Truism #1:

Truism #2: If the transformational moment isn’t properly set up, and instead the writer just launches into high drama on the page, the scene won’t be believable and it will fall emotionally flat for the reader.

Here’s an example of this second truism from the movie, Zombieland:

***Warning – Movie Spoilers Ahead*****

Home Is a Pup Named Buck

There’s emotion on the screen, duly portrayed by Woody Harrelson, but it never really touches the audience.  The flashback, in fact, feels a bit off.  Who feeds their dog pancakes or lifts them up and bathes them like that?  But then again, Woody’s character is a bit “off,” so the viewer (or this viewer at least) let’s the disconnects slide.

And that’s the genius of this scene.  Because as the movie goes on and the audience gets tied up in the more exciting aspects of zombie bashing, they forget all about that disconnect until the writer springs this scene on them:

WorstThing

After watching that scene, it dawned on me that the audience wasn’t meant to feel emotion in the first scene: it was just the set-up for this second scene in a way that would keep the audience from “bracing” against the emotion.  Hence the “narrative misdirection” of the puppy flashback.

That undetected set-up makes all the difference because we, the audience, were taken in along with the Greg Eisenberg’s character, “Columbus.”  So we felt Columbus’s insight and empathy as our own. It transfered right from the screen to our chests.

Better yet, while the audience was caught up in the emotion of that scene, the writer set us up for this bit of dialogue:

WalletPics2

Brilliant, huh? We see the nihilistic loner confront his loss and then overcome his isolation.  And it feels real. In fact, the emotion and drama works quite well for an otherwise silly comedy.

Copywriting Techniques to Take Away From All This

First of all, the copywriting equivalents of these techniques probably require a “don’t try this at home, kids” style warning, because they are in direct contradiction to standard: “hit ‘em as hard as you can with a WIIFM Appeal and UVP statement right off the bat”-style copywriting advice.  Advice which I normally endorse as sound practice, by the way.

But these techniques and examples DO work when done right and are worth studying and thinking about.  So with that caveat, here’s what I have seen used:

1) Sometimes the indirect approach works better. As I wrote earlier, most copywriters want to go in with guns a’ blazin’, spewing high-voltage WIIFM and UVP statements along with emotional problem-agitation-focused copy.  But sometimes a slower start works to your advantage by allowing you to set-up your dramatic moments and power statements.

So long as your copy is interesting and is subtle in its set-ups, this indirect approach can massively outpull regular “reason-why” style copy. For example, here’s how the famous Wall Street Journal copy starts:

“On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college. They were very much alike, these two young men.

Both had been better than average students, both were personable and both – as young college graduates are – were filled with ambitious dreams for the future.

Recently, these men returned to their college for their 25th reunion.

They were still very much alike.

Both were happily married. Both had three children. And both, it turned out, had gone to work for the same Midwestern manufacturing company after graduation, and were still there.

But there was a difference. One of the men was manager of a small department of that company. The other was its president.”

With the tale eventually leading up to this power statement:

“The difference lies in what each person knows and how he or she makes use of that knowledge.

And that is why I am writing to you and to people like you about The Wall Street Journal. For that is the whole purpose of The Journal: To give its readers knowledge – knowledge that they can use in business.”

Can you imagine the fall off in response if the copywriter had skipped the set-up and just launched into the power statement?  Can you imagine the U.S. School of Music correspondence course deciding a straight offer would work better than the immortal opening of “They laughed when I sat down at the piano but when I started to play!-”

And then there’s this bit of direct mail masterpiece that continues to work so well a recent copy just arrived in my inbox today:

You look out your window, past your gardener, who is busily pruning the lemon, cherry, and fig trees…amidst the splendor of gardenias, hibiscus, and hollyhocks.

The sky is clear blue. The sea is a deeper blue, sparkling with sunlight.

A gentle breeze comes drifting in from the ocean, clean and refreshing, as your maid brings you breakfast in bed.

For a moment, you think you have died and gone to heaven.

But this paradise is real. And affordable. In fact, it costs only half as much to live this dream lifestyle…as it would to stay in your own home!

Dear ETR Reader,

I’d like to send you a FREE copy of a unique–and invaluable–report.

It’s called How to Retire in Paradise on $30 a Day. And it tells you about the best places in the world for retirement living.

You look out your window, past your gardener, who is busily pruning the lemon, cherry, and fig trees…amidst the splendor of gardenias, hibiscus, and hollyhocks.

The sky is clear blue. The sea is a deeper blue, sparkling with sunlight.

A gentle breeze comes drifting in from the ocean, clean and refreshing, as your maid brings you breakfast in bed.

For a moment, you think you have died and gone to heaven.

But this paradise is real. And affordable. In fact, it costs only half as much to live this dream lifestyle…as it would to stay in your own home!

Dear ETR Reader,

I’d like to send you a FREE copy of a unique–and invaluable–report.  It’s called How to Retire in Paradise on $30 a Day. And it tells you about the best places in the world for retirement living.

Again, imagine how much less effective the straight offer of “Retire in Paradise on $30 a Day” would have been. No set-up, no emotional punch.

And while I’ll be the first to admit that readers are more suspicious of set-ups and more time sensitive than ever before, the continued use of this e-mail proves it still pulls.  Trust me, if the direct mail superstars of Early to Rise had tested something better, they’d be using it.

2) Reference your prospect’s “photo in a wallet” symbolism to leverage otherwise unavailable emotions. Woody Harrelson’s character, Tallahassee, wasn’t planning on helping rescue the two girls. He needed to be convinced. But rather than launch into a rational argument, or a straightforward WIIFM-style appeal, the “Columbus” character clothed his appeal in the talismanic image of Tallahassee’s only keepsake from his lost son.  And it worked.

I guarantee you that your prospect’s likely have a “wallet picture” type of mental image, some symbol, keepsake, or event that powerfully embodies and evokes their emotional stakes.  If you wish to give your copy greater emotional impact, find out what that talisman-like symbol is, and create mental images that take advantage of that symbolism.  Examples of this abound, but perhaps the most famous is Michelin’s tagline:

Before this Michelin ad, no one really cared about small quality differences between tire brands. The “wallet picture” imagery Michelin employed changed all that.

So while these techniques probably aren’t for beginning copywriters, they are worth thinking about. They’re worth practicing.  And – if and when you nail it – they’re worth using.

Would you trade your wedding ring for an exact replica?

It’s a question I sometimes ask audiences.  Not surprisingly, hardly anyone admits to indifference in the matter.

More commonly, the emotional attachment measures in the thousands of dollars, which is what most people say they’d need to be paid before swapping the ring they were married in for a perfect replica.

Dismiss this as mere sentimentality at your own peril.

The man (or woman) who admits to NOT valuing his original wedding ring over a replica gets shunned. The same thing happens to the man who would willingly wear the clothing of a serial killer. Most of us would refuse to don Jeffrey Dahmers cap, even if it had been previously washed and sanitized. No matter how unscientific, arational, and even “silly” our repulsion is – regardless of how much it represents “Magical Thinking”  -  you’ll still find that:

• The vast majority of people won’t willingly wear a piece of clothing worn by an evil man, and
• Those who WOULD wear Dahmer’s clothing deeply offend our sensibilities and provoke our immediate distrust.  They creep us out.

What does all that tell you?

Shared values run deeper than rationality. Way deeper. As Richard Weaver writes, “…logic depends upon the dream, and not the dream upon it… logic processes rest ultimately upon classification, that classification is by identification, and identification is intuitive.”

We identify objects as tainted or sacred at an intuitive, emotional level. At a place were our reasoning is powerless to touch.  A place where the principles of magic reign supreme over the laws of science. At the very place where we make our buying decisions.

And for marketers, that means 2 things:

1. You can’t expect a rational explanation to communicate a shared value that’s held at that intuitive, emotional level.
2. You’d better understand the rule sets behind the “magical thinking” our emotional and lizard brains engage in if you hope to move beyond mere rational explanations in your advertising

Case In Point: Columbia Sportswear’s Tough Mother

First, some background on Columbia Sportswear’s former CEO and now Chairman of the Board, as taken from the inside flap of her book:

“When a heart attack claimed Gert Boyle’s husband in 1970, the forty-six-year-old housewife and mother of three found herself at the helm of Columbia Sportswear, a small outerwear manufacturer in Portland, Oregon, that was struggling financially. With no business experience whatsoever, Boyle was faced with the challenge of running Columbia, which had been founded in 1937 by her father — a Jewish immigrant who had fled Hitler’s Germany. Boyle and her son Tim persevered, turning a company that in 1970 had forty employees and less than $800,000 in annual sales into the leading seller of skiwear in the United States, with more than 2000 employees and over a billion in annual sales…”

One of the turning points on this incredible success story was (surprise!) a change in advertising message.

Prior to the Borders Perrin & Norrander marketing campaign that billed Columbia’s CEO, Gert Boyle, as “one tough mother,” Columbia’s ads emphasized how their sportswear wasn’t just designed, it was “engineered.”

A perfectly rational approach to building value for the product that failed in the marketplace.  Customers rationally compare spec sheets and engineering functionality, but they identify quality and an affinity for an object at a much deeper emotional level. These are magical elements.

What Columbia needed was to convey their passion for no-nonsense product design in a way that “worked” with the laws of magical thinking – that took advantage of our notions that blood is thicker than water, that essences really exist, that shared values take place at level far deeper than “good business practices” and engineering labs.

Fortunately for Columbia, their next, legendary ad campaign did exactly that by focusing on Gert Boyle’s Tough Mother approach to product design and the mother-son relationship between Columbia’s CEO and President:

People saw those ads and believed.  They believed that Gert really cared, fervently and violently, about the products her company manufactured. They believed her interest in building clothing that protected the wearer went way deeper than just normal, rational business desires to “engineer” a better product.

As Ma Boyle puts it:

“The impact of the ads was almost instantaneous. Sales quickly increased and I was surprised when strangers came up to me on the street and asked if I was the ‘tough mother.’ Better yet, the image created by the advertisements took hold.  Instead of seeing us as just another outerwear company, our customers thought of us as the company where the cranky and crotchety old broad made sure that they were getting a good product at a fair price.  The bottom line was that what we were really expressing was that we were human… People relate to us because they believe there is a person at Columbia who really cares.  And the best thing about our ads is that they are true. I do care.”

After seeing the commercials, customers liked Columbia better.  Their affinity for Gert rubbed off (the phrase is telling, is it not?) onto the products.  And sales soared, leading to one of the clearest success stories from a national “image-based” campaign since the Marlboro Man.

What about you?

What are you irrationally committed to?  What values do you cling to even when it costs you – even when it makes no business sense at all?

Does your advertising even mention them?

And are you communicating those values rationally or magically?

P.S. If you really want to be inspired, check out some of Columbia’s old TV Ads.  I’ve always liked the one with the zamboni, myself ; )

OK, having just “experienced” the picture for yourself, read Rodin’s description of his statue:

“What makes my thinker think is that he thinks not only with the brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils, and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs; with his clenched fist and gripping toes.”*

Now go back and take another look at the pic. Did you notice new things? Did you find yourself noticing new details on the statue’s nostrils, lips, back, and toes, while giving silent affirmation to Rodin’s words?

That is the mark of great product description: using words to guide the senses and shape the experience.

And the more you sell premium products and experiences – the more you sell the distillation of passion – the more you had better tap into the power of copy to direct the imagination of the reader.

The Science and Art of Great Product Description

Lest you think the Rodin example was nothing but a parlor trick, I thought I’d cite some hard science and proven psychology behind this technique, while also giving some helpful how-to hints:

1) Vividly imagining the future reduces impulsive choices

And the reader’s imagination will trend towards the future – unless YOU direct the imagination of the buyer! I may be tempted to buy your product, but the more I imagine the future rewards and pleasures of sticking to my diet, sticking to my budget, and so on, the less likely I am to buy.

But if the copy directs my senses to vividly imagine the pleasures and benefits of ownership/consumption, I’ll be moved to buy rather than abstain.  Great copy recreates the enthusiast’s experience in the mind of the prospect.  Mediocre copy just describes the product.

2) Translating a product into an experience de-comodifies your product

“If it wasn’t hard, everybody would do it. The hard… is what makes it great.”  Tom Hank’s character said that about baseball, but it applies just as well to premium products and services.  Making a significantly better product requires extra effort and passion.  Often in the service of squeezing out an extra 10% refinement in 10-20 different areas.  And that’s the problem… at least from a copywriter’s standpoint

See, small refinements in a lot of areas don’t translate well in a spec-sheet head-to-head comparison, where the cheaper alternative ends up looking like a 90% as good for half the price alternative.  And that’s why good copywriters lean so heavily on “creation” stories, which project the manufacturers passion onto the reader, and make those relatively fine distinctions seem like all-important differences. Gary Weeks gives a first class example of this in the copy he created for his Weeks Rocker.  There’s a reason the man’s able to sell $1600 rocking chairs over the internet.

3) Curiosity and Education are every bit as powerful as a great deal

When you describe an experience that’s foreign to the reader, you create curiosity – a desire in the reader to “see” for herself. To taste the nuances of flavor in a well crafted wine, or to feel the texture and feedback that only the combination of first-class drawing paper and high-quality charcoal can provide.  Or even to “see” their PPC campaign with new eyes – eyes capable of sifting out the hidden motivations of prospects/searchers and the flawed messaging in the ads.

For many, learning, discovering new experiences, and expanding one’s scope of competency are as seductive a prospect as any straightforward value proposition. Gary Vaynerchuk rode this wave to fame and fortune. And two Maine Lobsterman have taken this kind of value-added offering to a new level, and made themselves into millionaires in the process!  You can too.

4) The Joshua Bell Effect

Asking people to recognize true merit and quality on its own, deprived of any cues or prompts, is simply asking too much from your customers and prospects.  Kind of like asking you to have recognized all those details about Rodin’s The Thinker without his quote as a prompt.

Perhaps the most striking modern-day example of this was an experiment done by the Washington Post wherein Musical Prodigy Joshua Bell played his stradivarius in the subway to see how many would recognize his musical excellence, absent the concert hall cues and media fanfare normally surrounding his performances.  The result: he was ignored by everyone but children. Even music snobs need cues to recognize talented, virtuoso performance.

As a copywriter you’re job is to set the stage for your virtuoso product/service and to provide prospects with the cues they so desperately need to recognize real quality when they see it.  When you tell prospects where to look, how to look, and what to expect, you’re not only enticing their imaginations, but helping those soon-to-be customers to fully recognize the differentiators your client has already baked into the product. Which both sells more product on the front end AND improves customer satisfaction on the back end, too.

Does your product copy merely describe the product?

Or does your copy predict the prospect’s experience of the product, helping them to see with their ears and anticipate all the pleasure and benefits that are sure to come with ownership?

“

- Cowboy Wisdom as quoted by Warren Buffet

Your website, e-mail, and direct mail copy all suffers from a flaw that kills reader belief.  And there’s no real way to prevent that problem – only workarounds and partial solutions.

It’s the nature of the copywriting beast to suffer the fate of the barber telling people they need a haircut – the vested interest of the speaker works against his believability.

And that’s why stories come in so handy.  While the right story won’t prevent the problem, it will overcome it with a double whammy of psychology capable of crushing this credibility gap like an empty beer can. Here’s why:

1) Flattery works, even when you know the flattery isn’t sincere.

Or so says recent psychological research titled: “Insincere Flattery Actually Works“.  Even though we like to think that we’re too smart to be influenced by insincere flattery, our intellectual understanding of the intent to persuade doesn’t stop the emotional influence of the message.

And the same also extends to a story that flatters the listener.  A story that flatters your prospective customers’ sensibilities, suspicions, judgements, or aspirations will emotionally influence them, even when they recognize your vested interest in telling the story.

This stands in sharp contrast to bragging, which never works regardless of how sincere it might be. So why does most copy brag instead of flatter? In the words of Bryan Eisenberg, why is there so much we-we copy?

While emotional-directed advertising has historically performed twice as well as purely rational ads, the key to making those ads work is to focus on the buyer’s emotion, not the seller’s.

2) We unconsciously “see” things through the eyes of the story’s protagonist

When listening to a story, we understand the narrative by picturing the experience as it occurs to the protagonist.  When we hear a story, we identify with the protagonist, not just visually, but emotionally. That’s why we love happy endings, and why watching an authentic tragedy leaves us feeling devastated and drained.

Put these two psychological principles together with the right kind of story and you’ve got persuasive dynamite.  Here’s a perfect case study demonstrating just how effective this can be:

Beckley Automotive’s 30% Sales Jump

My friend and colleague, Chuck McKay, works with a 15-bay repair shop in Des Moines by the name of Beckley Automotive.  Steve Beckley’s shop works on the European Imports he loves and drives himself: Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Land Rover, Mini, Volkswagen, Saab, and Volvo (along with Acura, Lexus, and Infinity).

For years Steve has purchased lists of European Import owners in Des Moines and has used multiple post card mailings to remind owners that someone in town understands all the ins and outs of the cars they drive. Over the years those cards have payed off handsomely.

But the cards suffered from the “barber telling you you need a haircut” problem: it’s just not very credible when anyone brags about how great they are – especially when they’re out to get your business.

So Chuck advised Steve Beckley to do two things with his mailings:

1. Stop appealing to European Import owners and start appealing to owners of specific brands.  In the words of Chuck: “A Range Rover owner doesn’t think of himself as a ‘European Import Owner.’  He thinks of himself as someone who drives a Range Rover.  Speak directly to him.”  In other words, appeal to emotion& self-identity.
2. Stop speaking like an advertiser and start communicating more like a good friend.  Start telling stories.

So to Steve’s immense credit, he took that advice, ditched his old copy, and wrote awesomely effective stories for each of the European marques he works on.  Stories like this one he sent to Mercedes owners:

Wouldn’t You Feel Smug?

Can you just imagine how self-satisfied you’d feel upon reading this story if you owned and drove a Mercedes Benz? You might just feel downright smug after reading that story.  And even though you’d know, in the back of your mind somewhere, that Beckley Automotive was trying to flatter you with that story, it wouldn’t matter: you’d still walk away a heck of lot more likely to call them for your auto work.

Indeed, that was exactly the case for recipients of these story-based postcard mailers, whose increased patronage of Beckley Automotive led to a 29.9% increase in sales this March over March of last year.

And that’s the power of smug.

It’s also a great way to sell a man a haircut when all the world can see that you’re a barber.

P.S. Chuck McKay does a lot more than advise clients on messaging and copy.  He’s also a superb Business and Marketing Strategist who manages to combine those rare-enough-on-their-own traits of clear thinking, small business savvy, and creative execution.  If you’re looking to grow in spite of the current economic climate, do yourself a favor – check out Chuck’s blog and drop him a message.

]]> http://www.jeffsextonwrites.com/2010/04/the-power-of-smug/feed/ 3 http://www.jeffsextonwrites.com/2010/02/the-asymmetry-of-trust/ http://www.jeffsextonwrites.com/2010/02/the-asymmetry-of-trust/#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:12:47 +0000 Jeff http://www.jeffsextonwrites.com/?p=1797 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:

1. Negative reviews can still have an outsized impact.
2. 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

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?

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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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?

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?

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…

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.