Had I introduced this particular piece with the header ‘Copywriters: better than unicorns and beards’ you may well be expecting a rather different read. Had I titled it ‘Cognitive consumer reasoning on a linguistic and attitudinal spectrum in a globalised Britain’ you’d probably just be thinking about unicorns and beards, or even unicorns with beards, anyway.
Even before Ogilvy uttered his ‘80 cents in the dollar’ principle for advertising headlines, copywriters have grappled over this particular issue like hungry pigeons in a wheelie bin filled with smashed Battenberg.
