Jeff Sexton Writes

Braving the demons of the deep in search of great copy

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"Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature... what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action... if you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being."

~William Bernbach

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I’m guest post­ing on Copy­blog­ger today with a post on the impor­tance of specifics.  But this post goes beyond the com­monly stated “specifics are more believ­able than real­i­ties” advice, and looks at WHY most writ­ers intu­itively grab for the gen­eral and the abstract over the spe­cific (hint, it has to do with fear), and HOW to over­come that incli­na­tion by focus­ing on dra­matic staging.

If that sounds inter­est­ing to you, you should check it out over at Copy­blog­ger.

But be, forewarned: before using specifics to stage drama, make sure you’re ready to stand out in the mar­ket­place, uncamoflu­aged and in all your polar­iz­ing glory.

“Social Media,” “Brand Touch­points,” and “Trans­parency” have become promis­cu­ous and, well, down­right slutty lit­tle buzz­words in today’s world. To the point where one almost reflex­ively judges a mar­keter using them to be a bit of whore himself.

But would you ever expect those same strate­gies to come from a big-time TV adver­tis­ing firm? From back in the 90s? Straight outa the mouth of an adver­tis­ing leg­end who cre­ated 3 of the Top 100 Adver­tis­ing Cam­paigns of the Cen­tury, and two of the most potent and admired polit­i­cal ads, since, um, ever?

Well, here’s a video of Hal Riney talk­ing about the launch cam­paign he cre­ated for Sat­urn. Skip ahead to the 56 sec­ond mark and see if you can’t hear the man describe exactly these kinds of new-school strategies.

A Quick and Dirty Transcript

And for those of you who who’d rather just read a tran­script, here’s what the man said:

“But our job isn’t to do tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials. Our job is to solve prob­lems. And it may be that tele­vi­sion is the answer, but it prob­a­bly isn’t the only answer, and there are other ways to think about things… And…and our answer was to find ways to make peo­ple like this com­pany. And that took the form of let­ters that we wrote to con­sumers and a thou­sand other things besides tele­vi­sion commercials.

So we did everything…

… and we, and we got involved in a lot of things like… like color. What kind of color — what do we call the col­ors, you know, Santa Fe Sun­set, or what? Well, how about Red?

All you had to do was to look at every­thing Detroit did and just do the oppo­site. And, and that’s vir­tu­ally what we did. We guided the com­pany through all of that and it was extra­or­di­nar­ily reward­ing to find out that this kind of hon­esty and straight-forwardness and integrity that we tried to main­tain, actu­ally worked.”

A Break­down of (just some) New School Strate­gies Employed by Saturn

Well just look at all these no sh*t, new-school brand­ing strategies:

• Per­sonal, mailed let­ters = social media.
• Orga­niz­ing plant tours and owner get togeth­ers (not talked about in this inter­view, but vital parts of the cam­paign) = Social Media
• Let­ting peo­ple see how the cars are built = transparency
• Hav­ing a no hag­gle pric­ing pol­icy = transparency
• Mak­ing the “thou­sand other things” match up with the brand promise and adver­tis­ing = transparency
• Rely­ing on cus­tomer advo­cates and Word of Mouth = Buzz Mar­ket­ing / Tribal Branding
• Skip­ping out on the falsely exotic paint names, like, “Cheyenne Sun­set” in favor of the more con­ver­sa­tional, authen­tic color names, such as “Red” = speak­ing in an authen­tic voice = transparency

But What About Saturn’s Branding?

As you may have noticed, this inter­view with Hal Riney is fea­tured as an extra from a doc­u­men­tary on adver­tis­ing called Art & Copy (highly rec­om­mended, by the way). And in another scene from that movie, Jeff Goodby and Rich Sil­ver­stein (for­mer employ­ees of Hal Riney’s) dis­cus their famous “Got Milk” cam­paign. Here’s a rough para­phrase of some of what they said:

The pre­vi­ous milk cam­paign was “Milk: It Does a Body Good,” which showed ath­letes doing stuff, like sprint­ing a 100 yard dash and then down­ing a glass of milk. And that didn’t work because it wasn’t the truth about milk. No one guz­zles milk after work­ing out. That’s not how or when we drink milk.

In con­trast, the “Got Milk?” cam­paign worked because it reflected the essen­tial truth about how and why we drink milk, and it did it by focus­ing in on the gen­uine moment of need.

This is a bril­liant strat­egy and one that was mem­o­rably dra­ma­tized in all of the Got Milk TV cam­paigns, start­ing with the very first one:

Tell the Essen­tial Truth About The Product

So let’s just start with that, shall we? You have to tell the truth about your brand.

As a canon­i­cal case study of this dynamic, Avis Rental Cars couldn’t say they were num­ber 1 because, well, they just plain weren’t. And when Avis tried to adver­tise as if they were num­ber 1, they got clob­bered.

Yet once they ran their famous “We’re num­ber 2; we try harder” cam­paign, the adver­tis­ing worked. They told the truth about them­selves and their ser­vice: they admit­ted what the buy­ing pub­lic already knew (that they were #2 in the indus­try), an admis­sion that bought them instant cred­i­bil­ity, and then Avis used that cred­i­bil­ity to make buy­ers feel dif­fer­ently about what they knew (that being #2 kept them hus­tling harder than the com­pe­ti­tion) — and it worked.

So that’s point num­ber 1: Tell the truth about the prod­uct or service.

For Sat­urn, they told the truth about being a brand new car com­pany try­ing to res­ur­rect America’s pride in man­u­fac­tur­ing. About want­ing to build an hon­est car, to sell it for an hon­est price, and in an hon­est straight­for­ward fash­ion. This is in con­trast to car com­mer­cials typ­i­cal claims of supe­rior per­for­mance, lux­ury, pres­tige, engi­neer­ing bril­liance, or price — none of which would have rung true or worked.

Instead of mak­ing false claims about supe­rior per­for­mance, Sat­urn made an hon­est claim to virtue, which is often a more-then-acceptable substitute.

If you doubt this was really the strat­egy, take a look at this ad from the ini­tial launch cam­paign. There’s a clear line of virtue sym­bol­i­cally trans­mit­ted from the 3rd grade teacher, to the let­ter and pic­ture she sends to the plant, and then onto the car itself when the plant worker lit­er­ally puts that sym­bolic piece of virtue into the car. Watch it and see…

Tell Them What to Expect – And Then Live Up To It

Then there’s the other side of the Avis cam­paign, the one no one really talks about. And it’s a two-parter:

1. Giv­ing spe­cific ver­i­fi­able expec­ta­tions to the customer
2. Mak­ing darn sure the cars lived up to the promise.

Take a look at one of the orig­i­nal ads from that Avis cam­paign. Now count the num­ber of spe­cific, ver­i­fi­able promises made in it: no dirty ash­trays, worn wipers, etc.

Well, what no one really talks about is how Doyle Dane Bern­bach — the agency that cre­ated that cam­paign — insisted that Avis put the oper­a­tional sys­tems and man­age­r­ial pri­or­i­ties in place to ensure that the cars lived up to the adver­tis­ing.  As Bill Bern­bach put it: “It’s always a mis­take to make good adver­tis­ing for a bad product.”

And they weren’t kid­ding around, either.  Avis did a com­plete cus­tomer ser­vice over­haul, upgraded their fleet of cars, and ensured that each employee received a copy of new Avis ads in his or her pay enve­lope before each cam­paign was launched.

Few peo­ple talk about these things when dis­cussing the Avis cam­paign, but they are an undoubt­edly major rea­son the ads worked.

So what about Saturn?

Many of Saturn’s major brand promises cen­tered on the deal­er­ship expe­ri­ence, as dra­ma­tized with such aston­ish­ing bril­liance by this Hal Riney ad:

As long as the deal­er­ship followed-through on that expe­ri­ence, the ads would work. And that’s why Hal Riney makes a point to men­tion the let­ter writ­ing and the “thou­sands of other things” they had the deal­er­ships do to ensure brand integrity. My favorite touch from the com­mer­cial is set­ting the clock for the new owner – ahhhh

So why is this so impor­tant? Three reasons:

1. Specifics make your claim more credible
2. Spe­cific allow you to shape your cus­tomers’ expec­ta­tions
3. Specifics allow you to eas­ily ful­fill those expectations

With­out this strat­egy, most stores devolve into promis­ing great cus­tomer ser­vice, which isn’t believed and gen­er­ally results in noth­ing but greater com­plaints from cus­tomers who come in with heaven knows what kind of expectations.

The Adver­tis­ing Still Helps & We’re Still Tribal People

So what does this mean today?

Well, non-advertising com­mu­ni­ca­tion of the brand, through mul­ti­ple cus­tomer touch points and social media and all those grand new-school adver­tis­ing things ARE indeed important.

But only when aligned around an intel­li­gent, strate­gi­cally sound campaign.

Oh, and it still helps to have some old school mass media mus­cle dri­ving your essen­tial mes­sage out to the, um, masses.  Yes, Vir­ginia, dig­i­tal is cool and direct mar­ket­ing is cool, but mass media still kicks some major brand­ing ass when wielded effec­tively. And brands are still all about shared val­ues and tribes and per­son­al­ity — and rel­e­vancy (yes I’m not above using a slutty mar­ket­ing buzz­word or two ) — those are the make or break factors.

Peo­ple want to belong, Some­thing that Sat­urn and Hal Riney well knew…

P.S. For those of you who laughed at the “look at every­thing Detroit did and just do the oppo­site” line, you might enjoy this arti­cle on Counter Brand­ing from Roy H. Williams, another adver­tis­ing great, and my busi­ness partner.

Frankly, the chances are good that you’re squan­der­ing the very best brand­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties avail­able to you on your cur­rent Web­site.  Read on to find out why, and what you can do about it.

The Impor­tance of Micro-copy

It all started a few months back, when my friend and for­mer col­league from Future Now, Robert Gorell, told me about Hipmunk.com.  He wanted to talk about micro-copy and I was all ears.

Rob­bert believes (rightly) that the small snip­pets of copy that make up the pre­dom­i­nance of cus­tomer inter­ac­tion rep­re­sent a huge oppor­tu­nity for con­vey­ing “brand voice” — an oppor­tu­nity that’s usu­ally squandered.

For exam­ple:

• The copy you place on your order con­fir­ma­tion page and order thank you e-mail
• The phras­ing and design of your Website’s 404 page
• Your prod­uct or ser­vice names themselves
• How you group and cat­e­go­rize prod­ucts, along with the labels you apply to those categories
• How you title and label your forms
• Call to action verbiage

All of these are areas where com­pa­nies could take an oppor­tu­nity to care­fully break with the trite norms of the Web or of their indus­try and come up with some­thing dif­fer­ent. Some­thing reflec­tive of the brand per­son­al­ity. And all these remain fairly vanilla on the vast major­ity of Websites.

Hipmunk.com is an exam­ple of how to do it right

Instead of allow­ing you to only sort flights by air­line, num­ber of stops, or cost, Hipmunk.com also allows you to sort by “agony,” a com­bi­na­tion of flight dura­tion, num­ber of stops, and cost.

How cool is that?

This is the kind of copy that brings to mind Tim Miles’ writ­ing adage: “Don’t tell her you’re cour­te­ous. Open her door.” A quote I always like to para­phrase as, “Don’t tell read­ers that you ‘under­stand’ them, write some­thing that demon­strates your under­stand­ing — some­thing that only a per­son who under­stood could write.”

Not only is the sort by agony fea­ture a use­ful func­tion, but the “agony” label shows that chip­munk “gets it”: they under­stand that most busi­ness trav­el­ers begrudge their time wasted at air­ports and are hop­ing to reduce it as much as pos­si­ble, while still tak­ing into account costs.

Micro-copy and Persona-Based Marketing

So while I appre­ci­ate the bril­liance of the micro-copy, I also see this as an exam­ple of persona-based mar­ket­ing. Because com­ing up with new and use­ful ways to sort flights or cat­e­go­rize prod­ucts or view your options involves get­ting inside the heads and the lives of your prospec­tive cus­tomers. You have to under­stand before you can cre­ate some­thing that demon­strates that understanding.

And this is where Persona-based mar­ket­ing becomes so very, very impor­tant. Per­sonas pro­vide mar­keters and copy­writ­ers a tool and frame­work for get­ting inside the lives and heads of their prospec­tive cus­tomers. And the more you are unlike your tar­get cus­tomer, the more you need help get­ting into their heads, the more you need personas.

Which is why any male inter­ested in Mar­ket­ing to Women ought to check out Michele Miller’s new Mar­ket­ing to Women course, Unzipped.

The Unzipped approach to Persona-Based Marketing

I read (and rec­om­mend) Michele’s pre­vi­ous book, The Soc­cer Mom Myth, and found it to have incred­i­bly deep and worth­while insights into per­sona creation.

Now, as a dis­claimer, Michele is a fel­low Wiz­ard of Ads Part­ner and The Soc­cer Mom Myth was co-written by my friend and Future Now col­league, Holly Buchanan. So I’m biased. Then again, I was also as jaded as I was biased, think­ing that I already knew every­thing the book was going to cover about persona-based mar­ket­ing. Wrong! I was so wrong, in fact, that I invested in tak­ing Michele’s online Mar­ket­ing to Women course that was offered as a follow-up (and yes, I had to pay the tuition just like any­one else).

At any rate, if you’re avail­able for the course at the end of this month, you should really check it out.

And if you can’t make it, why not buy the book, which is avail­able for Kin­dle for only 99 cents.

P.S. The course will be co-taught by the bril­liant Tom Wanek, author of Cur­ren­cies that Buy Cred­i­bil­ity.

Most e-commerce site’s sim­ply don’t pro­vide nearly enough pho­tos, of nearly enough res­o­lu­tion and qual­ity that prospec­tive cus­tomers want.  The reason?

Well, first, tak­ing your own pho­tos can be hard, espe­cially if you have a lot of SKUs.

But beyond that, I truly believe that most e-commerce biz own­ers and mar­ket­ing man­agers don’t real­ize the amount of ques­tions that pho­tos answer.  They just don’t get how many pos­si­ble con­cerns and poten­tial objec­tions can be addressed and over­come through the right photo.

With that in mind, I wrote a guest post on Doc­tor Ralph F. Wil­son’s Web Mar­ket­ing Today blog on noth­ing but the per­sua­sive uses of prod­uct pho­tos and prod­uct videos.

Go check it out.

Turns out I missed my blog’s one year anniver­sary, which took place on Octo­ber 7th. Doh!

Oh well, since I also missed the chance to post these thoughts pre-Thanksgiving, I thought I’d share this as a way of say­ing thanks to all of you, my read­ers and subscribers.

Any­one famil­iar with Joseph Camp­bell and The Hero’s Jour­ney, or even with Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet from Save The Cat, knows that sto­ries revolve around a very pre­dictable set of struc­tural elements:

• The hero almost always starts out with some fear, block, wound, or lim­i­ta­tion to be over­come or tran­scended as a result of the jour­ney taken, usu­ally expressed in a sta­sis = death moment
• The hero typ­i­cally resists the “call to adven­ture” before being some­what forced to “cross the threshold,”
• There’s an “all is lost moment”
• and in any story not a tragedy, there’s also the happy ending

What you don’t likely think about is that we all go through this cycle mul­ti­ple times in our lives. Heck, if “mythic” struc­ture applies to freakin’ TV com­mer­cials, don’t you think it can apply to your work-a-day world?  Well, it can and it does.  And that real­iza­tion has really been a por­tal to sin­cere grat­i­tude for me.

See, instead of express­ing grat­i­tude in gen­eral for every­thing good in my life, I take a trip back, 5 years ago, 10 years, ago or even ear­lier.  I men­tally go back to the last time I faced a sta­sis = death moment in my life, or the last time life pushed me past the thresh­old by kick­ing me squarely in the nuts.  I recall all those unpleas­ant feel­ings and what my life was like in that moment, and from that act of remem­brance, all of the many bless­ings that have come into my life since then fall into sharp relief.  I get to see the happy end­ings to a lot of cycles, and the grat­i­tude that comes from that lasts far longer than a strained attempt to be thank­ful in gen­eral.  Highly recommended.

A year ago I was leav­ing my old blog­ging home at Future Now and start­ing up an unknown blog in the already over­crowded field of copy­writ­ing and mar­ket­ing.  And while the end­ing hasn’t yet been writ­ten, the jour­ney has been a blast.  Thank you for being part of it.

- Jeff

““Know some­thing, sugar? Sto­ries only hap­pen to peo­ple who can tell them.” — Alan Gurganus

Justin Halpern isn’t the only one privy to frank, off-the-cuff insights deliv­ered with sar­donic wit. As a Wiz­ard of Ads part­ner and Mon­day Morn­ing Memo sub­scriber, I have the immense priv­i­lege of receiv­ing 200-proof adver­tis­ing wis­dom deliv­ered via pithy remarks straight outa Roy’s pen.

When I come across these how-to-advertise-in-the-real-world epi­grams, I write them down for fre­quent review. And for “Fri­day Fun,” I’m going to share a baker’s dozen of them.

Enjoy!

• Details and specifics add cred­i­bil­ity. Names! Dates! Prob­lems! Solu­tions! Any­thing less is an unsub­stan­ti­ated claim and will be sum­mar­ily dis­missed by the customer.
• …the job of a slo­gan isn’t to be com­pre­hen­sive… The job of a slo­gan is to break the ice, posi­tion the com­pany, and gain the inter­est of the lis­tener so that they want to know more.
• The sub­con­scious is not only real, it is pow­er­ful. It is in the sub­con­scious and in the uncon­scious that brand essence resides.
• “Visual imagery of pos­i­tive out­comes.” This is the heart and soul of selling.
• [You] can’t sell hap­pi­ness unless UNHAPPINESS is the default option.
• To sell vol­umes of any­thing, you have to name the price-point the prospect was plan­ning to spend, then describe some­thing he can buy at that price-point that exceeds what he was expect­ing to find.
• The chal­lenge isn’t to make the cus­tomer under­stand.  The chal­lenge is to learn to think like cus­tomers – it’s faster, cheaper, and more effective.
• “I don’t want to see your busi­ness from your perspective.”
• …mean­ing­ful dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion — rel­e­vance and cred­i­bil­ity. That’s what mar­ket­ing is all about.
• PROBLEM: Sell­ing health is a bad idea. Most peo­ple already have health. If they keep their health, they’re not going to give you any credit for that. Health isn’t mea­sur­able unless you’re cur­rently sick and this reg­i­men cures you. As I said before, weight loss and body shape are mea­sur­able. Does this pro­gram accom­plish those things?
• The strongest lines are always the ones about the customer.
• Always sat­isfy the left brain when you can. It holds veto power when the right brain wants to do some­thing that is obvi­ously dan­ger­ous or fool­ish.  No, I’m not say­ing that logic trumps emo­tion. I’m say­ing only that lazy writ­ers too often try to work the heart because it’s eas­ier. They’re unwill­ing to do the research and hard work required to sat­isfy the mind.
• “Clar­ity is the new cre­ativ­ity” is sim­ply my way of say­ing, “Cut the poetic crap when the sub­ject requires some expla­na­tion.”  Too many peo­ple in the past have used the Monet tech­nique of impres­sion­ism to “bluff with fluff” when the client would have been bet­ter served if the writer had deliv­ered a lit­tle more information.

And there you have it.  Any one of these would be a great jump­ing off point for an entire post, so if one catches your eye or you’d like some elab­o­ra­tion, let me know in the comments.