Nobody ever bought a sausage because it sizzles – they all sizzle. They don’t buy a drill because they want to make a hole – everybody in the world knows that every drill ever made can make a hole. People buy particular drills and particular sausages and they buy them for all sorts of complicated reasons that you have to figure out carefully – you don’t get that information from a bumper sticker.
What’s worse is that these aphorisms assume that people are dumb, generally they’re not, they’ll shout back at you “this is all sizzle, there’s no damn sausage. I want a firkin’ sausage!”
The slogans only exist because they make the snake-oil salesman sound smart but it’s antiquated 1970s polytechnic business school stuff – WBAWI (what business are we in?)
“You’re not selling perfume, you’re selling hope!”
(aka, “it’s not the scent it’s the sex” – my own contribution to the genre)
Here’s a £10k bill for marketing consultancy. pfnrrr.
