Jeff Sexton Writes

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~William Bernbach

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I recently came across this fas­ci­nat­ing post about Apple Mar­ket­ing prin­ci­ples, as artic­u­lated by Apple circa 1977.  Here they are:

Now, as a mar­keter, the Empa­thy and Focus parts are sec­ond nature — at least in terms of under­stand­ing.  Putting them into prac­tice every day is harder stuff, but any copy­writer that doesn’t under­stand the impor­tance of empathiz­ing with the prospec­tive cus­tomer and focus­ing in on their pri­mary buy­ing moti­va­tions and con­cerns isn’t a copy­writer at all.

It’s the last ele­ment most mar­keters and copy­writ­ers screw up or over­look: the impor­tance of Imputed Qual­ity.  Not nuts and bolts, specification-driven build qual­ity or value for the dol­lar qual­ity.  But qual­ity cues that tap into buy­ers’ pre-existing men­tal imprint of lux­ury and vir­tu­ous man­u­fac­ture.  The telling detail that says everything.

Want to see an exam­ple of imputed qual­ity used in copy?  Here ya go:

Notice that the actual build qual­ity is detailed by the bul­let points of the body copy, while the imputed qual­ity — the telling detail — is given pride of place within the head­line of the ad itself.*

Of course, this sort of qual­ity cue or imputed qual­ity fac­tor has to be already exist­ing or freshly baked into the prod­uct or ser­vice itself before it can be adver­tised, but rec­og­niz­ing the need for it — and doing the patient research and dig­ging to find it — is one of the major keys to writ­ing copy that works.

Apple of course, is a mas­ter at this, which is one rea­son they are renowned design icons, because inspired design imputes high qual­ity. But it’s also why Apple never skimps on screen qual­ity, key­board feel, and the over­all pol­ish put on their user inter­faces: those are the sort of tan­gi­ble, expe­ri­en­tial things that impute quality.

Yes, of course, we expect real qual­ity from an Apple prod­uct in the sense of free­dom from typ­i­cal PC-like annoy­ances, annoy­ances bril­liantly dra­ma­tized and mocked by Apple’s “I’m a Mac” cam­paign.  But even if you knew noth­ing about Apple or PCs and just LOOKED at the com­pet­ing prod­ucts laid side by side, you’d intu­itively get that one set of prod­ucts were spe­cial and nicer than the rest.  Regard­less of how their inter­nal com­po­nents and specs stacked up.

So Here Are My 3 Take­aways from This:

1) Qual­ity is impor­tant, but qual­ity with­out imputed qual­ity will go unre­warded in the marketplace.

2) Busi­ness own­ers should never expect cus­tomers to rec­og­nize qual­ity and should “bake” imputed qual­ity into their offerings.

3) Copy­writ­ers who fail to use imputed qual­ity cues will end up with under­per­form­ing ad copy.

P.S. — Want to see an already-existing qual­ity cue in action? Check out these guys thud­ding the door closed on a Mercedes:

P.P.S. — How do I know that Ogilvy dili­gently searched for prod­uct facts that would help him find and rec­og­nize impor­tant qual­ity cues?  Because he listed research twice when explain­ing his copy­writ­ing method­ol­ogy!  Steps 3 and 5 both empha­size the impor­tance of research and facts.

* For a more detailed analy­sis of this famous Ogilvy Ad, check out my old GrokDot­com post.

Kind­ness and Pro­fes­sion­al­ism — that’s what great cus­tomer ser­vice boils down to, accord­ing to my col­league Tim Miles.

And while Tim has drilled down to dis­cover the 7 ele­ments in small busi­ness Kind­ness and Pro­fes­sion­al­ism (which you should con­sider a must-read), for me the real genius is in his gen­eral for­mula of “Kind­ness and Pro­fes­sion­al­ism.” Why?

Because it’s the oppo­site of “Adding insult to injury.”

Believe it or not most med­ical mal­prac­tice suits, along with most “United Breaks Gui­tars” PR and word of mouth cat­a­stro­phes all promi­nently fea­ture both ele­ments — often with the “insult” tak­ing prece­dence over the injury.

Imag­ine what would typ­i­cally hap­pen with­out the “Insult.” If united broke the gui­tar and then apol­o­gized and even only par­tially com­pen­sated Dave Car­roll for the loss, do you still think he would have made that video. Think about that: even if the ordeal still cost Dave hun­dreds of dol­lars — even if the “injury” part of the equa­tion was still present — that ele­ment alone would never have sparked a viral YouTube revenge with­out the added injury of an uncar­ing and cal­loused bureau­cratic response.

But flip­ping the equa­tion goes beyond avoid­ing PR night­mares; adding kind­ness to pro­fes­sion­al­ism offers a pow­er­ful men­tal frame­work for cre­at­ing emo­tion­ally com­pelling cus­tomer ser­vice.  And these ele­ments are present in every “WOW” cus­tomer ser­vice story you’ll ever hear or expe­ri­ence, whether it’s the I Heart Zap­pos story, the var­i­ous Nordie sto­ries, and so on.

So, think about it: Kind­ness and Professionalism.

And then head on over to Tim’s blog to see every­thing that can go into each part of that dynamic duo.

Just did a rather enjoy­able inter­view with my friend and col­league, Dave Young over at BrandingBlog.com, wherein we dis­cussed one of my favorite top­ics: Mag­i­cal Think­ing.

If you’re new to the blog, here are a few of my pre­vi­ous posts on the topic:

• One Tough Mother’s Mag­i­cal Adver­tis­ing Secret
• Mag­i­cal Think­ing and McDonald’s
• A First Class Ticket

If you’re a lit­tle fuzzy on the con­cept of mag­i­cal think­ing, I rec­om­mend this Psy­chol­ogy Today arti­cle by Matthew Hut­son. But my short and biased take on it goes some­thing like this:

None of us are nat­u­rally, inher­ently ratio­nal beings. Our nat­ural think­ing pat­terns are “mag­i­cal” rather than sci­en­tific. It takes a con­scious atten­tion to ban­ish the mag­i­cal and rein­state a sci­en­tific view of things.

So regard­less of how thor­oughly sound-minded you may think you are, there’s a part of you that still thinks mag­i­cally. You still believe in mag­i­cal con­ta­gion, which is why you trea­sure first edi­tion, signed copies of books, or you dad’s deer rifle, or a base­ball caught at a big league game, and so on. It’s why you wouldn’t want to live in a house for­merly lived in by a ser­ial mur­derer — or worse, a home were vio­lent mur­ders took place. And it’s why you would hes­i­tate to deface a pic­ture of a loved one.

And this mat­ters because the part of us that actu­ally affects our decision-making process is the part that still thinks mag­i­cally — our emo­tional, lizard brain. Pretty obvi­ous why every mar­keter should be inti­mately famil­iar with mag­i­cal think­ing, right?

Want to hear more?  Go lis­ten to the inter­view.

P.S.  If you think Mag­i­cal Think­ing is only some­thing other peo­ple engage in, go ahead and try this exper­i­ment — I dare you! Go print out a pic­ture, prefer­ably a head­shot, of your kid and then stick a knife through it. If you can’t, or sim­ply “won’t” do it, or even if you hes­i­tate to do such a thing and feel funny about it, then con­grat­u­la­tions: you just got a first-hand expe­ri­ence with Mag­i­cal Thinking.

Paul Wolfe was kind enough to nom­i­nate me for this “con­test” and, in an effort not to let him down, I’ve pro­duced the fol­low­ing rin response to the 7 ques­tions / cat­e­gories of links:

Your most beau­ti­ful post

While I hes­i­tate to call any of my posts beau­ti­ful (as none of the prose qual­i­fies), there have been one or two posts on beau­ti­ful and heart­felt sub­jects, and this inter­view with Steven Press­field is one of them And just in case an “inter­view post” is con­sid­ered cheat­ing, I’ll throw this one in as well:

• A Belated Thank You

Your most pop­u­lar post

In look­ing back through Google Ana­lyt­ics, the front-runner for page views was this pre-release review of Dan and Chip Heath’s highly antic­i­pated book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.

But I tend to sus­pect that the front-runner posi­tion of that post has a lot more to do with the pop­u­lar­ity of the Heath Bros’ (deservedly) best-selling book, and a lot less to do with any par­tic­u­lar blog­ging excel­lence on my part. Luck­ily for me, my close-second most pop­u­lar post was also my most controversial…

Your most con­tro­ver­sial post

I had no idea this post on the Web­site for Best Made Axe would be as con­tro­ver­sial as it was, but I stand by my ini­tial premise: if you’re going to declare your­self the “best made” it’s only nat­ural to expect to find sub­stan­ti­a­tion of that claim on your Web­site. When that evi­dence isn’t found on the site, it causes doubt in the mind of the consumer.

For­tu­nately for Best Made Co, they do so many other things right with their mar­ket­ing, that the lack of sub­stance on the Web­site hardly mat­ters.  And I think it is to their great credit that both the head of Best Made Co.‘s Face­book fan page and one of the founders of the com­pany came to com­ment on the post.

Also, for what it’s worth, my intent with the post was always to help other small-scale pro­duc­ers under­stand an impor­tant aspect of per­sua­sive web­sites, and not to slam Best Made Co. Any­way, it’s still good read­ing, IMHO:

• Bet­ter Web Mar­ket­ing for Best Made Axe

Your most help­ful post

This is a tough one because all of my posts are aimed at being help­ful. But I think that this post man­aged to tie together a bunch of really worth­while insights in an inter­est­ing and fun pack­age cen­tered around the block­buster flick, Inception:

• Inception’s 4 Rules for Ulti­mate Influence

A post whose suc­cess sur­prised you

This par­tic­u­lar post was fairly per­sonal and off-topic for me, so I was sur­prised to find out that it res­onated with as many read­ers as it did.  Of course, after a moment’s reflec­tion, it wasn’t sur­pris­ing at all, since the core essay fea­tured in the post has been con­sis­tently pop­u­lar ever since it was first penned by Keith Bell.  Check it out, you’ll prob­a­bly like it too:

• Win­ning Isn’t Normal

A post you feel didn’t get the atten­tion it deserved

I think most web and direct response copy­writ­ers have been so ingrained with the “reason-why” adver­tis­ing mantra that we some­times don’t know quite what to do when we’re either short on demon­stra­ble points of dif­fer­ence or ben­e­fits, or legally pro­hib­ited from pro­claim­ing them in our adver­tis­ing. This post rep­re­sents at least one tried and true solu­tion to that prob­lem, but it got pre­cious lit­tle atten­tion. I think you’ll like it:

• A First Class Ticket

The post that you are most proud of

I’m proud to have writ­ten a hand­ful of guest posts for Copy­blog­ger, and espe­cially proud of how well this one turned out. It was a very solid post to begin with and Sonia Simone did a bril­liant job edit­ing it while Brian Clark did his usual amaz­ing job at cre­at­ing a must-read headline:

• The Com­mon Sense Mis­take that Makes Your Writ­ing Lifeless

And that’s it. Thanks for read­ing and a spe­cial thanks to Paul for nom­i­nat­ing me to par­tic­i­pate in this con­test in the first place

Ever won­der what hap­pened to Avis’s “We’re No. 2″ cam­paign?

I always assumed Avis fool­ishly dropped it out of bore­dom. Some brand man­ager wanted to put his “mark” on things and fool­ishly killed the goose that was lay­ing golden eggs. But that’s not nearly as inter­est­ing as what really happened…

See, a few years after Avis and Doyle Dane Bern­bach launched their leg­endary cam­paign, Hertz (aka No. 1) got ner­vous about how quickly Avis was gob­bling up their mar­ket share.  So Hertz got  wise and hired the other leg­endary cre­ative agency of the day: Ally & Gargano.

And here’s the counter-campaign that Carl Ally cre­ated for Hertz:

Hertz basi­cally took that “No. 2″ posi­tion and rammed it right up Avis’s arse, detail­ing point by point what cus­tomers give up when they rent cars from the smaller com­pany: loca­tions, car selec­tion, guar­an­teed per­for­mance, cus­tomer sup­port infra­struc­ture, etc.  And you gotta love that end­ing line: “No. 2 says he tries harder.  Than who?”

That counter-campaign went for the throat.  And the results show that it worked:

To the right you’ll see a snap­shot from a leaf of a new book on Ally & Gargano.  You can find a dig­i­tal ver­sion of the entire page here. But the impor­tant points to note are:

1) “After only 90 days from the start [of the cam­paign], Avis aban­doned their extremely suc­cess­ful cam­paign and quickly cre­ated adver­tis­ing with no ref­er­ences to Hertz, Try­ing Harder, or being Num­ber 2.”

2) From the launch of the cam­paign at the tail-end of 1966, Avis’s mar­ket share flat-lined and Hertz main­tained their posi­tion as the leader in the indus­try (which wouldn’t have hap­pened had the ear­lier trends con­tin­ued on for another 2 years).

And that’s what hap­pened to the famed “We’re Num­ber 2″ adver­tis­ing campaign.

So what are the lessons to take away from this?

First, I think Avis wimped out on this one. If they were vul­ner­a­ble on their brand­ing, it was because they weren’t fac­tu­ally liv­ing up to their “We Try Harder” claim. But even then, they could have re-vamped their cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and fought back rather than vol­un­tar­ily sur­ren­der­ing the one cam­paign that was actu­ally work­ing for them.

Before the Avis cam­paign was launched in 1963, Bill Bern­bach insisted that Avis revamp their fleet and actu­ally improve the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence so that he had a “bet­ter real­ity” to advertise. If Avis was really seri­ous about keep­ing the cam­paign — and they should have been — why didn’t they make another revamp and show exactly how they “tried harder” than Hertz

Sec­ond, you sim­ply can’t afford to ignore great adver­tis­ing. If a com­peti­tor has launched an immensely suc­cess­ful ad cam­paign that res­onates with the pub­lic and that’s dri­ving increased mar­ket share, you must respond. And the only way to do that is with great adver­tis­ing of your own.

Third, counter brand­ing works both ways. Ries and Trout famously advised chal­lenger brands to “find the weak­ness in your competitor’s strength” and that’s exactly what Avis did with their “No. 2″ cam­paign. But “Mar­ket­ing is often a bat­tle for legit­i­macy.  The first brand that cap­tures that con­cept is often able to por­tray it’s com­peti­tors as ille­git­i­mate pre­tenders.”* And that’s how Hertz coun­tered Avis’s counter brand­ing — by recast­ing Avis as an ille­git­i­mate pre­tenders to the “cus­tomer ser­vice” throne.

At least, those are my take­aways.  I’d be thrilled to read yours in the comments…

* Quote taken from The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

Yes­ter­day I was researching/browsing inter­est­ing and inven­tive print ads on the inter­net and came across this one:

If you can’t make out the print, it says “Extremely Fast Inter­ent” right next to the brand name and logo of what I can only assume to be some kind of ISP.

Clever, right? But will it drive sales?

Prob­a­bly not. And there’s two rea­sons for this:

1) No Call to Action

2) No sup­port­ing facts

Now, the call-to-action part is obvi­ous to any­one with any direct response copy­writ­ing expe­ri­ence what­so­ever. How do I find out more about this “extremely fast inter­net”? How can I tell if it’s offered where I live? In other words, how can I buy the darn thing, you’re sup­pos­edly offer­ing for sale?

If you want peo­ple to respond (usu­ally by buy­ing) it helps if you give them clear, easy direc­tions on how to do so. Sort of a no-brainer, that one is. But at the risk of draw­ing the ire of the DM crowd, I have to say that…

If I’m Inter­ested Enough, I’ll Find My Own Path to Buying

While I don’t want to dimin­ish the impor­tance of the CTA, I really think that the absence of sub­stan­ti­at­ing facts in this ad is, if any­thing, more harm­ful to its effec­tive­ness than the lack of any sort of Call to Action.  If you get me inter­ested enough in what you’re sell­ing, I’ll fig­ure out my next action on my own.  Google is great for that; I can just search “OI3 Netvi­sion” and see what comes up — IF, and only if, I’m inter­ested enough.

But I’ll never be inter­ested enough if you just show me the clever visual anal­ogy and think you’ve made your point. My nat­ural instinct in this sit­u­a­tion (really, anyone’s nat­ural instinct) is to assume par­ity. You say you’re fast, but you’re prob­a­bly no faster than my reg­u­lar inter­net provider. Clever ad, but it’s still an ad, mean­ing its mes­sag­ing is assumed to be self-serving bull­shit until proven otherwise.

Fac­tual Romance

And then there’s “Fac­tual Romance.” Fac­tual Romance is the term J. Peter­man came up with to describe his phi­los­o­phy towards prod­uct selec­tion and mer­chan­dis­ing, as used in this semi-famous quote:

“Peo­ple want things that are hard to find. Things that have a romance, but a fac­tual romance, about them.” — J. Peterman

And what I believe the man meant by this was romance bol­stered by some hard truth or fact that pre­vented the log­i­cal mind of the buyer from dis­miss­ing the romance as so much self-serving BS.  J. Peter­man can romance the Swaine Adeney Brigg umbrella as the “King of Umbrel­las” because it is, in fact, the umbrella of kings — the com­pany actu­ally has a Royal War­rant to pro­vide umbrel­las to the Royal Family.

Like­wise, it’s fine to romance the speed of Netvision’s inter­net con­nec­tion, but you’ve got to pro­vide a bit of fact to go with it.  How much faster is it than reg­u­lar DSL or the aver­age cable modem?  What does that mean in terms of down­load­ing a movie or talk­ing over a VOIP connection?

Imag­ine that ad with a big, bold, white font on the back of the com­puter screen pro­claim­ing “2X Faster than DSK.  Down­load High Def­i­n­i­tion movies in 3 min­utes or less.” Wouldn’t that make for a more effec­tive ad? Even with­out the CTA, it would at least get me inter­ested enough to research the company/claims, and maybe, just maybe, stick in the back of my mind, should I ever become dis­en­chanted with my cur­rent ISP.

Want an exam­ple of how to do this right? Check out this old Union Car­bide com­mer­cial for their high-tech insulation:

Yes, they’ve got the drama of the baby chicken. What a great prod­uct demo. But they also pro­vide lots of cool facts. Some stated plainly as facts, such as “it’s 25 to 100 times bet­ter than [any other insu­la­tion] we’ve had before.”  And some are stated in terms of con­crete, almost dra­matic exam­ples: “One inch of super insu­la­tion wrapped around a rail­road tank car can keep liq­uid helium at 420 degrees below zero all the way from New York to Los Angeles.”

The drama keeps you riv­eted to the screen in antic­i­pa­tion, and the facts let you know that it’s not BS. You leave con­vinced. And that’s what it takes for your ads, too — regard­less of whether you’re using print, radio, TV, or Web-based advertising.

Or, as my busi­ness part­ner, Roy Williams puts it:

• “Details and specifics add cred­i­bil­ity. Names! Dates! Prob­lems! Solu­tions! Any thing less is an unsub­stantiated claim and will be sum­mar­ily dis­missed by the customer.”
• “Always sat isfy the left brain when you can. It holds veto power when the right brain wants to do some thing that is obvi­ously dan­ger­ous or fool­ish. No, I’m not say­ing that logic trumps emo­tion. I’m say­ing only that lazy writ­ers too often try to work the heart because it’s eas­ier. They’re unwill ing to do the research and hard work required to sat isfy the mind.”

A few week’s back Jef­frey Eisen­berg sent me the fol­low­ing video clip taken from mtvU’s show, Stand-In. And after watch­ing the clip, I instantly con­sid­ered it a must-watch for those inter­ested in sto­ry­telling and/or online mar­ket­ing.  [If you don’t see the embed­ded video right away, give it a moment. Or watch it over at mtvU.]  At any rate, here it is:

For those of you who don’t have the two min­utes to watch the video, here are the main takeaways:

1) Every Scene Has To Be Entertaining

You can’t get away with a scene that’s noth­ing but expo­si­tion, or that flat out isn’t enter­tain­ing, isn’t funny, etc., as a shock­ing amount of your audi­ence sim­ply won’t stick around past the end of that scene.  Like they say in jour­nal­ism, “The eas­i­est thing in the world for a reader to do is stop reading.”

2) Your Sto­ry­line is Bro­ken If the Words “And Then” Fit Between Any Two Scenes or Beats

So if you say, “this hap­pens AND THEN this hap­pens” you’ve got a bro­ken sto­ry­line. There’s no causal­ity in the plot­ting of things. Instead, between every scene you should have either a “there­fore” or a “but,” as in, “this hap­pens and THEREFORE this hap­pens,” or “this hap­pens BUT (instead of the expected out­come) this hap­pens (caus­ing complications).”

That’s a HUGE insight baked into a very easy to under­stand and action­able for­mat. And it’s also, in my opin­ion, THE “hid­den in plain sight” key to mak­ing your Web­site ana­lyt­ics action­able.  So let’s trans­form this from “story” lan­guage to Con­ver­sion Rate Opti­miza­tion language:

Every Page Should Have a Per­sua­sive Pur­pose for your Visitors

If any page on your site is non-persuasive or irrel­e­vant to your vis­i­tor, you run the very real risk of los­ing that vis­i­tor; the eas­i­est thing in the world for your Web­site vis­i­tor to do is to exit your site, as an inter­net full of com­peti­tors is no far­ther than a Google search or a click away.

So if your home page or prod­uct page or about us page is filler con­tent that you’ve just kind of put up because you’re “sup­posed” to have a ____ page, you’re vio­lat­ing the “every scene has to be enter­tain­ing” rule, which I’d trans­form into “every page has to per­form a per­sua­sive role for the vis­i­tor who links to it” rule.

That means that you need to know:

• WHO is com­ing to your site,
• WHY they’re com­ing (i.e., what they’re hop­ing to accom­plish), and
• WHAT they need to know, feel, and believe in order to convert.

Then you have to fig­ure out the kind of mes­sag­ing and con­tent you need for each page that will ade­quately inform, impassion/reassure, and per­suade your vis­i­tors into tak­ing the next step towards con­ver­sion. Because if you don’t know what a page is sup­posed to be doing for a cus­tomer, how do you expect to tell when it’s fail­ing to do it?

So that’s Rule #1 for Online Per­sua­sion and Action­able Ana­lyt­ics. Here’s rule #2:

Your Ana­lyt­ics Should Tell A Story — And YOU Have to Sup­ply the “There­fores” and “Buts”

You need to look at the behav­ior of your vis­i­tors as indi­cated by the ana­lyt­ics and then attempt to explain the behav­ior. Except that you can’t let your­self get away with “and then” link­ages.  Peo­ple don’t land here, “and then” go to this page, “and then” go to that page, “and then” leave.  You have to use “Because” and “But” linkages.

For exam­ple, if you see peo­ple going straight from the home page to the gallery page (on say, a site for a pro­fes­sional Web devel­oper), and you then see them leave, you’re job as the ana­lyst is to use your knowl­edge from Rule #1 in order to con­struct a rea­son­able hypoth­e­sis of WHY peo­ple are leav­ing.  Some­thing like:

“You have a bunch of peo­ple com­ing to the Home page of your site after search­ing “Pro­fes­sional Word­press Design” BECAUSE Google’s organic search results direct them to your index page. BUT, your Home page doesn’t talk about Word Press above the fold.  In other words, a vis­i­tor has to scrolled down below the fold in order to get con­fir­ma­tion that they are in the “right place” for “Pro­fes­sional Word­press Design.” THEREFORE these vis­i­tors look to get con­fir­ma­tion of your Word­Press Blog-designing skills on your gallery page. BUT these vis­i­tors don’t yet real­ize that lots of Web­sites (rather than just blogs) are now cre­ated on Word­Press and not just blogs. THEREFORE, when they only see pro­fes­sional look­ing Web­sites on your gallery page, this CAUSES them to con­clude that you don’t really offer what they’re look­ing for (“Pro­fes­sional Word­Press Design) and to then leave your Website.”

The Bridge Between Ana­lyt­ics and Action Is a Testable Hypothesis

This exer­cise will not only causes you to try to explain observed vis­i­tor behav­ior (as seen through your ana­lyt­ics), but it will also high­light your assump­tions while pro­vid­ing your with a set of rea­son­able hypoth­e­sis for opti­miza­tion. You can now try to test a vari­ant of the home page with “Word­Press Devel­op­ment” mes­sag­ing placed above the fold. And/or you could split test hav­ing a sep­a­rate “Blogs” gallery, or at least a “blogs” sec­tion of your gallery.

Now, if the tests are pos­i­tive, you’ll have some indi­ca­tion that your hypoth­e­sized moti­va­tions were cor­rect.  And if the tested changes turn out neg­a­tive, you’ll have learned some­thing about the pre­sumed moti­va­tions or con­cerns of your vis­i­tors.  And the elim­i­na­tion of a false assump­tion can be every bit as valu­able as a lift in con­ver­sions. Now you can go back and try to fig­ure out what the real moti­va­tion is.

And that’s the key to mak­ing your Web ana­lyt­ics actionable.

Before the big iPhone unveil­ing today, if some­one told you that they had real pic­tures of what the next gen­er­a­tion of the iPhone looked like, and they just showed you some pho­tos, totally devoid of con­text, would you believe them?

Of course not. The claim lacks all credibility.

You can’t pos­si­bly look at pho­tos like that with­out wondering:

• How could you pos­si­bly have got­ten these, given how pas­sion­ately Apple pro­tects their upcom­ing projects?
• Even if you DID get legit­i­mate pho­tos, why aren’t Apple’s lawyers send­ing you a cease and desist letter?
• What evi­dence do I pos­si­bly have that these are real, and weren’t sim­ply photoshopped?
• And so on.

In short, the con­text is all wrong, so we just know the pho­tos are fakes (or “artists ren­di­tions,” at best). But what about this video?

Some­how, this video fooled a lot of peo­ple and cre­ated quite a stir before it was proven to be faked. But why? Why is this video so con­vinc­ing when the typ­i­cal “leaked” pho­tos aren’t?

Con­text.

The video pro­vides a con­text which pre­emp­tively answers all of these credibility-killing ques­tions and more.  Accord­ing to the non-verbal sto­ry­telling in the video, the guy who made the video acci­den­tally dis­cov­ered an “unre­leased” page to Apple’s Ger­man Web­site, and took a screen record­ing of it.  That’s how he got the pho­tos, that’s why Apple can’t stop him, because they’re the ones who put the con­tent on the Web, etc.

More impor­tantly, the very style of the Web pages cre­ated by this hoaxster con­vinces us.  When we look at these “acci­den­tally dis­cov­ered” Web pages, they look so faith­ful to Apple’s own design aes­thetic, and the pic­tures of the phone look so faith­ful to the rumors about the new iPhone (curved, metal back, larger screen, thin­ner, etc.) that we tend to believe that maybe the video is for real.

Mak­ing This Dynamic Work for You

The truth is that we ALL rely on con­text every day for almost every deci­sion we make.  Manip­u­late con­text and you manip­u­late people’s per­cep­tions and, ulti­mately, their deci­sions, too:

• If you’re an ice cream par­lor and you sim­ply put can­is­ters of sam­ple spoons up on the counter, that con­text will cue peo­ple to ask for free tastes, with­out any other change required.
• An HVAC guy who shows up in a corporate-branded truck and uni­form will look like he’s from a big com­pany, even if the com­pany con­sists entirely of him, his cell­phone, and that truck.
• Tell me you have the best food in the city, and I’ll be a lot more likely to believe you if you serve that food on linen table cloths rather than plas­tic trays.

Good fic­tion writ­ers know the impor­tance of this instinc­tively, which is why they go to such lengths to estab­lish the right pre­text for their big moments — they “set you up” and then “pay it off” later. Though I am absolutely not advis­ing any­one to hoax their cus­tomers or to adopt a conman’s mind­set, I am ask­ing you to think about the believ­abil­ity of the claims you make, and how the right con­text can cre­ate cus­tomer con­fi­dence that you might not cre­ate any other way.

So what con­text cues are you using now, and what cues should you be using going forward?