Aristotle tells us that persuasive appeals rely on logos, pathos, and ethos, aka logic, emotion, and character.
Unfortunately, most textbooks and teachers act as if they are three separate and exclusive appeals, as if you must choose one over the others, or as if they are essentially unrelated to each other.
This is totally and fatally wrong. Here’s the right way to think of these things, as quoted from Dr. Jonathan Shay’s essay, Aristotle’s Rhetoric as a Handbook of Leadership [emphasis mine]:
Aristotle shows us that leader has three interrelated means of achieving his fellow citizens’ trust:
- Appeal to their character (éthos)
- Appeal to their reason (lógos)
- Appeal to their emotions (páthos)
These three are interrelated, not separate, because the goals of action arise from the troops’ ideals, ambitions, and affiliations—their character. Reason concerns the means to reach those goals. And the emotions arise primarily from their cognitive assessments of the real-world improvement or deterioration of their ideals, ambitions, affiliations, and how fast they are changing in the world.
Aristotle has useful comments on the leader’s need to build trust through appeal to the troops’ character and emotion. He even explains how it is possible to be “too rational,” losing the trust of those you are trying to lead. (See Garver’s, “Making Discourse Ethical: Can I Be Too Rational?”)
Now, to be fair, Dr. Shay’s essay also examines the importance of the leaders Ethos as perceived by his followers/audience, but this is the aspect of ethos most everyone else already focuses on, with lots of solid content on incorporating speaker/brand ethos into your copy. What most people gloss over when discussing ethos is the importance of the audience’s ethos.
Why is this so important?
Because you want to appeal to prospective customers’ best image of (and aspirations for) themselves. Then show how your advocated course of action corresponds with that image.
And when you do this, you’re not ignoring pathos or logos, either. The emotional appeal in your copy will stem from the gap between the reader’s ideal image of themselves and the current (often frustrating and disappointing) reality. While the logos will both demonstrate the credibility of your proposed solution while also demonstrating your inherent respect for the audience. To quote a bit more from Dr. Shay’s essay:
The centrality of rational explanation (“argument”), rather than coercion or deception, shows the leader’s respect for the troops, who are his or her fellow citizens. You can’t separate respect from good will… The persuasive power that comes when a leader appeals to reason comes more from the degree to which it provides evidence for the leader’s respect toward the troops than from the power of reason to compel assent, or having compelled assent, to guide or restrain behavior.
Or as I like to say, Facts need Drama and Drama needs Facts.
So, while I fully recognize that the character or ethos of the leader/speaker/brand IS indeed incredibly important, I’d suggest that this is so only in relationship to the ethos of the audience.
Start with the audience’s self-identity first, and the rest will fall into place.
“…it is James Thurber’s Walter Mitty who, in the space of a single afternoon, is the commander of a navy hydroplane, a life-saving surgeon, an expert marksman, and an intrepid army captain. Walter Mitty isn’t crazy. He just has trouble convincing the outside world of who he is inside.
‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ is a favorite American story because it speaks to the Mitty in each of us. Who among us has never played cowboy, astronaut, princess, or nurse? Like Don [Quixote] and Walter, each of us has a secret life, and it is silly to pretend that our outward choices are not influenced by the people we are inside.
In we are to insist on intellectual honesty, we must urge Don and Walter to abandon their childish dreams. But if we would sell our products and make two customers happy, we will speak not to a tired old man and a henpecked husband, but will eloquently address the needs of a chivalrous knight and an intrepid army captain.
It’s called ‘Advertising.’”
Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
In my last Practical Tactical Tuesday post, I mentioned that features might be dramatized to show something other than immediate, objective benefit, that features might be dramatized, instead, so as to tie the product into the values and self image of the prospective customer. When you choose this other path, you end up advertising to the felt needs of your prospects’ inner Walter Mitty, rather than to their actual, real-life needs.
SUVs vs. Minivans
Examples of this abound, but here’s one we’re all familiar with: the millions of mothers driving around in SUVs instead of minivans. They chose the more expensive SUV despite the fact that SUVs cost more, guzzle more gas, are more likely to roll-over, and just generally aren’t as well suited to the actual commuting demands of most moms. By all objective standards, the minivan (or, maybe even the station wagon) is the better choice.
But does the average mom see herself as a minivan-driving Soccer Mom?
So why would she want to drive a vehicle that’s stigmatized by such an unflattering stereotype? Well, quite a few of these moms wouldn’t. So they opted, and continue to opt, for a vehicle that better fits their inner image while retaining most of the seating and cargo capacity they really need. Hence the cross-over SUV craze.
But I’m far from picking on mom’s or SUV drivers — I’m saying we ALL have at least a few areas of our lives where we pick the objectively sub-optimal choice in order to chose the product or service that better fits our inner values and identifications.
2 Ways of Making Decisions
Copywriters need to keep in mind that we have two ways of making decisions: one is the self-interest, pros and cons model, and the other is the identity model:
- The Self-Interest Model asks: “What’s In It For Me?”
- The Identity Model asks: “What Kind of Person Am I and What Would That Kind of Person Do In This Situation?”
Best of all, your copy doesn’t have to exclusively choose one over the other. In fact, a blend of the two is usually your best option, when you’re fortunate enough to have options. But if you’re really hankering to see an almost pure use of identity in ad copy, go read a J. Peterman product description or two, and you’ll see this style of copy at work.
29
Mar
Do the HOMEwork too!
When it comes to Advertising, Marketing, and Persuasion, are you a student of what’s come before you?
- Do you know the history?
- Do you try to learn from the greats by reading their books and studying their works?
- Do you look at all of it? Or just a narrow slice?
If you didn’t answer Yes to the main question and the first two bullet points, you can stop reading now. Really. There’s no hope for you.
But I find that quite a few serious copywriters get hung up on the third bullet point.
These copywriters have studied the direct mail lineage — Hopkins, Caples, Collier, Schwartz, Halbert, Kennedy, et al — but haven’t looked at any of the giants of Madison Ave style advertising beyond, maybe, Ogilvy. And vice versa for broadcast advertising guys who’ve never studied Direct Response marketing.
Or they’ve never thought that the Theatre Arts or Rhetoric or Comedy Writing or Sales Training or even say, Comic Books had anything to teach them.
In other words, they dismiss stuff that’s not directly in their field or that they don’t “get” right away. Big mistake.
So today’s lesson: be a student of the game — the whole game. Learn what’s great from the past. Study it. Note that “study” doesn’t mean passively reading it. When in doubt, figure out what other great talents that you DO like see in the “greats” that you don’t get.
And here’s two great links to get you started on the path:
- This New York Times article on Ed McCabe [hat tip to The Escape Pod for turning me onto this article]
- This Invisible Ink post on learning from legends you don’t “get” at first contact.
P.S. That NYT article mentions the same Volvo ad I used as an example in my last Theory Thursday post and I managed to snag a screen shot of it. Here it is:
A bit of common wisdom for lawyers goes something like:
“When the law is against you, argue the facts. When the facts are against you, argue the law. When both are against you, call the other lawyer names”
Great advice, but how does this translate into advertising terms?
Ah, to get that, you have to go back to the Rhetorical advice from which this common wisdom came. And when it comes to Rhetoric, I always look to Jay Henrichs, author of Thank You for Arguing and Word Hero. Here’s what Jay has to say in chapter 12 of Thank You for Arguing:
“If facts work in your favor, use them. If they don’t (or you don’t know them), then…
Redefine the terms instead. If that won’t work, accept your opponents facts and terms but…
Argue that your opponent’s argument is less important than it seems. And if even that isn’t to your advantage…
Claim the discussion is irrelevant.”
Redefining Terms Read more
15
Mar
Visual Storytelling
In case you’re not up on your entertainment news, Nicollette Sheridan, of Desperate Housewives fame, is suing her former boss for wrongful termination and battery.
Lots of off-stage drama has ensued during the court proceedings, and lots of industry insider information has been revealed as well.
This LA Times piece does a great job of summarizing the action to date, but one quote from that article struck me as particularly important for copywriters:
“A mid-level writer testified that she earned $648,000 for one season’s work, eliciting groans from a spectator’s gallery packed with reporters earning substantially less for putting verbs after nouns.”
That quote thwacked me upside the head because of it’s mistaken assumption. Truly, the reason that TV writer earns several times more than most journalists* is because her job DOESN’T involve “putting verbs after nouns.”
If you can find that kernel, the core of what that product is, so that when you talk about it, no matter how you talk about it, people respond and say “Yes! That’s right!”, then if you talk about it in a strong, interesting, memorable way, they say “Yeah that’s right, I’m gonna buy it.”
- Jim Durfee (co-founder, Carl Ally Inc.) as quoted in Art & Copy
Every now and then an ad comes along that really nails the true essence of the product. Ads that achieve both maximum impact and dramatic sales success. Think “Got Milk.”
This Clorox ad belongs in that category:
Think about it, bleach isn’t really about just getting things clean. Soap does that well enough. Nor is it about merely disinfecting things, although that’s closer to the mark. Bleach is about making things “ritually clean.”
When a kid poops in the tub and you bleach it, you not only cleaned the tub of poop, you removed whatever imaginary, psychological contagion might have been left over. That’s how we think of bleach — it’s beyond clean, beyond merely disinfected, and taken all the way to pristinely, immaculately, safe. And, yes, there’s a whole lot of Magical Thinking involved in this.
The essence of Clorox isn’t just what it does (Pine Sol and Lysol also disinfect), but encompasses as well what we unconsciously believe bleach does, as well as the full context of it’s use and role in our lives.
Remember that when creating advertising for your products.