Success Quote by Leo Burnett

Burnett’s line is a polite knife: it flatters advertising as empathy, then immediately threatens exile for anyone who treats the audience as an abstract target. The provocation is in the word “turn.” He’s not asking for demographic literacy or clever copy tricks; he’s demanding a kind of temporary self-erasure. Good ad writing, in his worldview, isn’t persuasion performed at people, it’s identification practiced with them.

The subtext is a rebuke to the industry’s perennial temptation: writing to impress the client, the agency, or your own sense of verbal sparkle. “Turn yourself into your customer” is an anti-snob principle. It insists that the so-called ordinary buyer has coherent desires, fears, routines, and private logic that deserve to be taken seriously. If you can’t inhabit that logic, you’ll default to caricature: the housewife, the rugged man, the aspirational striver. Burnett built an empire on characters and icons, but he’s warning that archetypes only work when they’re rooted in lived human texture, not boardroom fantasy.

Context matters. Burnett came up when mass consumer culture was hardening into an American religion: packaged goods, radio, early TV, the rise of brand mythology. In that environment, “copy” could easily become a confidence game. His maxim tries to keep the craft honest by tethering it to a moral standard: advertising as translation. Turn yourself into the customer, and you can find the sentence that feels like the buyer’s own thought. Fail, and you’re not just bad at the job - you’re in the wrong business.