Copy Perspective Monday
Going for Broca: “Show Don’t Tell” in Action
How long can you keep your audience’s attention before delivering a punchline?
In a moment, I’ll explain why “Surprising Broca” is so important to both advertisers and comedians. But first, watch this video.
Regardless of whether it cracks you up or annoys you, show it to some friends and see what they think. I guarantee you’ll be puzzled by the reactions you get. I was.
I loved the video, as did my mother and the colleague who sent it to me in the first place. But my wife, sister, and father found it baffling, annoying — hardly worth the attention spent watching, trying to understand it.
So what’s this have to do with Web copy? Well, the creators of this ad did two things brilliantly:
1) They chose a unique angle and frame.
2) They kept viewers watching through intrigue. Most viewers, even those annoyed by the ad, are compelled to watch all of it in order to resolve the mystery.
And yet the ad raises some interesting questions: How disorienting and unique an angle can you take before they turn off? How long can you keep readers guessing? And is this technique ever appropriate for Web copy, where skimmable and scannable text offering near immediate comprehension are the rule*?
The short answer: It differs by personality type, current intentions, motivations, and scent. People who are task-oriented by nature or by current circumstance will dislike ambiguity. Ambiguity gets in the way of task-completion. People who are browsing, looking for insight, or looking to be entertained will more readily tolerate or embrace ambiguity and intrigue because it’s, well, intriguing. And this is important it has a lot to do with when and where you’ll want to take advantage of these techniques.
Similarly, people who fall into the Judging end of the Judging-Perceiving of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator continuum will generally have far less tolerance for prolonged ambiguity. (For instance, if you didn’t like the Sopranos finale, you might be Type-J.)
Unfortunately for Perceiving types, the world of commerce is predominantly Type-J. The world of fashion, art, design, etc, tends to be more of a Type-P world. As such, the very nature of your business will affect the degree to which you can profitably engage customers with P-style intrigue.
Finally, scent has a lot to do with it. The seven-second rule is generally directed to home and landing pages where establishing and maintaining scent is most crucial because you are just starting to build trust with the visitor. The more your links promise something and deliver on it, the more trust you build with the visitor. Once you’ve built up some good faith, then dabble in a bit of offbeat-yet-cool copy until it reaches a payoff.
A friend or colleague can get away with asking you to close your eyes for a surprise. A stranger generally can’t.
Where does that leave us? Well, based on what we’ve covered, I can come up with some relatively specific rules of thumb. But before I make them, I’d like to poll you, our fine Grok readers, about your experiences with off-beat web copy. What have you seen that worked? What annoyed the living daylights out of you? Did you like the commercial?
[*Author’s Note: Maybe now’s a good time to tell you that “Surprising Broca” is all about having fun with your audience’s expectations. This technique stems from Broca’s Area of the brain, where patterns are recognized. When these patterns don’t come full-circle for whatever reason, we can’t help but get angry, frustrated, laugh, smile, or nod.]
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Written by:Jeff Sexton
Copy Perspective Monday: #4, Time vs. Money
While somewhat counterintuitive ten years ago, it’s painfully obvious today: saving the customer time and aggravation is usually more persuasive than simply saving them money.
This seems to hold true in the online world as well. A fairly recent MIT study showed that a majority of online buyers will forego the super discount websites and spend more at Amazon or brand-name sites in order to assure a reliable shopping experience.
So instead of an examination of when to focus on price savings vs. time savings, let’s look at how buyers’ perception of time changes as they move through the buying process.
As might be expected, task-directed customers are substantially less open to marketing before completing their tasks than they are afterwards. Visitors to a Bank don’t want to hear about additional services and offerings until after they’ve been waited on by a teller. Once they’ve been seen by a teller, though, they become much more open to up-sells and cross-sells. Yet the longer customers stay (happily) engaged with a store, the more likely they are to buy. Both of these behaviors are well documented in the offline world.
Assuming such behaviors hold true on the internet, in the first instance, we’ll want to move the customer though a website as quickly as possible. In the latter, meanwhile, we’ll want to keep the customer engaged with the Website in order to increase her chance of converting. These apparently contradictory aims seem to argue for equally contradictory styles of site architecture and copy.
This paradox resolves itself when viewed through the lens of buying stage.
Late-stage buyers already know what they want. Consequently, they simply want to get in, get what they came for, and get out. Get out of their way and make accomplishing that goal as smooth, easy and fast as possible. The time to up or cross-sell late-stage buyers is at the product order page, shopping cart, or post-purchase e-mail. At these point, recommendations for other add-ons or accessories saves the customer more time since they won’t have to make additional shopping trips later. Plus, the suggestions are made when the customer is basking in a “mission-accomplished glow” and most likely to listen.
Think of going to Amazon.com (AZN) with a specific book title, typing it into the search engine, and finding the book. Only after you’ve found what you came for that you might possibly be interested in learning about similar books or recommendations based on what other people bought. The homepage also had lots of suggested items and recommendations, but you likely ignored those in your task-directed book search.
Early-stage buyers, on the other hand, are still gathering relevant information with the intent of eventually making a decision. They’re still task-oriented, but their task is to decide what to buy — or from whom to buy it — instead of actually buying it. What they’ve come for is insight, and the more of that they find on your site, the more time they’ll spend with you.
In both buying stages, your goal is to provide the visitor with what she wants while saving her time. But in early buying stages, you save the visitor time by providing her with information and insight she would have otherwise had to work much harder and longer to obtain. She gives you her time because she senses she’s saving some in return. Conveying this information and insight with engaging and enjoyable copy further leverages this relationship by ensuring that visitors are not only saving time, but enjoying the time they do spend with you. Do that and it’s a fair bet you’ll ends up getting your visitors’ money as well as their time.
Turning back to the Amazon.com example, you may have come looking to research a book on a topic. At this point, the site’s search function is less important than great customer reviews, suggested alternative titles, and the ability to read a passage or two out of a prospective book before buying it. Who hasn’t spent a significant amount of time browsing for stuff on Amazon? The Amazon.com website effectively honors the time needs of both late and early stage buyers.
Most websites only cater to, or “optimize” for, late-stage buyers by assuming that visitors will know exactly what they want. And optimizing for late stage buyers is good as far as it goes because it is honoring the time needs of late stage buyers. But very rarely do websites consider the time needs of early-stage buyers — they don’t look at persuasion.
As 3-panel and universal search become more common, early-stage buyers will have a progressively easier time finding insight that serves their needs. And if it’s your competitor providing that content, are you ever likely to get those buyers when they finally do take action? Or will the persuasive battle have already been won by your competitor?
It’s simply time vs. money. Spend time crafting persuasive, insightful copy that speaks to early stage buyers, or lose money.
[*Editor’s note: If you’ve enjoyed the Copy Perspective Monday series, let Jeff show you how to master these techniques and many more on September 17th at our Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar in New York.]
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Written by:Jeff Sexton
Copy Perspective Monday: What is “Substance”?
Last week’s article on Style vs. Substance, kept driving me back to one question: “What is substance?”
It seems a pragmatist would insist that anything the customer is willing to pay for automatically becomes substantive. And while I abhor the reductive sophistry in such definitions (tell me “quality” means simply “meeting standards/expectations” and I’ll be tempted to punch you), I feel this particular definition is worth accepting — at least provisionally, and for the purposes of a thought experiment.
With that settled, I want you to think of your least favorite color. Now, how deeply discounted would a car of that color have to be before you’d buy it? For the sake of the experiment, assume you can’t flip or trade the vehicle; you’ll have to own and drive it. Let’s say it’s a $30,000 car in a butt-ugly rust color (or whatever turns your stomach). Would you take that car for $24,000, knowing you’d have to drive it?
Is color worth $6,000? Does $6k make color substantive?
Closer to home, how many of you have bought a black MacBook? Last I checked, it was about $200 more than the comparable white version and the only “substantive” difference is a $50 hard drive upgrade. Apple hasn’t had any problems selling them at this price. I own a white MacBook. I talked myself out of the “outrageous” surcharge for the black one, and I kick myself every day for not recognizing color as a substantive element of my laptop.
Moving past color, what about, say, feel? Does a slick-shifting gearbox count for anything on a car? Is that a substantive difference? It won’t show up on a speck sheet. Same thing with steering sensitivity and precision. How about the bank vault-like thud of a Mercedes door? Sure, that thud conveys more than feel; it indicates build quality, right? Well, Toyotas are commonly thought to have better build quality and they don’t have that thud. So the door heft is more Teutonic style than anything else; it conveys quality on a purely emotional level.
But that’s just it. Buying decisions are driven by emotion, and style affects us emotionally. So, of course stylistic differences have a huge impact on how and what we buy — as much on major purchases like homes and cars as it does with jeans or cologne. Solid doors can be more convincing than consumer reports.
And that leaves just one question . . .
Why do we differentiate between logically substantive differences and style? Because self-identity involves our emotions at a far deeper level than what one might call superficial style. If saving several grand on an ugly car means I can pay for private schooling for my kids, then style takes a back seat to being a good dad — that’s the stronger emotion. If I see myself as a level-headed guy, paying a price premium for a Mini Cooper may not to cut it, unless I can justify it on the grounds that it’s actually a practical car with surprising interior room, great gas mileage, and solid performance. Because all those things are true, the Mini has sold well. Even still, Minis are predominantly bought by people with a dominant Myers-Briggs type of “SP” or “NF”; Spontaneous and Humanistic temperaments, people with few hang-ups over needing to be “logical.”
As a (Competitive) “NT,” I’m not exactly Johnny bean-counter and the $150 difference wouldn’t pay for much schooling, but I still talked myself out of the black Macbook, whereas I would have had no problem paying that $150 for a “logically substantive” upgrade such as a faster processor or more memory. My emotional response to the cool black color of the high(er)-end MacBook gave way to my emotional need to make a rational decision, thus validating my identity as a “reasonable” guy.
So what’s the bottom line? Don’t just focus on the product or even on your customers’ superficial demographics. Focus on the customer’s self-image, then use that insight to decide what’s substantive to them. If it turns out a “stylistic” quality is substantive for your customers, then style-heavy copy might be the best way to persuade them and convey value.
[Editor’s note: Stay tuned next week as Jeff Sexton, Future Now copywriting instructor and Persuasion Architect, guides us through Copy Perspective #4, “Time vs. Money” (which was to have run that this week, but substance couldn’t wait). You can also learn from Jeff first-hand on September 17th at our Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar in New York.]
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Written by:Jeff Sexton
Copy Perspective Monday: #5, Style vs. Substance
Perspective #5* really isn’t an “either/or” proposition so much as it is a continuum; not a question of one-or-the-other but of which one will dominate, and to what degree.
Here are some things to consider:
1) Persuasive copy should always have style.
Remember how even intellectual ads should affect emotions? Well, regardless of how substantive the message, you need to use drama as an essential part of the copy.
The question isn’t whether to use stylistic elements to make your points persuasive — you always should (read Made to Stick if you don’t believe me) — but whether Style will be a key selling-point.
2) Can you get away with featuring style as a (primary) selling-point?
Notice that I wrote “a selling-point,” not “the selling-point”. Unless you’re dealing with fashion items — e.g., clothing, shoes — style can’t be the selling point. But it had better be a selling-point, if not a primary one.
Take the Mini Cooper for example; a car that’s had smashing success based primarily on a style-heavy advertising and marketing campaign.
Yet style wasn’t a choice forced onto the product by its advertising. Style was a copy/advertising choice made possible by the nature of the product. The Mini is, and was, an icon of style and design. This is a main selling-point for a car, simply because it’s wildly more stylish than anything else in the low-$20k price class.
Given a higher price bracket, a style-heavy advertising message would be disastrous, as exemplified by Nissan’s early 90’s GI Joe/Barbie ad for the 300ZX.
The ad was a hit, but sales of the car disappointed. At $33k (USD), the car would be roughly equivalent to $50k in 2007 dollars. Style and performance aren’t really competitive advantages at $50k; they’re more like prerequisites for entering the price category. And advertising a prerequisite in lieu of a value proposition is never a good idea.
Again, a couple of questions remain: Can you get away with going for style over substance in your messaging? Will the product support such a choice?
3) Use style-heavy copy and messaging to convey intangible (or sensory) qualities.
In Call to Action, Bryan and Jeffrey take on the e-commerce myth that you can’t sell items on the Web that you need to smell, touch, or taste to appreciate — the old, “if you can’t smell it, you can’t sell it” adage.
In other words, use evocative language to help your customers create vivid mental images of themselves enjoying the benefits of your product/service.
This is where style-heavy copy and creative really shine. Here’s an example from the J. Peterman site:
I was browsing in a Paris antique shop one winter afternoon when a fitted leather train case caught my eye.
It contained silver-handled brushes, boot hooks, a straight razor, several silver-stoppered glass bottles…
One bottle was different. Encased in yew-wood, with a handwritten date: 1903.
Inside the bottle, there was still the faint, intriguing aroma of a gentleman’s cologne. A “prescription” cologne, custom-made for a rich traveler a century ago.
Curiosity was eating at me
I bought the case (the price was shocking) and sent the bottle to a laboratory for analysis. They broke down the residue by gas chromatography. Identified its fingerprint through spectro-photometry.
The report said: an “old woody fougère.” Clean citrus notes, bergamot, “green notes.” The middle notes: clary sage…cardamom. The dry-down: leather notes, smoky labdanum…elemi, tabac, frankincense.
The detective work was impressive.
So is the thing itself.
Women like the way it smells on a man. Like a symphony that begins loudly, then soon slides into subtle, entangling developments that grow on them.
Or so I’ve been told.
The syle of the copy creates the atmosphere for the right images and associations to flourish, and the intense sensory descriptions help the reader to almost smell the sophistication of the product. The website isn’t so great, but the copy makes all the difference.
Another fine example is this Honda Civic ad that uses style-heavy creative in an entirely different fashion than the Mini print campaign.
Remember that the Civic already “owns” substance in the mind of the consumer, so they can afford a style-heavy ad or two — especially one that evokes the physical sensation of driving their new car. But since the whole put-the-audience-in-the-driver’s-seat approach has been done to death, this ad uses a stylistic and creative twist to capture the audience’s attention and imagination. Viewers are struck by the chorus’s ability to reproduce the actual sounds, causing them to focus on the very sensations the ad hopes to convey.
It’s audible farfugnugen, baby! (Way better than “Born from jets“.)
That’s what I mean by using style-based messaging as a tactical method for conveying intangible, sensory qualities.
So, where on the style/substance continuum is your copy?
[*Editor’s note: Fans of Copy Perspective Monday may notice that the would-be final installment, #6, came before #5. To understand the madness to his method — or is that the other way around? — stay tuned next week as Jeff Sexton, Future Now copywriting instructor and Persuasion Architect, guides us through Copy Perspective #4, “Time vs. Money” (an all-time favorite). You can also learn from Jeff first-hand on September 17th at our Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar in New York.]
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Written by:Jeff Sexton
Copy Perspective Monday: #6, Pain vs. Gain
Don’t think of a white bear.
Are you thinking of a white bear? Stop. Don’t think of them.
Not to sound too much like the Verizon guy, but how about know? Still thinking of a white bear?
Ahhh, the power of a mental image. So what does this have to do with Perspective No. 6? (As you may recall from last week, this is a six-part series.) And why am I jumping past numbers 2 through 5? Because there are powerful reasons to evoke negative mental images in your copy, and equally powerful reasons not to — and they both involve the persistent power of white bears, er… negative images, that is.
Oh, and because Perspectives 2 and 3 provide the answers to this problem.
In his Monday Morning Memo of December 4, 2006, Roy Williams wrote that:
Happiness rarely triggers commerce. Unhappiness often does.
Purchases are triggered by dissatisfaction with the way things are. We purchase when we have a need, a desire, an itch to scratch. We want to change our condition, our surroundings, our state of mind. We buy because we are dissatisfied…
…To increase your sales volume, you must identify the dissatisfaction that lurks in the heart of your customer.
And then you must shine your flashlight of words into that darkness…
This would seem to be a powerful reason to evoke negative images in your copy: remind the buyers of the itch, then present your solution as the ideal way to scratch that itch, right? Aye, there’s the rub…
Like white bears or WMDs, negative images persist. And it’s somehow easier to create powerful negative images than it is to produce powerful positive images.
Emotionally speaking, worries trump daydreams.
Worse, most copywriters create a powerful negative image and then try to counter it with a logical or syntactical argument. Which is kind of like letting a skunk loose at work and trying to keep the smell away from your desk with a cubicle partition.
As an example, a copywriter just can’t get away with something like:
“Having trouble getting to a second or third date? It could be your facial acne - now you can get rid of painful acne with Wonder-X!”
What do you think is going to be associated with Wonder-X: the cure, or the painful emotions stirred up by the copy?
Dismissing a logical argument from the mind is all too easy. It’s why rationalizations work. The good angel on your shoulder gnashes his teeth at that all too often, doesn’t he? Mine sure does.
But a powerful mental image is almost impossible to dismiss.
So, does that mean you should always go with gain over pain? With positive mental images rather than negative? Frankly, no. It means:
- that negative mental images are extremely powerful;
- that they have to be used with restraint;
- that sometimes it’s better to hint-at or suggest the negative than to address it directly.
- (and, most importantly) that negative images ALWAYS have to be countered with a more powerful positive image and never with logic or syntax alone.
In fact, psychologists have done research on white bears (really!), and the only way not to think of a white bear is to consciously think of something else. As the copywriter, you must provide something else that’s sticky enough to effortlessly displace the negative image you created.
How do you do that? Well, you have 3 choices:
- Don’t use negatives at all; only talk about the positive. Depending on your product, this might be the smartest move of all. Of course, depending on your product (insurance?), this might not be an option at all, either.
- Only hint at the negative (e.g., “Because so much is riding on your tires.”)
- Modulate the intensity and vividness of a negative image to ensure it doesn’t overwhelm your copy and that you can easily replace it with your more powerful, positive mental image.
And how do you modulate an image’s intensity and vividness? With perspectives 2 and 3. But that’s for another post…
Catch me next week when I show how it’s done.
[*Editor’s note: This is actually the second part of our Copy Perspective Monday series. Make sure to read part one and its follow-up if you missed them. Follow along as Jeff Sexton, Future Now copywriting instructor and Persuasion Architect, guides you through an in-depth perspective on the six copy perspectives. You can also learn from Jeff in person on September 17th at our Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar in New York.]
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Written by:Jeff Sexton
Copy Perspective Monday: #1, Intellect vs. Emotion
Numerous difficult choices have to be made before your fingers ever touch the keyboard, if you hope to write compelling copy. Among those choices are what Future Now calls the Six Perspectives:
1) Intellect vs. Emotion
2) Then vs. now
3) Me, Them or You
4) Time vs. Money
5) Style vs. Substance
6) Pain vs. Gain
Depending on the circumstances, either side of any one of these polarities can be the right choice. So choosing correctly requires you to know more than simply what circumstances call for which decisions; it requires you to understand the dynamics behind those decisions.
For this reason, I’m devoting an entire article to each perspective*, starting with the first: Emotion vs. Intellect. Now, at some level this one isn’t really a choice at all, since all persuasive copy should speak to the desires (read: heart) of the customer. As we say at Future Now:
“People rationalize buying decisions based on facts,
but
People make buying decisions based on feelings.”
The real question, then, isn’t whether you’re you going to speak to the emotions; it’s a question of ‘what’ versus ‘how.’ Are you going to change what your readers know about the topic (and thereby change how they feel about it), or are you going to change how they feel about what they already know?
Choosing to change “what” is an intellectual perspective. Choosing to change “how” is an emotional perspective.
An example of an intellectual perspective:
At $40, our perfect-fit pocket tees might strike you as pricey…
Until you try one on. The supple hand of long-staple, organically grown sea-island cotton costs $20/yard itself – even at wholesale prices. But it’s guaranteed not to fade, pill, or wear out for 5 years, regardless of use. No more relegating your favorite tee to car-washing duty after a year or two.
And that kind of comfort and durability just can’t be duplicated with cheaper alternatives. Neither can our distinctive articulated shoulders, famous Grok mascot, or made-in-the-USA commitment.
You could certainly buy a cheaper shirt, but then you’d have to wear it.
Is that aimed at affecting your emotions? Sure it is; I want you to feel better about paying forty freakin’ dollars for a t-shirt. But the copy is accomplishing that by changing what you know about the t-shirt: it’s made of better material, has superior construction, etc. That’s an intellectual perspective.
A famous ad campaign that leveraged an emotional perspective:
In his book, Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads, Roy Williams says of the famous Motel Six ads:
“Tom Bodette, reminded us of what we already knew, that ‘Motel Six has the lowest prices of any national chain,’ but Tom made us feel differently about it. He replaced our mental image of ‘cheap and tacky’ with one of ‘clean and simple.’ The straightforward and unpretentious charm of his statement ‘We’ll leave the light on for ya,’ caused us to question the value of chocolate mints on our pillows and tiny bottles of avocado body balm in our shower stalls.”
So, when do you go with Intellect and when do you go with Emotion?
a) Go with the opposite perspective when you already know that the former is nailed down.
If the Grok mascot had considerable cachet, and if our pocket-tee was a known luxury item, then the emotional pull was already established. The main goal of the copy is simply to provide the intellectual justifications/rationalizations of the purchase.
With Motel Six, it’s the opposite; the intellectual argument was already well established: they’re cheaper than the competition. But the block to purchasing wasn’t intellectual, it was emotional; no one wanted to stay at a cheap flophouse. The ads concentrated on removing the emotional block.
b) Consider if your product or service is bought on style or substance.
This is getting into another perspective but, suffice it to say, a substance sold primarily on style (say, designer jeans) would probably do better engaging emotions than intellect. And that accounting software had better affect the emotions by providing a sound, substantive, and intellectual basis for making the purchase, rather than trying to slide by on style alone.
c) Honestly answer whether you have the factual “juice” to make an intellectual argument?
Not every business has an intellectual argument to make, or at least not one that their customers would care about. So, when the facts aren’t in your favor, argue definitions and qualities; use an emotional perspective. This is advice as old as rhetoric itself.
Conversely, even style or fashion products and services could benefit from an intellectual perspective, IF the facts were in their favor. The Grok pocket tee is a good example of this.
That’s a fair amount of thought for one perspective, but do the hard thinking before hand, and you’ll enjoy the benefits of effective copy afterward.
[*Editor’s note: This is the first part of our Copy Perspective Monday series. Follow along as Jeff Sexton, Future Now copywriting instructor and Persuasion Architect, guides you through an in-depth overview of six essential copy perspectives. You can also learn from Jeff in person on September 17th at our Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar in New York. If you enjoyed this installment, be sure to read its addendum, “Emotional Perspective Redux“.]
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Written by:Jeff Sexton
