18
Feb
You’re thinking of buying something or some service and an acquintance says, “Don’t do it; I bought that/hired them and it was a total waste of money. I got screwed.”
Do you trust that acquaintance enough to let them sway your decision? Generally speaking, yes.
But if you’re on Amazon, looking at an interesting book, and you see a handful of 5-star reviews, many claiming that this is “The Best” book on the subject, do you trust the positive reviews?
Well, it depends on how well written and substantiated the reviews are, etc. But generally speaking, no, you don’t really trust them. All else being equal, we tend to give far less credence to positive reviews than negative ones.
Why we trust negative reviews more than positive recommendations
Basically, we grant others authority in the matter of their own personal experiences. If they say their favorite color is blue, we believe them. If they say they had a bad experience with such and such a product or service provider, we believe that too, because they are speaking from their own personal experience in that one situation.
You don’t have to be an expert on vacum cleaners to know that the one you bought has failed you miserably. And your experience alone is often enough to sway someone from buying that brand.
But a general recommendation is different. The ability to credibly make a positive recommendation requires more than just personal experience with a given product. For a recommendation to be persuasive, the reader must have faith in the reviewer’s overall judgement and in their field-specific knowledge.
You can tell me you liked a specific type of ergonomic chair, but your experience alone isn’t enough to make me want to buy that chair because there are a lot of good chairs out there and I’m not looking for good – I’m looking for the best my money can buy.
In order to persuade me that the chair you bought is the best chair for my money, you have to have more than just your experience with the chair. You need to have broad knowledge and expertise (or at least experience) with the top ergonomic chairs on the market so that you can compare multiple chairs and competently pick out the best performing chair for the money.
To believe and act on your recommendation, I’d need to know:
- that your use of the chair is similar to mine,
- that you’ve already tried a bunch of chairs, and
- what your criteria were for selecting the chair you did.
All this over and above your personal experience with the chair you eventually bought and recommended.
See the difference?
A Social Media “Friend” isn’t necessarily a friend
A lot has been made recently about studies purporting to show that people trust their friends less and experts more. It’s well worth looking at the study, but be careful about applying this too broadly.
First of all, what the study is really saying is that people trust anonymous reviews less than recommendations stemming from an authoritative source. Well, duh!
Does that mean reviews and testimonials have lost importance? Hell no. Keeping in mind what we just discussed, here’s what I believe it means:
- Negative reviews can still have an outsized impact.
- Positive reviewers need to substantiate their unbiased nature and subject matter expertise.
Sean D’Souza is ahead of the curve, as usual
What this really reminds me of is Sean D’Souza’s advice on Testimonials, advice that clearly understood (and masterfully leveraged) this phenomena several years ago when his product first came out. He used to give the PDF away to members of his newsletter, but the product he’s selling now for $40 is well worth it, in my humble opinion – and I’ve sampled more than my fair share of copywriting books, info-products, and guru advice 
Universally acclaimed as one of the best business books of 2007, Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick is also one of the all-time best communications books you can buy.
So the anticipation surrounding their next book is palpable – as was my excitement at receiving a reviewer copy!
But frankly, what made Made to Stick great wasn’t so much the raw content (though the content was awesome) as it was the incredibly practical and cohesive framework that the Heath Brothers used to organize that content into a method for transforming messages.
That famous SUCCESS framework made the material stick. And building on that framework, the format of the book itself made for an easy and enjoyable read due to the numerous before and after examples (or “clinics” as they called them) and illustrative anecdotes.
Those same virtues take center stage in their newest book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard:
- Elegant and practical mental framework? Yup
- Lots of Before and After style “Clinic” Sidebars? Check
- Incredibly engaging and illustrative anecdotes? You betcha
The Rider, The Elephant, and The Path
So having hyped the mental framework and structure of the book, I’ll give you a quick and dirty explanation of it. The Heath Bros make three points right off the bat in introducing their new metaphorical framework for change:
- We’re fundamentally schizophrenic about change; our hearts and minds often disagree. If you’ve ever set a 2nd alarm clock across the room to force yourself out of bed and prevent snoozing, you know exactly how much our conscious minds and emotional desires can be at odds.
- Relying on your conscious mind to self-supervise change simply doesn’t work. Conscious attention is a precious resource that is quickly exhausted when used to overcome the emotional desires of our heart.
- Environmental cues often have a profound effect on our behavior and our ability to change – shockingly so. In fact, more so than most of us would ever guess
Borrowing a metaphor from Jonathon Haidt, the Heath Brothers bring these three points together by calling the heart an Elephant, the conscious mind the Rider, and the environment the Path.
And within this framework, making hard changes successful requires 3 broad strategies:
1. You have to Direct the Rider
In this case, the rider is the logical, conscious part of you and/or the people you are hoping to change. Now, this much isn’t a revelation, but most people do manage to get this part wrong.
They get it wrong by expecting the elephant rider to be able to muscle the elephant into making the change against the elephant’s inclinations/will. Not gonna happen – at least not for long. Self supervision is a limited resource that’s too-quickly used up by brute force-of-will efforts.
So how does one more intelligently direct the rider?
- Overcome Paralysis Analysis by Finding the Bright Spots. Our conscious minds are really good at finding problems and analyzing them. Unfortunately, this kind of negative analysis often works against us when it comes to making difficult changes. But we can better direct our conscious minds by using tools such as appreciative inquiry and positive psychology. These tools direct us to look for what’s working, rather than what’s wrong. Find out what’s working in spite of the negative obstacles and analyze why.
- Make goals actionable by scripting the critical moves. Whether desired behavior is easy and clear or just a little bit harder and more complex makes a HUGE difference when it comes to change. Getting Things Done is almost entirely based on this premise – you have to move from inactionable to-dos and projects to well defined, do-able, next actions. ”Eat healthier” isn’t a next action. ”Switch from whole milk to 1% and save yourself 5 bacon strips worth of saturated fat every time you drink a glass” is very much actionable.
- Point to the destination by providing people with an imaginable, concrete, BHAGs. You want to put the rider’s power of analysis to work on figuring out how to get to a motivating destination or goal, rather than using analysis to resist the change.
2. You have to Motivate the Elephant
The Elephant is the emotional, more instinctual part of you and/or the people you’re hoping to change. If your rider wants to get up early to go running, it’s your Elephant that would much rather grab an extra hour’s worth of sleep.
Most people see the Elephant as the problem, but in the vast majority of successful change efforts, the Elephant was engaged as a driving force. Here’s how Switch suggests you do that:
- Find the Feeling. As the Heath Bros say it, “…the sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but rather SEE-FEEL-CHANGE. You’re presented with evidence that makes you feel something…something that speaks to the Elephant.” Grab their hearts and their minds will follow. User-testing is often times as much about creating empathy for the end-user as it is about getting new usability data.
- Shrink the Change. It’s easier to tackle big problems if you’ve already got a bit of momentum on your side, so make the change feel doable by emphasizing the momentum that’s already there or by setting up quick initial wins to create that momentum. My pet store gives us a free bag of dog food for every 8 we buy from them, but according to Switch, they’d be better off making the cards say every 10 bags and giving away 2 free punches in order to create that initial momentum; a Carwash ran an A/B test on completion rates for cards using that technique which showed a 79% improvement in completion rates.
- Grow Your People. People make choices either on a consequences/cost-benefit model or from an identity model. The first model is familiar to any copywriter familiar with WIIFM. Here’s how the second model operates, “In the identity model of decision making, we essentially ask ourselves three basic questions: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? What would someone like me do in this situation? Successful change efforts work with and further develop the changees’ identities. And this works in sports as well as football, as this great article on the New Orleans Saints proves.
3. You have to Shape the Path
This section of the book introduces Stanford Psychologist Lee Ross’s Fundamental Attribution Error, which states, “people have a systematic tendency to ignore the situational forces that shape other people’s behavior,” which causes us to “attribute people’s behavior to the way they are, rather than to the situation they are in.”
In contrast, successful change efforts look to change the situation in order to change behavior, rather than blaming the changee. Here’s how Switch recommends we do that:
- Tweak the Environment. Reduce friction for desired behavior. Design situations, tools, procedures, forms, etc. so that it’s easy and intuitive to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing. Usability, user-centered design, and Website Optimization folks should all raise a “hell yeah” at this one. Yes, it works offline too. And so does going offline when it comes to changing your environment to spend more time concentrating on work and less time on twitter, FaceBook, and eMail
- Build habits. Create instant habits through “action triggers.” Mentally plan the action you want to take and the trigger for that behavior and you can almost triple your success rate from simply planning the behavior. In other words, saying, “I’m going to hit the gym everyday after my 2:00 meeting,” can be three times as effective as planning to “start working out tomorrow.” For more complicated habits, using checklists can help ingrain, script, and even trigger desired behavior. And you can also build triggers into the environment as well as make use of environmental cues in your messaging.
- Rally the herd. In other words, get social proof working for you rather than against you. Public display of performance can help with this. So can clustering the chief evangelists and proponents for change so that they can see the commonality of their perceptions and beliefs.
- Keep the switch going. Encourage and celebrate steps taken toward the goal in order to build momentum. Get a flywheel effect going if you can. Make it easy for customer praise to reach front-line employees.
What I Love About This Framework
As a Persona-based copywriter and Website Optimization specialist, I often ran up against what I tend to call the industry-standard (or sub-standard, really) understanding of Website Optimization, which was the misconception that improvement came solely from tweaking the online environment: changing this button, streamlining that form, implementing different cart and checkout procedures, etc.
And while there are certainly gains to be made from those kind of optimization efforts, often times the major gains had more to do with motivating the Elephant and appeasing the Rider (in other words with messaging and persuasion) than in simply tweaking the functionality of the site.
A panhandler probably won’t get more donations by using a larger collection bucket or by setting up a debit-card swiper for donations. He will get more donations by creating a more powerful message about his need.
In fact, Finding the Feeling, using Identity-based Decision Making, and Scripting the Critical Moves are some of my go-to ninja tools when it comes to making the big gains for clients – the kind of gains that elude the slice-and-dice-and-multivariate-test-it-all crowd.
But I’ll leave discussion of those techniques for follow-up posts. For now, just go buy the darn book, will ya?
Technically, augmented reality is confined to iPhones, iPhone competitors, and other advanced DARPA-like experimental gadgets. But that’s an idiotic techno-geek understanding of the phenomenon.
In truth, culture is the ultimate augmented reality.
As most people understand it, augmented reality technology overlays information onto the visual landscape being viewed through the smart phone/head-up display/gadget. Think of it as a real-time mash-up of info overlayed onto whatever you’re currently viewing.
But if augmented reality adds additional info onto what we normally see, it’s probably worth asking if we ever really see anything without “augmentation.”
Do you see a BMW as just a car, or do you read much more into those flying propellers? Does a person wearing a harvard sweatshirt come across merely as someone wearing a sweatshirt, or do the cultural implications of Harvard University “augment” your view of the person wearing that sweatshirt?
From this perspective, all branding is an attempt at augmented reality. So is all education and all culture. And perhaps on of the more amusing amalgams of all three would be Foster’s “How to Speak Australian” commercials:
I’m almost surprised Fosters hasn’t already come up with an iPhone augmented reality app loosely based around the premise of the ads.
Yes, “augmentation” happens all the time and often blinds us as much as it aids. Once taught that an apple is an “apple,” we quickly pass through the 2-year old’s fascination with it to see the apple as “only an apple” - to the point where it takes all of Cézanne’s painterly talent to rescue apple from “apple” and get us to see the thing sans “augmentation.”
And so it is with copywriting. Good copy often approaches subjects from an unusual perspective so as to “trick” the reader into seeing what’s really there – to overcome the dysfunctional cultural cues that cause us to dismiss things from consciousness.
A more humorous and superficial example of augmented reality at work within copywriting would be this bit of copy from Best Made Axe:
“When you own a good ax, you see the world differently. Scrap wood in the yard? Kindling. Ugly table? Kindling. Overdue library book? Kindling. Spouse? Someone who would love a beautiful bespoke ax this holiday! Best Made Axes are the deluxest woodcutters out there, with hand-finished hickory handles and fine-grain steel heads. They even come in custom wooden crates. (Kindling.)”
But the far more serious and powerful example would be the actual “augmentation” of perception that Best Made Axe has pulled off within its customer base. After exposure to Best Made Axe, these customers no longer see an axe as a utilitarian tool. They now see an axe (or at least a Best Made Axe) as a talisman, symbol, design element, and entrance ticket or initiation into a more self sufficient, virtuous, and (dare I say?) manly, world. Hence the company’s ability to sell out full production of $250-$500 axes. Axes whose technical/functional merit is likely no better than most $100 axes.
Yes, Seth Godin is right: starting a profitable brand in today’s world is very much the same as starting a “tribe.” What his readers often fail to grasp is that starting a tribe requires the creation of a worthwhile sub-culture. And that means creating a (functionally useful) augmented reality for tribe members/users of your product.
Wanna-be marketers fail because they don’t select an “augmented” reality that will help the tribe members - A reality that is more true than the one it’s supposed to replace or add to. Instead they hope to induce a delusion or infatuation around their product for purely selfish reasons. But a cult of personality is not a tribe.
So the question for you is: are you offering the world a better culture and greater insight, or are you merely peddling a self-serving delusion? Are you helping us see more of what’s really there, or are you hoping to add “the light that never was” onto a substandard product?
If your answer is the former, might I suggest that learning increases resolution? That your copy might provide more than a little learning disguised as artful fun, or serve to convey a bit of that high-res user experience. And that blogging/content marketing is often the best way to augment your readers’ reality over time.
The bottom line: augmented reality isn’t an iPhone app; it’s the ultimate marketing app.
Are you using it in your marketing?
It’s a rare thing when I take exception to one of Seth Godin’s posts. But his last post on “Too much data leads to not enough belief” had me quibbling.
Of course, there IS a lot that I agree with in the post: namely that people respond to a story and a tribal affiliation far more strongly than they will ever respond to a spreadsheet. But I guess from a Web perspective, the idea of granularity and data as a hindrance to belief just doesn’t square with my observations.
What I’ve tended to see is the following:
- People go to the Web to check things out. They’re specifically researching a purchasing decision and are expecting more data from a Website than from an ad or even a direct mailer. When you don’t provide that data, people get suspicious.
- Content rich Websites tend to convert better than content poor sites. That doesn’t mean the data should take center stage or should replace a well-crafted story, just that those people who want to drill down on specifics, well, they want to be able to drill down on specifics. And they’ll find those specifics from somewhere, even if it’s from an ill-informed opinion on a forum somewhere.
- The mere presence of (and access to) data is often enough to provide confidence. Data can sometimes be like a privacy policy, most people just want to know that it exists and that you’re confident enough to show it to them without really wanting to examine it in any great detail. The mere fact that you have the information and have provided access to it is often enough to engender buyer confidence.
Can you imagine Newton Running being unwilling to show you the science behind their running shoes? What would that do to your confidence if they wouldn’t show you (or didn’t have any) data from their tests?
Again, I may not need to study their graphs or watch all of their videos or look up their patents, but the very fact that they’re passionate enough to get into the nitty-gritty details with me – the fact that they do actually have data – makes me far more willing to believe them and to buy a pair of their shoes than if they wanted me to just accept their product/idea on faith.
I also think that passionate proof is an essential element of any high-margin or premium product’s Website, which is one of the main reasons I wrote my critique of Best Made Axe’s lack of proof.
To me, data isn’t a hindrance to passionate belief – it’s proof of it. How can you be passionate about an idea, design, or product unless you’re willing to put it to the test and show off the results?
What’s Your Experience
Of course, I’m always willing to hear thoughts from my readers. What do you guys and gals think? What’s been your experience? Have you ever had a situation where less would have been better when it came to proof and substantiation?
Think of travelling through the web via hyperlinks as a form of teleportation. Now think of teleportation. Specifically, if you really were teleporting what would be your main concerns?
1) You’d want to make darn sure you KNEW where you were going
2) Upon “landing,” you’d want to ensure you arrived in the right place
Those are two of the most important things you can learn about crafting and structuring your hyperlinks, and they translate as:
- Word links so people can figure out where the link will take them, and
- Match your headlines, pictures, and page content with visitor expectations created by the hyperlink they clicked on to get to your page. Let them know they’re in the right place.
And yet these are also the two most frequently violated “rules” of hyperlinking. E-mails frequently have call to action links/buttons that take you to a page that utterly fails to follow-up on the offer presented in the e-mail. Call to action buttons meant to take you to a product page are often mislabeled as if they will place the item in your cart. And so on.
Master these two basic lessons and you’ll have learned more than 90% of most Web users, and even most Web developers and (sad to say) more than a few copywriters.
And yet, those are just the basics. Another, perhaps more sophisticated, way of looking at this is to say that every link represents a promise and every click represents permission.
The Promise
The promise comes from the expectations created by the hyperlink’s wording or label. You’ve essentially promised the visitor that, if they click on the link, they’ll be teleported to the kind of content they expect. Which means that, on an emotional level, visitors will feel a site is “dishonest” if a link “tricks” them by teleporting them someplace unexpected or undesired. Ouch!
More fundamentally, this also means that you, as the copywriter, have to craft links (and content) that offer forth promises compelling enough to motivate visitor clicks. There is no gravity to an online conversion funnel; nothing will “pull” visitors through to the next click or micro-conversion except their own motivation based on promised benefits.
In other words, you can’t take visitors where they don’t want to go. You can’t force the conversation. You have to offer to talk about what the prospective customer wants to talk about – what SHE finds important. Ignoring a topic of conversation by not providing the appropriate link (or by failing to provide the right content on the other side of a link) is like a car salesman refusing to talk about the price of the car when asked. It kills credibility and trust.
The Permission
The permission is what you get when a visitor clicks on your link, and permission is a copywriter’s best friend. Why? Because the right hyperlink construction can give you permission to speak about things that you’d never get away with otherwise. Here’s an example:
You’re crafting an About Us page that focuses primarily on a company’s history while throwing in a few credibility increasing features like a picture of the actual office and the team of employees, etc. But what you might really want to do is openly brag about all the home-runs the company has had – except that you feel a self-promoting tone might be “against brand.”
So you simply use self-deprecating link that talks about “our brag sheet” (or something similar) that links to exactly the kind of self-promoting copy you knew you couldn’t get away with on the About Us page. Why? Because any reader who clicks on a link to your Brag Sheet has mentally given you permission to brag. Following that click, you can brag without looking like an egocentric jerk.
Similarly, you could link to that same kind of content with an “Our track record” link placed most anywhere else on the site. Again, by clicking on “our track record” clients have given you permission to talk, at length, about the company’s successes. Normally you’d want to talk about What’s In It For the Customer and how you can help them, but the link provides permission to ignore WIFFM for a bit while you build credibility.
To give you another analogy, this link permission for something like “Our Track Record” is kind of like a date explicitly asking: “So what about you? What’s your story?”
And if you ponder that analogy, especially in light of context, I’m sure you’ll come up with even more lessons about linking, persuasion, and online conversations
In fact, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that last analogy. Tell me what you came up with…
I never would have guessed that a 30-second commercial could be structured on the same storytelling beats as a typical 90-minute movie.
And yet that’s exactly what the late Blake Snyder demonstrated in his last book, Save The Cat Strikes Back.
If you’re not familiar with the Save the Cat series of screenwriting books, let me explain. Blake Snyder breaks the typical movie down into 15 dramatic “beats,” that also coincide with traditional 3-act story structures and Joseph Campbell’s monomyth/hero’s journey cycle.
If you’re interested in learning more, you can download all 15 beats on the “Blake Snyder Beet Sheet” along with a diagram of how the beats line up with a basic 3-Act Structure over at the official Save The Cat Website.
At any rate, it’s important to keep in mind that these are the structural beats for feature-length movies – that’s what makes it so cool and semi-mind-blowing that they also work for a 30 second commercial.
So here’s how Blake broke down the dramatic structure of a Pledge Commercial, using these same structural “beats” that he uses to teach scriptwriting:
“The Day I Discovered Pledge
Opening Image – A downcast housewife. Home a mess. Dust everywhere. This “before” snapshot depicts the Set-Up, and even a Stasis = Death moment, for it looks like things won’t change.
Catalyst – Then our hero discovers….. Pledge!
Debate – “Should I use it?”
Break Into Two – Yes!
Fun and Games – With a spray can of her B-story ally, the delighted home maker flies through the house, dust vanishes like magic, tabletops glow. And the “false victory” at Midpoint shows she can live like this all the time. But there’s a problem….
Bad Guys Close In – To have the “new,” she must give up the “old.” Can our hero face the truth of what she must sacrifice?
All Is Lost – What “death” has to occur? What “old idea” must be gotten rid of? What is the “All Is Lost” moment of our Pledge commercial? Why it’s dropping Brand X in the trash! It’s the furniture polish that our hero used to use that is now obsolete.
Break Into Three – Having dispensed with Brand X, the synthesized pair finish up the housework with delight and…
Final Image – Dressed in her tennis outfit, racket in hand, a newly together housewife walks out the door, leaving the primally named Pledge atop a very shiny table to guard her home.
The End”
So what’s the point of all this? Three things:
1. To reinforce the importance of scripting your online videos.
That pledge commercial probably had very little dialogue, but the messaging was still scripted as intensely as a feature-length film. And the same thing occurs with the vast majority of high-conversion product videos and viral videos.
More importantly, if you can and should script an interactive video, shouldn’t you also “script” visitor interaction with your Website? Surely you’ve given thought to what happens on this or that page, but have you considered the overall “persuasive arc” that would take place as the visitor moves through your site?
2. To reinforce the importance of Story in your online messaging
We may claim to be “just the facts” kind of guys and gals, but we’re not. We wouldn’t be human if we were. As a persuasive technique, Story rules, even in:
- something as seemingly static as a photograph,
- something as short as a headline,
- or something as important as your opening “hook.“
3. To recommend Blake Snyder’s books to you if you haven’t read them.
His Save the Cat series is well worth the read, regardless of whether or not you have any aspirations toward writing film scripts. Just check out his Amazon reviews for his first and second books and you’ll see.
Welcome Back from the Holidays
Oh, and I also wanted to welcome everyone back from the holidays. Hope all of you enjoyed some much-deserved time off. Thanks for reading my stuff. I’m resolute in my commitment to bring you as much great material as possible in the coming year.
P.S. If you have any suggestions for topics or anything you’d like to see covered, feel free to e-mail me.
22
Dec
Conversion Optimization consultants, more than a few copywriters, and most SEO experts used to look down on Flash-based sites.
Flash sites weren’t well indexed by search engines and had a bad habit of turning a pull medium into a not-so-interactive video. Oh, and their content was often more gratuitous than persuasive in a flash-animated splash page sort of way.
Most all of that has changed, and we’re really starting to see interactive video come into its own, as is the case with Eloqua’s new promotional/lead generation video. If you haven’t seen it yet, you really should take a few minutes out of your day to take a look. And maybe spend a few more minutes to poke around different pathways and responses.
Another great example is Boone Oakley’s “YouTube Website,” as demonstrated by their home page that I’ve embedded below:
But make sure to look past the technology to see the copywriting.
Yes, you read that right: I said copywriting. That video – including each and every one of it’s forked paths – was planned out, scripted, and storyboarded. The video is cool; the messaging is brilliant.
Viewed through that lens, you’ll notice that most of the core persuasive points remain the same regardless of whether you click on “Marketing” or “Sales” or “Executive.” What changes is the focus on this or that feature set, the videos ordering of taking points, and the perspective in which some of the material is covered. Brilliant. And a technique that Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg pioneered with text-and-hyperlink-based sites.
So while I love the video and I think it represents new opportunities to inject personality and charisma into interactive “conversations,” keep in mind that technology has to support messaging, and the core interactivity involved is no different than that of regular old embedded hyperlinks. Proper persuasive planning is still required.
Never forget: you practice a queer trade, making you an odd duck by default.
If you’ve ever had someone totally miss-read a blog post and walk away thinking the opposite of your intended message, chances are you forgot what an odd duck you are.
As a writer, chances are that you’re more at ease with the idea of creating meaning through interpretation of events, and of critically examining a narrative for multiple meanings, contradictions, open endings, shades of grey, nuances, etc. And you likely bring those same skills to bear on everything you read.
Most People Don’t Read The Same Way You Read
That level of analysis may be second nature for you, but it’s a lot of unpleasant work for most people, who generally don’t think to put that effort into 99% of what they read. When you forget that, you write something that’s bound to be misunderstood.
So here’s what to do about it…
The Straightforward Grammar of Business Stories
In order to tailor your writing to a general audience and to avoid miscommunication, you’ll want to intentionally structure your story the way most readers think about and remember stories. The message can be unexpected, but the narrative structure used to deliver it shouldn’t be.
And when it comes to business stories or parables, most non-writers think in terms of three nodes:
- Hero,
- Villain/Obstacle, and
- Turning Point/Triumph.
Complex, rich, satisfying stories may contain more moving parts, but business parables shouldn’t. If you’re telling an anecdote or fable to make a point, you’ll want to keep the narrative structure simple. Who’s the hero? What’s he want? And who the hell is getting in his way?
If your main point or general story structure doesn’t fit neatly within this structure, people will misremember or warp your story in order to fit the framework, often to the point of changing your intended meaning.
The Unwritten Expectations For Each Storytelling Node
In addition to simplifying your story to those three nodes, make sure you tell the story in such a way as to meet audience expectations for each of the nodes:
- Regardless of what writing instructors and English teachers may have taught you, in a business story the hero should always be the guy you talk about the most in the telling of the story. If you talk too much about someone other than the hero, you’ll likely confuse your audience.
- The villain should be, well, villainous, even if the villain is just an obstacle. Make sure your audience can see the dastardly pain and gnashing of teeth your villain/obstacle causes.
- Dramatize the turning point for the hero. Don’t be subtle about it; novelist can paper over a momentous decision or a-ha moment for literary effect, but a business parable can’t afford that kind of subtlety. And make sure the victory follows immediately after the decision point. Most importantly, whatever point you’re trying to convey had better be made and “proved” during the turning point and victory.
- Remember that everything in the story will either get lumped in with the hero or the villain – they (or it) will inevitably be remembered as either helping the hero achieve victory or working against the hero, with no room for neutral or conflicted parties, characters, or elements.
If you complicate the structure, or bury your point outside of that framework, or confuse people by talking too long about someone other than the hero, the reader will likely walk away thinking something totally different than your intended point.
Here’s a textbook example of what can go wrong:
What Happens When You Violate the Structure
Roy Williams used a Monday Morning Memo as a sort of character sketch, contrasting the difference between faith in, well, providence, in the largest sense of that word, and a blind slavery to “the sure thing.”
Specifically, he wrote about how Joe Weppner’s underdog bout against Muhammad Ali for the heavyweight title inspired Stallone to write the script for Rocky. And, more importantly, he wrote about the incredible faith it took for Stallone to turn down a Studio’s offer of $400,000 for the script alone in favor of $25,000 and the chance to play the part of Rocky.
But Roy spent most of the Memo setting the stage by talking about Weppner and his singular chance at beating the odds. Not until the last few paragraphs does Roy introduce Sylvester Stallone and his gutsy move to turn down the “sure bet” of $400K for the chance to play the part of Rocky.
So when Roy closes his Memo by contrasting Weppner’s short-sighted slavery to “the sure thing” – about how Weppner took a $70,000 flat fee instead of a 1% cut of the movie’s gross that turned out to be worth $8 million – to Stallone’s faith, well, most readers missed the point of the memo.
How do I know? Because Roy’s MMM from two weeks after that opens with:
I recently wrote a Monday Morning Memo… about how Chuck Wepner’s fight against Muhammad Ali provided the inspiration for Sylvester Stallone to peck out the screenplay of Rocky, a low-budget film that, against all odds, won the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture in 1976. As expected, I was flooded with emails from people sharing stories of friends and family who “like Wepner” valiantly did their best in the face of insurmountable odds.
Funny thing is, that wasn’t the point of the memo…
Roy’s Story Structure Violated the Grammar of Business Parables
Weppner was the main character in the story, and yet Weppner was neither the hero nor the villain. Sylvester/Rocky was the hero. Daunting odds and the temptation of the “sure thing” was the obstacle.
So where does that leave Weppner? That leaves Weppner to either be confused with or associated with the Hero, or to be lumped in with the Obstacle/villain. Business parables leave no room for a complicated and conflicted third character.
So even though Weppner was both the inspiration for Rocky AND the guy who gave into the temptation of the sure thing, his image as the real-life inspiration for Rocky was what people took away from the Memo – even though that was the opposite of the intended point.
Fix Your Stories by Sticking to The 3-Node Structure
Do this by ensuring that:
- The Hero is clearly the hero. Make sure he gets the most description and “time in front of the camera.” If Roy had set-up with the image of Stallone refusing to sell-out his dream rather than presenting the image of Weppner as a gutsy and dogged fighter, they’d likely have been a lot less confusion.
- The Villain or Obstacle is presented “onscreen.” If your villain isn’t tangible, the reader will likely substitute a tangible villain for the one you intended. In Roy’s MMM the villain/obstacle was the temptation to sell-out to the sure thing. But selling out isn’t easily visualized and there was no Mephistophelean villain to embody selling out. So most reader’s likely substituted “the system” as the villain, with the system acting as the embodiment of conventional wisdom and “the odds.” The system may not be visual, but everyone’s been beaten down by it at one point or another, and everyone knows what it’s like to long for a magical moment of beating the odds. So readers paired Wepner the boxer and Stallone the actor in their battles to beat the system/odds.
- Turning Point & Victory: While the victory for Stallone immediately followed on his turning down the $400K, there really isn’t as much of an emotional turning point for Weppner. He lost out on $8 Million, but we have no idea how badly he did or didn’t need the money. Or how much he did or did not like being a liquor wholesaler in Bayonne, LA.
I’m not suggesting that you “talk down” to your audience or that you only tell simplistic stories. I am suggesting that you become aware of this framework so that the business or copywriting stories you tell end up making the point you hope them to make.
Tom Wanek, author of the Marketing Beyond Advertising blog and former e-commerce entrepreneur has just published his latest book: Currencies That Buy Credibility
As a fellow Wizard of Ads partner, I had the good fortune of seeing him develop the material for this book over the last few years and of strong-arming him into an interview on his incredibly original approach to Signaling Theory and marketing.
The transcribed Question and Answers are below:
Q: First, let me say how much I love the 6 Currencies framework for thinking about credibility builders. And in thinking about your framework, it occurred to me that the indispensable element in all the currencies – the common thread – is the idea of vulnerability. You’re credibility is directly tied to how vulnerable you make yourself by your willingness to place one or more of those 6 currencies on the line.
Have I gone off on the deep end here, or is vulnerability really the key element behind the currencies – the idea that you have to make yourself vulnerable before a cynical audience will take you seriously?
TOM: [Laughs] No, you haven’t skipped off the deep end just yet.
Vulnerability is certainly another way to look at it. In the book, I discuss resources that you can risk or spend to purchase credibility. And obviously vulnerability is an inherent part of risk.
Jeff, you’ll also appreciate that my inspiration for the six currencies comes from Signaling Theory – which observes how animals communicate using bizarre behaviors and physical traits. Biologists commonly refer to the “cost” of sending a particular signal. And in many cases, this requires that animals place themselves in vulnerable situations.
Q: Would you draw a parallel between this and a post by Michele Miller on Marketing to Women? Michele said that although women WANT connection, the way to allow connection to develop is to PROVIDE women with control. In other words, give her control by making yourself VULNERABLE to her, and then she’ll form a CONNECTION. Do you see that message as being parallel to Currencies that Buy Credibility?
TOM: Yes, Michele is recommending that business owners invest the currency of Power and Control. And her recommendation is spot on.
It seems that most business owners want to control the customer relationship. But this controlling behavior breeds the habitual corporate-speak of hype and chest-thumping clichés that consumers have come to loathe and reject.
In the book, I provide two case studies that demonstrate how companies boost their credibility and authenticity by investing Power and Control into their customer relationships.
Q: Although everything in marketing is astonishingly context dependent, if I admit that going into this, can I ask you a non-contextual question? What currencies seem to work better than others? When it comes down to brass tacks and you’re employing these strategies on behalf of your clients, are there some techniques or currencies that are your “go to” stuff? Or do you use them all about the same?
TOM: Generally speaking, the more you risk, the more believable your message becomes.
But as you know, consumers do not make decisions in isolation. Rather, they compare the differences between their available options.
For these principles to truly work, your credibility investment must reinforce your message. And you won’t be able to purchase credibility unless you stay true to yourself. In other words, if your business can’t support what you’re signaling, then don’t send that particular signal. Redirect your resources.
Q: Are there some currencies that are over-used? Are there some that are under-used? If so, might there be an advantage to “cornering” the market on their use?
TOM: No, I believe all currencies are underused.
That said, we do see material wealth invested most frequently in the form of warranties and guarantees, but this does not mean the other currencies are any less effective. Again, context is everything.
Thanks so much, Tom. I can’t wait to get my hands on the book.
I hate fixing household plumbing problems.
It’s not that plumbing is hard or even all that unpleasant, really. And that’s the infuriating part: the fact that plumbing would be – should be!?! – downright easy if you just didn’t have to:
- negotiate way-too-tight spaces,
- avoid smacking your hand against hot-enough-to-burn-you stuff,
- overcome rusted bolts,
- make yet another trip to the store to get a needed part, tool, etc.
- deal with the worry of making a costly mistake
Honestly, what kind of shade tree mechanic or home fixer-guy hasn’t bitched about one of these things? It’s the luxury of being a shade-tree mechanic or home-fixer guy.
But real professionals don’t have that luxury.
True pros know conditions are never ideal. And they know their reputations and paychecks rest on results achieved in far-from-ideal conditions.
Real plumbers expect to fix plumbing problems while on their backs, staring up at the underside of a cabinet, and working with rusted bolts. That’s how it is in the real world, and so they train for it. Because no one pays you to be an imaginary plumber in a make believe world where the pipes are all out in plain site.
I half-wanted to draw out the analogy between this and copywriting, advertising, and marketing, but I won’t insult your intelligence. Just let me ask you:
Are you a real professional at your chosen vocation?
Do you train yourself to handle far-from-ideal conditions and situations?
Or are you too busy dreaming of the perfect client/product/competitive market and bitching about the marketing equivalents of rusted bolts and tight spaces?