms where beer was cooled, the process of cleaning every pipe twice daily. He turned to his host and asked why none of this appeared in Schlitz's advertising.
"Because every brewer does the same thing," came the answer.
"But no one else has ever told this story," Hopkins replied.
He wrote a campaign describing Schlitz's brewing process in meticulous, sensory detail. No competitor could claim Hopkins was lying — they all did these things too. But because Schlitz was first to say it, the information attached itself to Schlitz alone. Readers assumed that only Schlitz made beer this carefully.
Schlitz moved from fifth to tied for first in sales within a year. Hopkins later wrote in Scientific Advertising that the lesson applied anywhere: the first to describe a common industry practice claims that practice as a virtue. Stating the obvious, before anyone else does, is a competitive act.