25
Jan
I recently came across this fascinating post about Apple Marketing principles, as articulated by Apple circa 1977. Here they are:
Now, as a marketer, the Empathy and Focus parts are second nature — at least in terms of understanding. Putting them into practice every day is harder stuff, but any copywriter that doesn’t understand the importance of empathizing with the prospective customer and focusing in on their primary buying motivations and concerns isn’t a copywriter at all.
It’s the last element most marketers and copywriters screw up or overlook: the importance of Imputed Quality. Not nuts and bolts, specification-driven build quality or value for the dollar quality. But quality cues that tap into buyers’ pre-existing mental imprint of luxury and virtuous manufacture. The telling detail that says everything.
Want to see an example of imputed quality used in copy? Here ya go:
Notice that the actual build quality is detailed by the bullet points of the body copy, while the imputed quality — the telling detail — is given pride of place within the headline of the ad itself.*
Of course, this sort of quality cue or imputed quality factor has to be already existing or freshly baked into the product or service itself before it can be advertised, but recognizing the need for it — and doing the patient research and digging to find it — is one of the major keys to writing copy that works.
Apple of course, is a master at this, which is one reason they are renowned design icons, because inspired design imputes high quality. But it’s also why Apple never skimps on screen quality, keyboard feel, and the overall polish put on their user interfaces: those are the sort of tangible, experiential things that impute quality.
Yes, of course, we expect real quality from an Apple product in the sense of freedom from typical PC-like annoyances, annoyances brilliantly dramatized and mocked by Apple’s “I’m a Mac” campaign. But even if you knew nothing about Apple or PCs and just LOOKED at the competing products laid side by side, you’d intuitively get that one set of products were special and nicer than the rest. Regardless of how their internal components and specs stacked up.
So Here Are My 3 Takeaways from This:
1) Quality is important, but quality without imputed quality will go unrewarded in the marketplace.
2) Business owners should never expect customers to recognize quality and should “bake” imputed quality into their offerings.
3) Copywriters who fail to use imputed quality cues will end up with underperforming ad copy.
P.S. — Want to see an already-existing quality cue in action? Check out these guys thudding the door closed on a Mercedes:
P.P.S. — How do I know that Ogilvy diligently searched for product facts that would help him find and recognize important quality cues? Because he listed research twice when explaining his copywriting methodology! Steps 3 and 5 both emphasize the importance of research and facts.
* For a more detailed analysis of this famous Ogilvy Ad, check out my old GrokDotcom post.
Before the big iPhone unveiling today, if someone told you that they had real pictures of what the next generation of the iPhone looked like, and they just showed you some photos, totally devoid of context, would you believe them?
Of course not. The claim lacks all credibility.
You can’t possibly look at photos like that without wondering:
- How could you possibly have gotten these, given how passionately Apple protects their upcoming projects?
- Even if you DID get legitimate photos, why aren’t Apple’s lawyers sending you a cease and desist letter?
- What evidence do I possibly have that these are real, and weren’t simply photoshopped?
- And so on.
In short, the context is all wrong, so we just know the photos are fakes (or “artists renditions,” at best). But what about this video?
Somehow, this video fooled a lot of people and created quite a stir before it was proven to be faked. But why? Why is this video so convincing when the typical “leaked” photos aren’t?
Context.
The video provides a context which preemptively answers all of these credibility-killing questions and more. According to the non-verbal storytelling in the video, the guy who made the video accidentally discovered an “unreleased” page to Apple’s German Website, and took a screen recording of it. That’s how he got the photos, that’s why Apple can’t stop him, because they’re the ones who put the content on the Web, etc.
More importantly, the very style of the Web pages created by this hoaxster convinces us. When we look at these “accidentally discovered” Web pages, they look so faithful to Apple’s own design aesthetic, and the pictures of the phone look so faithful to the rumors about the new iPhone (curved, metal back, larger screen, thinner, etc.) that we tend to believe that maybe the video is for real.
Making This Dynamic Work for You
The truth is that we ALL rely on context every day for almost every decision we make. Manipulate context and you manipulate people’s perceptions and, ultimately, their decisions, too:
- If you’re an ice cream parlor and you simply put canisters of sample spoons up on the counter, that context will cue people to ask for free tastes, without any other change required.
- An HVAC guy who shows up in a corporate-branded truck and uniform will look like he’s from a big company, even if the company consists entirely of him, his cellphone, and that truck.
- Tell me you have the best food in the city, and I’ll be a lot more likely to believe you if you serve that food on linen table cloths rather than plastic trays.
Good fiction writers know the importance of this instinctively, which is why they go to such lengths to establish the right pretext for their big moments — they “set you up” and then “pay it off” later. Though I am absolutely not advising anyone to hoax their customers or to adopt a conman’s mindset, I am asking you to think about the believability of the claims you make, and how the right context can create customer confidence that you might not create any other way.
So what context cues are you using now, and what cues should you be using going forward?
7
Sep
When writing copy for products and services designed to help someone do X, the best persuasive tactic is to re-sell them on the dream.
In other words, whenever prospects got into X in the first place, they did so because they had bought into a dream. For instance, most people take up blogging because they buy into the dream of blogging: be able to put their “voice” out into the world and finding an appreciative, receptive audience that not only tweats, re-tweats, comments on, and forwards their posts, but also finding financial benefit through that same audience buying their books, come to their conferences, etc. That’s the dream most people are chasing when they start up a blog.
Needless to say, the reality frequently falls short of the dream. And the frustration at the gap is where the incentive to buy comes in.
So if you’re selling a service to help people with their blogging, you not only want to sell the prospect on the service, but also re-sell them on the dream. More specifically, you want to sell them on the ability of your service to help them re-capture the dream.
Why?
Because they already bought into the dream once, and they haven’t yet given up on it (they’re still X–ing, aren’t they?), and nothing is easier than selling someone on the dream they’ve already bought into. Doesn’t matter what the dream was, and it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in; the easiest sale you’ll ever make is selling the prospect on the dream they’ve already dreamt.
Jonathan Morrow’s new product BoostBlogTraffic.com is a perfect example of that. Check out the product announcement over at Copyblogger and see for yourself. What’s Jonathan doing for the first 2/3rds of the copy? Invoking the frustrations and dream-reality gap involved in blogging, and then re-selling the blogging dream, baby!
Because Jonathan Morrow knows what he’s doing.
- So what dream where your prospects chasing whenever they got into your market?
- Are you minding (and mining) the gap between the dream and the prospect’s current reality?
- Does your copy re-kindle the dream?
22
May
Portals and Why They Matter
“Taking it to the next level” is cliché. So is the phrase “he/she/it opened a lot of doors for me.” But people still reach for these phrases regardless. There’s a reason for that.
Both phrases reflect an intuitive understanding of transitions: that there’s always a threshold to cross. Boundaries define an area, environment, or world. Movement past boundaries necessitates movement through openings in those boundaries — or though portals, if you will.
So where there is change, there are portals, or so our subconscious minds expect. But all too often, businesses fail to meet our subconscious expectation for portals.
Businesses usually want to transition shoppers from thinking one way about a product or service (price sensitive) to another way of thinking, typically one that elevates shared values, big-picture performance, and total experience above price. The goal is to move shoppers from an objective, consumer-reports mindset to an enthusiast’s mindset.
And yet people don’t just snap from one state of mind into another; there has to be a transition and a portal to mark that transition. Put plainly: if you’re selling premium products or experiences, you need to understand the power of portals.
Fantasy Writers Understand Portals
When it comes to portals, perhaps the best people to study are fantasy writers, who have always intuitively sensed the need for portals between worlds:
- C.S. Lewis had his Wardrobe.
- J.K. Rowling had her Platform 9 3/4s,
- L. Frank Baum had Dorothy ride her twister, and
- The Wachowski Brothers gave Neo his red pill (among other portals).
Enter The Picture Book Powerhouse of Portals
But some of the most intense and easily observed stacking of portals I’ve come across take place in a children’s picture book: Skippyjon Jones, by Judy Schachner.
And what follows is my breakdown of Portal Stacking in Skippyjon Jones. And to start, let me give you a bit of set-up…
Skippyjon Jones is a young Siamese Cat who likes to pretend that he’s really some other animal. The story starts with him pretending to be a bird, much to his mother’s dismay. So she sends him to his room for a little time out, and that’s when ol’ Skippyjon begins his transformation into the great sword-fighting Chihuahua, El Skippito Friskito. A transformation involving portals galore.
First, Skippyjon starts bouncing on his bed, with the bouncing symbolically equivalent to flight. Then, during that flight, Skippyjon Jones encounters his first portal:
Literature is rife with the notion of mirrors as portals. And Skippyjon’s midflight glimpse into his mirror reveals his hidden chihuahua nature. A nature which is amplified through the donning of a Lone Ranger style mask by the little kitty. Skippyjon literally becomes invested in the identity.
Then we flash down to Skippyjon’s mother and sisters watching TV downstairs, talking about Skippyjon’s time out. But when the book cuts back to Skippyjon Jones, we’re not brought back up into the room, but forced to look into his room through — you guessed it — a portal:
We’re outside seeing Skippyjon objectively as a masked kitty racing around his room like a freak. And the half-conscious expectation is that when we move inside, we’ll transition from outside to inside in more ways than one, moving from an objective to a subjective understanding, so that we will start to see what Skippyjon/El Skippito Friskito sees.
Still, the reader is further prompted to engage in Skippyjon’s whimsy by yet another portal transition, this time from the room to the closet:
So we have a double-portal transition, from outside the room to inside, and from inside the well-lit room to inside the dark closet, wherein the magical realm of imagination rules, and where Skippyjon Jones, the Siamese cat, fully becomes El Skippito Friskito, the great sword-fighting Chihuahua.
But still, if Skippyjon is to fight something truly monstrous, he might have to cross yet another portal within the imaginary story, before he is to face the monster. And so it is, as Skippito and his band of Chihuahua friends take a nap, using sleep as the ultimate portal to dreams…
And that’s when the adventures really begin. Until, at the conclusion of Skippyjon’s imaginative adventure, El Skippito is blown back through the portal/closet door, and back to the everyday reality of his mother and sisters. Portal crossing in; portal crossing out.
So why is this important for the book?
It makes the difference between watching a kitten dream something silly, and being emotionally pulled along with him into his dreams. All those portals really help readers (of all ages) “get into” the story. Yes the story itself is delightful, and yes, the author (Judy Schachner) does a wonderful job making the book a blast to read. But I can’t help but think the brilliant use of portals has more than a little do with the books critical praise and widespread popularity.
And in case you think I’m reading too much into this, take a look at the Official Skippyjon Jones Website’s entrance page:
Anyone want to guess what happens when you click to enter? Go ahead and try it!
So, that’s cool and all, but how can you use it for your business? We’ll get into that next week…
But for now, let me just give Judy Schachner’s book a hardy plug for all those with young kids out there. It won the E.B. White Read Aloud Award because it’s both a blast for the parents to read and a delight for kids to listen to. Highly recommended.
And who knows, you might learn something too…
P.S. My mentor and business partner, Roy H. Williams, teaches an entire course on portals. If you’re interested in this kind of stuff, you probably ought to check out Wizard Academy at some point. And, yes, as adjunct faculty, my opinion on Wizard Academy is heavily biased ; )
23
Mar
So quiet you could hear a…
It’s so loud in here I can’t even hear…
Do those sentence even make sense? If it’s really, really quiet, shouldn’t there be an absence of noise? Why would you point out how quiet it is by raising the spectre of sound in the mind of the reader? And why would you indicate loudness by talking about what you can’t hear?
Surprisingly, this isn’t just my lame attempt at a Steven Wright style joke; there are legitimate answers to these questions, and the answers reveal something shockingly important for copywriters.
The answer? You can’t convey extreme absence or total immersion very well through a direct approach. You have to hint at it through implication or comparison. Or you have to convey the subjective experience of it. Or use both techniques.
Hearing a pin drop implies that there are no sounds louder than that present. In other words, your mind, once seeded with that single, delicate sound, surrounds the rest with a silence more blanketing and complete than any you could have described directly.
And no, this isn’t just because “hear a pin drop” is a colloqualism or cliche, this technique works even when dealing with the actual experience of sound, as described by the great movie sound effects editor Walter Murch:
Murch flips on his computer, clicks the mouse a few times and instantly pulls up a scene from Jarhead. Swofford’s character, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is in combat for the first time and there’s an artillery barrage. Everyone else ducks for cover, but he stands up. And the camera moves closer to him. Then, in the distance, there’s a muffled explosion followed by dead silence.
This fleeting silence is a golden moment for an editor — a chance to put the audience right there on the battlefield. Jarhead’s director, Sam Mendes, originally wanted that silence to stretch for several seconds. But Murch came up with a better idea.
Pieces of dust and sand from the explosion hit the actor’s face in slow motion. Then you hear the sound of the particles hitting his face. “My combat action has commenced,” the character says.
This fleeting silence is a golden moment for an editor — a chance to put the audience right there on the battlefield. Jarhead’s director, Sam Mendes, originally wanted that silence to stretch for several seconds. But Murch came up with a better idea.Pieces of dust and sand from the explosion hit the actor’s face in slow motion. Then you hear the sound of the particles hitting his face. “My combat action has commenced,” the character saOne of the rules of the road is that if you want to create the sense of silence, it frequently has more pungency if you include the tiniest of sounds.”
Did you catch that? The silence is lengthened and intensified by giving you both a small noise and an inner subjective experience of it. Murch even describes this as a rule of the road:
One of the rules of the road is that if you want to create the sense of silence, it frequently has more pungency if you include the tiniest of sounds
Similarly, describing the cacophony directly doesn’t get to the experience of it as well as describing the subjective mental disordering and disorientation that such ear-piercing noise causes; the internal mental confusion of ‘I can’t hear myself think’ implies an external sonic chaos that your readers’ minds will recreate, thereby putting them “right there on the battlefield.”
So what are the advertising applications of all this?
In my last post I plugged the technique of discovering and using quality cues in your advertising. And that raises the obvious question: how can you find those cues?
One answer: find the pin drops.
What unique turn of phrase implies more than it says. How can you describe an internal state that implies an external event and vice versa?
Do you think that Mike Diamond’s plumbers really smell good? Or do you think that smelling good implies cleanliness, professionalism, and stand-up qualities? Smell is just one sense, perhaps the most primitively emotional, but we’re all the more able to fill in all the rest ourselves based on that, aren’t we?
What about finger licking good? It’s a cliche now, but imagine when it first came out!
OK, now you try — what are your pin drops? What small detail seeds our mind to rain down the greater whole?
P.S. If this seems hard, it should. It’s the kind of thing ad professionals get paid the big bucks to come up with.
Interactive ads often strike me as a next-generation “funny ad” — with the “interactivity” feeling just as gratuitous as the humor in most funny ads.
And as any copywriter worth his pay can tell you, gratuitous humor hurts ad performance.
So as clever as many interactive ads are, the ad professional in me usually walks away from them with that same impression: did this really help convey the message, or did it just showcase the “talents” of the ad agency?
But that wasn’t the case with Spent from the Urban Ministries of Durham (created by McKinney).
Spent lacks all of the “hey look at me, I’m digital and cool” variety of interactivity, as it’s a text-based game. But Spent’s text-based interactivity forces the player to make the same soul-crushing and dilemma-filled choices pushed onto America’s working poor.
As Ad Freak writes, “It’s a jarring experience, and several of the choices will stick with you long after you’ve played.” Now that’s interactivity that works!
Interactive Insight From the Heath Bros
And Spent reminded me of this example of persuasive interactivity highlighted in Chapter 5 of Chip and Dan Heath’s Switch:
- Children completing chemotherapy are sent home to complete their treatment by taking a regimen of antibiotics and low-dosage chemotherapy pills.
- But compliance is critical to success. Missing 20% of your meds means a 200% higher chance of getting cancer again.
- To increase compliance HopeLab developed a video game that let kids play the part of a silver nano-bot that kills cancer cells with chemo rays.
- The game has 20 levels and is supposed to teach kids about their Chemo regimen and recovery through between-game lessons
- The game is a smashing success, boosting compliance by 20% and doubling kids chances for cancer-free success.
- BUT, most of the kids only completed 2 levels of game play, meaning they got little info and mostly game-play
The findings seemed counter-intuitive, until HopeLab’s research director asked a marketing professor at Stanford to explain:
“Think about this from a Marketing perspective. We can change behavior in a short television ad. We don’t do it with information. We do it with identity, ‘If I buy a BMW, I’m going to be this kind of person. If I take that kind of vacation, I’m this kind of eco-friendly person.’”
In other words, the game got the kids to identify with the chemo as their weapon for getting their life and health back, rather than as a reminder of their sickness. It dramatically changed how they felt about taking chemo through direct involvement – an involvement made possible through interactivity.
Got it? Interactivity should foster imaginary and emotional connection to the persuasive message. If it’s not doing that, it’s probably a waste of resources.
How This Applies to Regular Advertising
What you’re probably thinking is: That’s great, Jeff, if you’ve got the ad budget to create interactive ads in the first place.
My first response: the costs of interactive advertising have dropped tremendously over the last few years. Plus the more you rely on message-based involvement and the less you require wizz-bang graphics, the cheaper it’s likely to be. In other words, don’t dismiss it; research it, and even if it is still too expensive, be willing to check back in a year’s time.
My second response: If text alone can be interactive, no other medium has an excuse not to be.
Does that second response surprise you?
Here’s an example of interactive text (not hyperlinks) from Roy Williams’ Monday Morning Memo, Revealing the Vivid Unexpected:
“The thing about growing up is that you get fewer scabs on your knees, but more internal injuries. Do you remember the day when that little yellowhammer flew straight at the window? You picked it up. It had a drop of blood on its beak. Identical color to ours. Just one drop, like a bright bead. And then there were all those brightly plumed kids who left school, flying cheerfully and didn’t get far. Ran smack into World War II. Little Tommy Naylor lying in Africa somewhere, blood on his beak. Identical color to ours.”
– monologue of Peter Sallis as Norman Clegg, Last of the Summer Wine; Getting Sam Home, (1983) written by Roy Clarke
We’re not told the yellowhammer collided with the window. Neither do we read the words “dead” or “death.” Yet we know the little bird hit the window and died because of the line, “You picked it up.“
We come to this conclusion on our own. This technique of “revelation by inference” pulls us into the narrative by making us fill in its blanks…
…Read the passage again and witness the brilliant restraint. Roy Clarke flashes just a few slides onto the movie screen of our mind and we fill the gaps between them. We conclude:
(1.) A yellowhammer is a bird.
(2.) It hit the window and died.
(3.) Tommy Naylor was a schoolmate.
(4.) Tommy grew up and went to war.
(5.) Tommy died in Africa in WWII
But none of this is told to us directly. Yet we know it just as surely as if it had been.
Tony Schwartz and Evoking a Response with Old-School Media
As you can see, forcing your audience to “fill in the gaps” is a form of interactivity that’s available to all media, whether it’s billboard, radio, or TV. As Media Guru Tony Schwartz writes:
“For an advertiser, the issue of concern should center on how the stimuli in a commercial interact with a viewer’s real-life experiences and thus affect his behavior in a purchasing situation.” [Emphasis added]
Now, Tony is most famous for his Daisy commerical, an interactive piece of advertising if ever there was one. Take a look:
Goldwater’s campaign complained bitterly about the ad, claiming it was an attack ad and that it misrepresented Goldwater’s remarks and policies with regard to nuclear weapons, but oddly enough, the ad never mentions Goldwater or his policies. That was filled in by the listeners as they interacted with the images and sounds. They filled in the gaps.
And for those asking the question, yes, the technique works just as well for product commercials rather than political ads. Here’s a commercial where Tony Schwartz used his techniques to pitch Coca-Cola without ever mentioning the product’s name:
So the real question isn’t are you using digital advertising, but are you creating interactive advertising, regardless of your media?
If not, maybe you need a better ad writer. Or maybe you need a better trained copywriter.
P.S. As the Web holds all media, the importance of meaningful, non-redundant interaction between graphics and copy and video and cross-channel communication is becoming more and more important. Start thinking about it, if you haven’t already.
Over at Copyblogger, Brian Clark just posted a meaty and insight-saturated interview titled, Attention: Is Your Headline Getting Any?
And at the tail end of that interview, Brian announces a Headline Writing Masterclass that I’ll be co-conducting along with Brian via Webinar.
So I wanted to announce this Webinar to all of my readers here at the blog, and to give you a brief explanation on how to sign-up and what kind of content you can expect:
First, you may want to look at my old post: How Trouble Taught Me 4 Ways to Write Better Headlines.
What that post should tell you is that my approach to teaching headline writing is in direct opposition to most others. I don’t give you headline templates or formulas to Mad Lib with your own products and brand names; I seek to help you understand the dynamics and principles behind effective headlines.
When you can create great headlines from first principles, you never run out of awesome headlines, regardless of how voracious or demanding your content marketing needs. When you rely on templates, you end up looking schlockey as you stretch and deform the headline to inappropriate contexts and and you quickly run out of templates.
So why not learn how to make them yourself?
Well, most writers don’t learn it because darn few people teach how to do it. Sean D’Souza has some decent stuff on headlines, and Brian Clark reveals some good stuff in this interview and in his blog posts. But other than Sean and Brian, most people revert back to the Swipe File/Mad Libs technique.
So, yes, this is yet another info-product highly recommended by it’s creator — except all you have to do to get this one is sign-up for the Internet Marketing for Smart People newsletter (which is a good deal in itself; I’ve been a subscriber since it first came out).
What will this Webinar cover, in more specific terms?
So, in Brian’s Copyblogger interview, he mentions his the 4U Method of Writing Headlines*, which means that every headline should be:
- Useful (with a broad definition of “useful”)
- Urgent
- Unique
- Ultra-specific
So in those terms, this Master Class will teach you:
- 10 specific ways to signal Usefulness to your Audience
- 7 Fascination Triggers to create added Urgency and Uniqueness to your headlines
- How to layer technique onto technique to multiply the magnetic effect of each
- Over 33 Headlines Deconstructed in Depth
- Understand the difference between power adjectives vs. amateur-hour adjectives
I’d offer you all a money-back guarantee, but, um, we’re not charging any money for it, so… just go sign up for it already!
Oh, and in the words of Bartles & Jaymes, “and thank you for your support” 
* According to a commenter, the 4U Method comes from the great Bob Bly Michael Masterson.
18
Jan
Even a vicious criminal wants his gun manufactured by a virtuous man.
He most certainly doesn’t want the gun to have been made with cut corners, with an unscrupulous eye towards maximizing profit margins, and a sociopathic inconsideration for the end-user.
And so it is with everyone: no matter how much we may fail to attain virtue ourselves – no matter how much we behave as foolish children — we still want the things we buy and the people who provide our services to be virtuous.
For advertising and copywriting, this means that demonstrating or dramatizing virtue on the part of the product, manufacturer, or service provider is often enough to move the needle.
This is especially true in cases where proving superiority in performance is difficult or legally prohibited or impossible. In practical terms, demonstrating virtue means using your copy to indirectly show how the actions of your client are driven by something deeper than economics.
Here’s an example demonstrating this technique of implied virtue:
In a previous post, I focused on the story’s ability to flatter prospective customers, but I ignored how the story implies that Mr. Beckley works on Mercedes because he has an affinity with the values that the car stands for – that he cares about how all that added engineering and build quality ultimately protect the driver.
In other words, Beckley’s decision to focus on Mercedes and Volvos is a principled, virtuous choice, making him, by transference, a principled, virtuous mechanic (as opposed to a mechanic choosing to concentrate on a more lucrative or less competitive foreign auto market).
So Mr. Beckley not only becomes a mechanic you can trust, but one with whom you share a common brand affinity for Mercedes automobiles. Brilliant.
Taking WIIFY to the Next Level
I touched on this emotional dynamic a bit earlier with my post on What’s In It For You (and on One Tough Mother’s Magical Advertising Secret), But now I’d like to tie that idea to the work of my colleague Tom Wanek.
Tom’s framework of signaling theory, as described in his book Currencies that Buy Credibility, really functions as the missing link between credibility and WIIFY. Here’s how:
1. To show virtue, you have to show an unreasonable devotion to excellence or end-user satisfaction. You have to demonstrate extra-painstaking measures that go beyond the merely economic. And ideally, you want to do this with something other than an explicit claim.
2. Signaling Theory says that non-adaptive/non-economical expenditure of resources can be used to “prove” or signal mating fitness. The male peacock’s weighty tail feathers show off his vigor; they demonstrate his ability to survive despite the handicap, kind of like beating someone up “with one arm behind your back.”
3. In business, an apparently non-selfish investment of money, resources, time, etc. can signal the sincerity or virtue of your business offer. This is the crux of Wanek’s brilliant application of Signaling Theory to marketing. A money-back guarantee (supposedly) shows that you’re willing to take on all of the buying risk, ostensibly due to confidence in your product. Richard Davis’s willingness to shoot himself while wearing Second Chance Body Armor rather dramatically demonstrates how risking Safety and Wellbeing signals belief and trusts in a product:
4. Ads can demonstrate virtue by leveraging one of Wanek’s 6 Currencies that Buy Credibility, namely:
- Material Wealth
- Time and Energy
- Opportunity
- Power and Control
- Reputation and Prestige
- Safety and Wellbeing
In the Beckley Automotive example, Mr. Beckley is sacrificing opportunity (the opportunity to work on any mark and make of vehicle) in order to signal his shared affinity for Mercedes.
My point is simply that layering virtue with Signaling creates a stronger overall effect than either strategy alone. And that this kind of implied demonstration of virtue is what most people are really after in most of the products and services they buy — that it represents what Ogilvy referred to as “a first class ticket” and “the positively good.
So what are you doing with your advertising? Are you using either or both of these techniques to maximum effect?
P.S. As previously noted, the Beckley Automotive example was used with the kind permission of the brilliant Chuck McKay, a marketing and business strategist with much to offer any business serious about pursuing increased market share and profitability.
P.P.S. Tom will be teaching at Wizard Academy on the 26th of this month for those interested in an in-depth study of marketing through signaling theory