How I Became Seymour Duncan.

Seymour was well known in the rock-star community for his custom hand-made electric guitar pickups, but his mom & pop business operation couldn't survive just on sales to rock stars. He needed to catch the attention of the mass market.

I met him after he inquired about a photo we'd used to illustrate an interview with Jackson Browne in Santa Barbara Magazine: a Jurgen Hilmer close-up of the fretboard and strings of a custom Phil Kubicki guitar. Seymour wanted to produce a distinctive poster using a similar photo, with a list of Seymour's products on the back side of the poster.

At first my role as a copywriter was only to spruce up the descriptions of each of his 32 different pickups. The descriptions were virtually identical--every pickup delivered "a fat full punch that cuts through." So why buy product #28 compared to #16? "Because it has a fat full punch that cuts through." I forced him to explain what the differences were for each pickup.

I became more and more fascinated with his explanations of how he got into the pickup business. He started as a guitar player and took pickups apart to find out why one sounded different from another. He moved to England to work as a musician; his day job was as a guitar technician for the Fender shop in London, and he met many rock stars and fixed their guitars and modified their pickups.

I studied the competition and saw that everybody was using rock-star endorsements, with no information about the guitar pickups themselves. Nobody was explaining why you should put a new pickup in your guitar.

My art director, Mark Oliver, and I persuaded him that it made more sense to do a brochure focusing on the pickups themselves, with commentary from Seymour explaining why each pickup was different from the others. I interviewed Seymour extensively and wrote the brochure in first person, as though Seymour himself were telling the story.

The brochure was introduced at the National Association of Music Manufacturer's convention, and was an instant hit, catapulting Seymour Duncan into the industry leadership.

After the success of the catalog, Seymour asked for a series of ads to go into guitar magazines. At first he wanted to advertise his worst-selling items, but I persuaded him to go with his top three items; if they were already selling well, our ad campaign would send sales skyrocketing.
In keeping with the theme of focusing on the pickups themselves, we decided to show them blown up large on the page, in top view, side view, and end view. "I" explained how the various technical details of their construction affected the sound. The ads were also produced as 20" x 30" posters.
The campaign was massively successful.