Jeff Sexton Writes

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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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“Songs with words are recalled more quickly (and with greater accu­racy) than music that has no words. Like­wise, pic­tures with peo­ple in them are viewed more often (and longer) than pic­tures that have no people.”

- Roy H. Williams, Secret For­mu­las of The Wiz­ard of Ads

I’ve always cringed at the men­tion of “per­sonal branding.”

“Per­sonal brand­ing” grates on me because I believe that it’s far more prof­itable to under­stand cor­po­rate brand­ing through the lens of per­sonal rep­u­ta­tion than to cre­ate some kind of con­trived rep­u­ta­tion through use of cor­po­rate branding.

For exam­ple, if you under­stand brand as rep­u­ta­tion, you can’t help but under­stand that:

• Your actions speak louder than your words
• What oth­ers say about you is more impor­tant than what you say about you
• Deep rela­tion­ships are more impor­tant than shal­low popularity
• Straight-talking, look-you-in-the-eye indi­vid­u­als are trusted while “orga­ni­za­tional men” aren’t

And yet, I do believe that the very best advo­cates for per­sonal brand­ing have a worth­while point or two, namely that:

1. Peo­ple want to do busi­ness with other peo­ple — peo­ple they know and trust

There’s magic to George Zim­mer promis­ing us that “You’ll like the way you look, I guar­an­tee it.” Or a Lee Iacocca chal­leng­ing us with “If you can find a bet­ter car, buy it.”

The magic lies in the human con­nec­tion, in the sense of doing busi­ness with a live human being invested with the mag­i­cal power of free will, instead of with some face­less orga­ni­za­tion, utterly with­out agency.

When given a choice, we pre­fer busi­nesses run by peo­ple whose pas­sion for what they do extends beyond mak­ing money. Peo­ple who’ll do the right thing; peo­ple that care.

We want to know that Mama Gert Boyle sim­ply won’t stand for her com­pany to pro­duce any­thing less than the best, even to the point of tor­ture test­ing Columbia’s cloth­ing on her own son. This hits us at a far deeper level than tech­ni­cal specifications.

Want to see what it looks like when a small busi­ness puts some of this magic into their advertising?

Check out Tim Mile’s brand­ing cam­paign for a local Heat­ing and Air Con­di­tion­ing Company

2. (most) Peo­ple can’t “know” the real you

Do you think that any of us actu­ally knows the real Lee Iacocca? Other than his wife, kids, and close friends? Heck no. And yet most of us feel as if we know him. He has a pub­lic persona.

The rea­son most of us don’t have a crafted pub­lic per­sona is because most decent peo­ple shy away from self aggran­dize­ment. It goes against the grain and feels icky.

We’re far more com­fort­able with Jimmy Stewart’s “aw shucks” foot twist­ing than Don­ald Trump’s “I’m the great­est” chest thumping.

We all have to get over that.

We have to grow more com­fort­able both with the need for self-promotion and with the need to pro­vide the pub­lic with a nar­rower and more eas­ily grasped pro­jec­tion of our­selves than could pos­si­bly fit our own com­plex per­son­al­i­ties. We have to be OK with the pub­lic per­ceiv­ing us as some­thing approach­ing a car­i­ca­ture of our real selves.

I’m sure the owner of the HVAC Com­pany that Tim Miles renamed “Dr. Com­fort” prob­a­bly wouldn’t have thought to car­i­ca­tur­ize him­self as a method to brand his com­pany. Nor would he most likely have been too com­fort­able with what must have seemed a boast­ful and over-reaching title — that of “Dr. Comfort.”

And yet the strate­gic use of the Dr. Com­fort per­sona has con­vinced a lot of peo­ple to do busi­ness with him.

How Domino’s Could Have Made “Rate Our Chicken” Even Better

Want to see this at work in a national ad cam­paign?  Check out Tom Wanek’s analy­sis of Domino’s Rate Our Chicken Ad.

Just keep in mind that Tom approaches this analy­sis from a Credibility-based per­spec­tive.  He’s ana­lyz­ing how Domino’s use of trans­parency and sig­nal­ing lends cred­i­bil­ity to their claim of supe­rior chicken.

And from that per­spec­tive, Tom finds fault with how the “Rate Our Chicken” ad opens and closes its mes­sage. It opens with a weak, non-attention-bragging image and it closes with a show of hes­i­tancy and doubt on the part of Domino’s chicken expert. Tom rec­om­mends a more con­fi­dent clos­ing image — and he’s right!

But that’s com­ing from a logical/credibility perspective.

What actu­ally unites the two men­tal images has noth­ing to do with logic and every­thing to do with the magic of “Pic­tures with Peo­ple.”  Tate Dil­low is the thread run­ning through­out the com­mer­cial, and he is who com­mands both the open­ing and clos­ing images of the ad.

As much as Domino’s is look­ing to gain cred­i­bil­ity through trans­parency, they are also look­ing to gain an emo­tional involve­ment through Tate Dillow’s pub­lic per­sona as Mr. Domino’s Chicken. And for the most part it works.

But as Tom so rightly points out, it could be made bet­ter by strength­en­ing the open­ing and clos­ing images. Yet know­ing that Tate is the thread that holds the com­mer­cial together, we wouldn’t want to remove him from either the open­ing or clos­ing images. Nor would we want to do away with any image that helps to con­vey Tate’s human­ity to the audience.

So my sug­ges­tion would be to sim­ply switch the open­ing and clos­ing men­tal images.

Show me the trans­par­ently human and under­stand­ably nervous-about-the-box Tate Dil­low first. Make me curi­ous why the box has him so worked up. Hook me into his story.

Then, at the end of the com­mer­cial, show me the con­fi­dent, “My Name’s Tate Dil­lon and I am Domino’s Chicken” image, leav­ing me with the impres­sion that this guy’s hell-bent on giv­ing me great chicken.

The Bot­tom Line:

The best bet for your ads isn’t to be either purely log­i­cal or emo­tional, but to com­bine the two in the evi­dent pas­sion and ver­i­fi­able actions of a spokesper­son the pub­lic can trust.  And if you’re the owner of the com­pany, that spokesper­son should likely be you.

Are you up for it?

P.S. I couldn’t find an already-online ver­sion of Roy H. Williams’ essay, “Song’s with Words, Pic­tures with Peo­ple,” so I made a hasty scan of it and posted it here. Enjoy…

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 ; )

Have you seen the recent McDonald’s Ad for their Fruit and Maple Oatmeal?

It fea­tures a woman who sits down next to her hus­band, bab­bling away about the deli­cious oat­meal she bought.  As she sits down, she remains focused on the oat­meal and never really looks at her hus­band until after she offers him a spoonful.

Then — sur­prise! — the man she’s offer­ing to spoon-feed isn’t her hus­band at all; he’s only dressed like her hus­band, and is, in fact, a socially awk­ward dweeb eat­ing break­fast alone. That’s when the icky part happens.

As the woman recov­ers from her shock, with her extended spoon still hov­er­ing in front of the stranger, the social mis­fit puts his mouth around her spoon and eats the oatmeal.

And we all feel vio­lated for her.

The woman, mor­ti­fied beyond belief, drops that spoon like it was poi­son and recoils from the stranger, retreat­ing to the safety of her hus­band. It’s meant to be funny, but comes off as deeply dis­turb­ing. Even after the husband’s “that’s actu­ally how we met” joke makes light of the sit­u­a­tion, most view­ers remain dis­turbed and left feel­ing more than a lit­tle icky.

[****A reader help­fully left a youtube link to the com­mer­cial in the com­ments — thanks, Susie! The video cap­tures has some weird over­tape in the first few sec­onds of the com­mer­cial, but you can see all the impor­tant parts.  Check it out:***]

But why?

Mag­i­cal Thinking

Whether we admit it or not, we all believe in essences.  Sure, our con­scious minds might try to over-rule our emo­tional belief, but we still believe — we still have the same emo­tional reac­tions and make the same deci­sions as if we con­sciously believed in essences and cooties. This is why peo­ple shy away from cook­ies placed next to say, tam­pons or kitty lit­ter, even when both the cook­ies and the kitty lit­ter are safely wrapped in plas­tic and never actu­ally touch each other.  It’s also why the bil­lion dol­lar sports mem­o­ra­bilia indus­try even exists!

So when the woman in the ad started eat­ing the oat­meal and stuck that spoon in her mouth, she imbued it with some of her essence.  And by eat­ing from that same spoon the stranger not only exposed him­self to her germs, but on an emo­tional level, he enacted a vio­la­tion — a stolen inti­macy with the woman, made against her will. He took some of her essence, and in turn, inter­min­gled his essence with hers, con­t­a­m­i­nat­ing her spoon.

This is one rea­son why the woman imme­di­ately ditches the spoon — she doesn’t want his essence creep­ing up the spoon to her hand — and also why she recoils in dis­gust at the man’s actions.  For any man who fails to rec­og­nize that kind of trans­gres­sion is dan­ger­ous, almost sociopathic.

It all makes per­fect emo­tional sense. And if you think I’m spin­ning off into Eng­lish Major la la land, just ask your­self:

• Would you buy fur­ni­ture from a con­victed child moles­ter, even if it was sold for pen­nies on the dol­lar? Why not?
• Would you be upset if you knew that an old bed you had sold in a yard sale was bought by a child molester?
• Would you give spe­cial treat­ment to some item (aka relic) that had belonged to one of your heroes?

If you answer, no, to the first two ques­tions or, yes, to the third, then at least a part of you believe in essences.

Mag­i­cal Advertising

So what does this have to do with advertising?

Because the decision-making part of our brains work accord­ing to the laws of Mag­i­cal Think­ing. Mean­ing that your adver­tis­ing ought to at least be in har­mony with those same laws, if not actively lever­ag­ing them to your benefit.

And, just so you know, the Law of Contagion/Essences is just one of about two dozen “Laws of Magic” that you’d prob­a­bly want to keep in mind.

So does your adver­tis­ing weave magic? Or are you vio­lat­ing these laws and inad­ver­tently leav­ing your audi­ence feel­ing icky all over?

P.S. One might say that McDonad’s oat­meal itself is a sign of mag­i­cal think­ing, wherein the mere con­tact with oats some­how imbues health­ful qual­i­ties onto a snick­ers bar’s worth of sugar, chem­i­cals, and sat­u­rated fat.

For awhile, the con­ven­tional wis­dom online was that neg­a­tive reviews typ­i­cally helped sales by lend­ing cred­i­bil­ity to pos­i­tive reviews, so long as the pos­i­tive reviews sig­nif­i­cantly out­weighed the negative.

Of course, it’s a lot dicier than that, though, isn’t it?  A ream of other fac­tors come to mind almost instantly, for any­one who has ever shopped on Ama­zon or Zap­pos or any other review-heavy site:

• How artic­u­late and spe­cific are the neg­a­tive reviews?
• How much are the neg­a­tive reviews in agree­ment about the fail­ings of the product?
• How damn­ing are these spe­cific faults?
• Do any of them con­tra­dict your brand promise?
• Do any of the pos­i­tive reviews coun­ter­mand the points raised by the neg­a­tive reviews?

But the ques­tion remains: on aver­age, how many neg­a­tive reviews does it take to make a shop­per recon­sider a purchase?

The answer, it turns out, is some­where around three.

And that sounds about right for any­thing but books, movies, and music — those cat­e­gories are dif­fer­ent, since polar­iz­ing ideas and art attract as much as they repulse.

Still, even accept­ing the 3 neg­a­tive review rule, there’s a big dif­fer­ence between a neg­a­tive review of a shoe on Zap­pos and a neg­a­tive review on your Web­site, I’ll bet.  Here’s why:

1) You’re likely either a man­u­fac­turer or cura­tor of the prod­ucts you sell

If Wal­mart has a badly reviewed item, they can just drop it. Plus, they likely have sev­eral other options for cus­tomers to choose from. That bad review doesn’t truly reflect on them.  And it’s the same thing with Zappos.

But if you actu­ally MAKE the prod­ucts, it’s a dif­fer­ent story. Espe­cially if that bad review con­tra­dicts your mar­keted qual­ity claims. If you man­u­fac­ture com­puter back­packs, for exam­ple, and your claim to fame is tough func­tion­al­ity, then neg­a­tive review over a a bag that frayed and became all-but unser­vice­able in only 6 months rep­re­sents a much big­ger prob­lem for you than for a mass e-tailer like ebags.com

Sim­i­larly, if you’re a small retailer spe­cial­iz­ing in, say, stereo equip­ment, and you mar­ket your­self as the audiophile’s choice and the place for the dis­crim­i­nat­ing buyer, then the lines and brands you carry and the equip­ment you sell all carry with them an implicit rec­om­men­da­tion: if you’re car­ry­ing it, it must be good. So a neg­a­tive review becomes an attack on your expertise/recommendation.  Not good.

2) You’re likely com­pet­ing on qual­ity and cus­tomer satisfaction

Whether a neg­a­tive review is fair or not, it almost always beto­kens an unhappy cus­tomer.  Occa­sion­ally, the reviewer might com­mend your res­o­lu­tion of their com­plaint or dis­sat­is­fac­tion within their neg­a­tive review, but this is far more the excep­tion than the rule. Most neg­a­tive reviews just trash the prod­uct.  And if your brand promise cen­ters around sat­is­fac­tion, neg­a­tive reviews of this kind hurt your credibility.

What Lands End Could Learn from Orvis

So I was look­ing at buy­ing a new blazer recently, and came across the fol­low­ing reviews of Lands’ End’s Year Round Blazer:

So, you get the pic­ture right?  Lots of reviews call­ing Land’s End out on dra­mat­i­cally reduced qual­ity and sub-par value for the price point.  And qual­ity and value ARE this brands sup­posed call­ing cards, so you’d think that Land’s End might want to DO some­thing about that.

But then, what can they do?  They’ve promised to post all hon­est reviews, so they have to let the neg­a­tive reviews stand.

Well, they could do what Orvis does when a neg­a­tive review pops up.  Take a look:

And that’s how you do it.  You REMIND your cus­tomers of your sat­is­fac­tion guar­an­tees and you vis­i­bly show poten­tial shop­pers that you did every­thing pos­si­ble to resolve the issues brought forth in the review.

Now, Ama­zon and Zap­pos prob­a­bly can’t do that, due to the sheer num­ber of SKUs and reviews they deal with. But YOU can and should do it.

So when it comes to cus­tomer reviews, be like Orvis not Land’s End.

Steven Press­field is a writer of two worlds.

In one world, he’s the cel­e­brated author of The War of Art — a book that has quickly become the field man­ual for any­one engaged in cre­ative or artis­tic work of any kind, espe­cially entre­pre­neurs and writ­ers. In the other world he’s the king of all mil­i­tary epics and his­tor­i­cal sagas — a think­ing man’s Tom Clancy whose nov­els about The Bat­tle of Ther­mopy­lae, Alexan­der the Great, and The Pelo­pon­ness­ian War are favorites among grunts, gen­er­als, and lit­er­ary crit­ics alike.

Unfor­tu­nately, there’s not nearly enough cross pol­li­na­tion between the two worlds. Few of Steven’s fic­tion fans have read his non-fiction, and even fewer of his non-fiction fans have read his nov­els. And if you’re read­ing this blog, you prob­a­bly fall into the lat­ter cat­e­gory, which means you’re miss­ing out, because the themes and mes­sages that have moved you from The War of Art (and now, Do The Work) res­onate through­out his novels.

But don’t take my word for it, just read the fol­low­ing e-mail inter­view that Steve was gra­cious enough to grant me, and you’ll see exactly what I’m talk­ing about:

Ques­tion 1: At one point in The Leg­end of Bag­ger Vance, the nar­ra­tor, a WWII vet, says of a Baby Boomer med­ical student/intern, Michael:

“… I found myself think­ing of ancient Greece, which had become, for it’s trou­bling par­al­lels with our own time, more and more a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of mine.  The so-called Golden Age lasted only three gen­er­a­tions.  Junah’s was the first gen­er­a­tion, the first of our Amer­i­can Golden Age.  Mine was the sec­ond; Michael’s now the third.  In Athens, Junah’s and mine would have been the gal­lant decades of Aeschy­lus and Sopho­cles, Per­i­cles and Themis­to­cles; ours would have been the glo­ries of Marathon and Ther­mopy­lae, Salamis and Artemi­sium. Michael’s would have been the bit­ter third gen­er­a­tion of Alcib­i­ades, the gen­er­a­tion of plague and empire when painted youth mocked the Mys­ter­ies and fell from the excess of their own brilliance.

This is what I feared for Michael. That his gen­er­a­tion, so strong, so well made, so bright and aware beyond its years, would com­pare itself to us in envy, envy of the clar­ity of our chal­lenges and the brutish obvi­ous­ness of our enemies.”

Also, on your blog and in your book, Do The Work, you have been very open about ini­tially set­ting The Pro­fes­sion much closer to current-day times than it ended up.  That, in fact, mov­ing the story fur­ther out to the future was nec­es­sary to keep read­ers from feel­ing the par­al­lels too keenly to main­tain their “will­ing sus­pen­sion of disbelief.”

So the nat­ural ques­tion becomes, how has writ­ing The Pro­fes­sion either strength­ened or changed your obser­va­tion of these parallels?

Steve’s Answer:

Great ques­tion, Jeff.  I con­fess I hadn’t even thought about it con­sciously till you asked.  But yes, very def­i­nitely “The Pro­fes­sion” is my state­ment about that Third Age, the age of empire descend­ing.  The dif­fer­ence between an Alcib­i­ades and a Gen. Salter (in “The Pro­fes­sion”) is that the for­mer believed that he could sin­gle­hand­edly res­ur­rect the Golden Age as a reflec­tion of his own bril­liance (he couldn’t), whereas Salter has a much darker view of the arc of empire and har­bors no such illu­sions.  He’s not really a nar­ciss­sist or a mega­lo­ma­niac; he’s a man who sees empire’s rise and fall all too clearly — and con­ceives of him­self as seiz­ing the reins of power as much to pro­tect his coun­try­men from worse men as from any idea of mad ambi­tion or self-aggrandizement.

Ques­tion 2: Many authors talk about “hear­ing the voice” of a char­ac­ter, and that once they get the voice right, every­thing sort of falls in place. Did this hap­pen for you with The Pro­fes­sion?  Gent seems to have such an authen­tic voice, prac­ti­cally tak­ing on a life of its own in Chap­ter 3, that it almost seems as if you might have started with that?

Steve’s Answer:

That’s exactly right, Jeff.  Gent’s voice is the whole book.  I started with that.  Oddly enough, I met and became great friends with a real-life war­rior (who shall remain name­less for the moment) dur­ing the writ­ing of the book.  He was as close to a real-life Gent as it is pos­si­ble to come, which really helped my con­fi­dence in the char­ac­ter.  You know, it’s not too hard to envi­sion larger-than-life char­ac­ters in fic­tion set a cou­ple of mil­len­nia into the past, but doing the same in the present can be a lit­tle dicey.  So yes, “The Pro­fes­sion” started with Gent’s voice and his voice car­ries the story through all the way.

Ques­tion 3: Which char­ac­ter formed him­self first in your mind: Salter or Gent?  And how soon after the first did it take for the other to arrive?  Also, can you speak a lit­tle bit of how the dynamic between these two char­ac­ters evolved?

Another great ques­tion.  Gent came first, then Salter right behind.  The one implied the other.  Part of Gent’s “uni­ver­sal sol­dier” ideal was his need for and loy­alty to a great leader.  The way a Mace­don­ian of the pha­lanx needed Alexan­der or a legion­naire needed Cae­sar.  The leader defines the cause for the war­rior and makes him believe in the pos­si­bil­ity of it and of his own great­ness.  But buried within that belief on the warrior’s part is the seed of becom­ing his own leader, of evolv­ing beyond the “loyal trooper” model to real­iz­ing and actu­al­iz­ing his own beliefs and his own code.  That took a long time to evolve in the writ­ing and needed some seri­ous aid from my col­league and friend, Shawn Coyne.  He made me see the char­ac­ter of Gent much more deeply than I had orig­i­nally envi­sioned him.

Ques­tion 3a: If Salter is an Alcib­i­ades–like char­ac­ter (or Cori­olanus / Alcib­i­ades hybrid), would you char­ac­ter­ize Gent as a Tela­mon – a leader who would be “great” but whose lack of the mon­strous pre­vents him from tak­ing those fate­ful, mon­strous acts of an Alexan­der or Cae­sar or Salter?

Steve’s Answer:

You hit the nail right on the nog­gin, Jeff.  I orig­i­nally con­ceived of Gent as Tela­mon (a recur­ring char­ac­ter in two of my pre­vi­ous books — a mer­ce­nary war­rior of the 5th Cen­tury B.C.) because I’ve always loved him and wanted to give him his own book.  I was curi­ous what he would say and do.  Tela­mon (and Gent) are pure war­riors, in that they fight for the fight alone, not for a flag or a cause.  In fact they despise flags and causes.  They ask, “Why is one flag bet­ter than another, or one cause?”  And of course they aren’t?

Gent/Telamon are ronin Samu­rai.  They’re adher­ents to the dark code of the iso­lated war­rior, for whom all causes and dreams have proved false over cen­turies and who now serve the god of war alone, Ares (or Eris, strife.)  And you’re right, they lack the ele­ment of the mon­strous, to their credit, so they remain grounded and in their own way moral and good.  They’re like the seven samu­rai in the Kuro­sawa movie of the same name, who fight and die only for their broth­ers and the peas­ants whose vil­lage they couldn’t find on a map — and for a bowl of rice if they’re lucky enough to get it.

Ques­tion 4: Can you talk about the notion, fea­tured in the book, of “the inter­sec­tion of neces­sity and free will”?  The only time I’ve heard any kind of phrase like that before is from C.S. Lewis in describ­ing his con­ver­sion to Chris­tian­ity.  Can you explain how Salter see this and also, if you feel sim­i­larly, how you see it?

Actu­ally I stole that phrase from myself, from “Tides of War,” in which it appears as Alcib­i­ades’ phi­los­o­phy.  Salter under­stands the arc of empire, in the sense that as a nation like the United States recedes from its apogee of great­ness, cer­tain darker polit­i­cal strains will appear, like the polar­iza­tion we’re see­ing today, like the reluc­tance of society’s youth to serve any­thing grander than their own ambi­tion, and so forth.  That’s Neces­sity.  The republic–any republic–is trapped in it.  As empires decline, we see time after time the increased employ­ment of mer­ce­nar­ies, the rise in pop­u­lar­ity of blood sports, a decline in tra­di­tional morals, etc.  So that arc is fixed.  But at the same time, the actions of a great man can, if not deflect this arc, then at least align them­selves with it and ride the tiger.  That’s free will.  Alcib­i­ades believed he could manip­u­late Neces­sity by the use of his will (though he, being Greek, saw it in terms of win­ning the favor and inter­ces­sion of the gods).  Salter knows bet­ter than that.  His view is more Thucy­didean and darker.  He sees human nature as unchange­able.  He’s try­ing to align with the imper­a­tives of his­tory and enact them as best he can — and bet­ter for the nation than other, lesser men might enact them.

Ques­tion 5: “I fight for money. Why? Because gold purges van­ity and self-importance from the fight. Shall we lay down our lives, you and I, for a flag, a tribe, a notion of the Almighty? I did, once. No more. My gods are now Ares and Eris. Strife. I fight for the fight itself. Pay me. Pay my brother.”

This para­graph, taken from the first chap­ter of the novel, intro­duces us to Gent and the idea of wide­spread use of whole-scale mer­ce­nary armies.  And also gives us Gent’s self-identity as both a mer­ce­nary and a war­rior.  And it also bears an incred­i­bly strong resem­blance to the idea, expressed in The Leg­end of Bag­ger Vance and The War of Art and Do The Work, of doing the work as a pure act, purged from hopes, ego, desire for fame, etc.  Doing the work for the work. And yet, this con­cep­tion seems to fail the larger test within the scope of the novel: a fight is always a fight over some­thing larger than the fight itself; in the end, power is exer­cised towards ends.  Can you talk a bit about that?

Another great obser­va­tion, Jeff.  And I didn’t real­ize this myself till I was into the 13th or 14th draft of the book, influ­enced by my friend Shawn.  The rea­son the code of fighting-for-the-fight-alone is so dark is that it’s spawned from despair, the despair of the real­iza­tion that soci­ety as a whole has lost its ideals and the once-noble vision that for­merly sus­tained it.  A fight, as you say, “is always over some­thing.”  That’s the eth­i­cal dimen­sion that Gent comes to embrace in the end and that every artist, if he’s going to be true to his art, has to embrace and embody in his work.  If you think back to “The Seven Samu­rai,” what makes them great in the end is that they gave up their “fight only for the fight” men­tal­ity and really embraced the needs and des­per­a­tion of the vil­lagers who had hired them.  That’s what the Toshiru Mifune char­ac­ter does for the oth­ers.  He’s not a “real” samu­rai (ronin would be the proper word, mean­ing “mas­ter­less samuria” — in other words, dis­pos­sessed war­riors who have lost their orig­i­nal code and had to cob­ble together a sub­sti­tute out of courage, skill, etc. bereft of an over­ar­ch­ing ideal of ser­vice) and so he’s free to really care about the farm­ers and the chil­dren and the wives.  That’s what makes him great and also what kills him.  So yes, you’re absolutely right.  The war­rior code needs to be informed by an ideal of virtue greater than the fight itself.

And that’s it folks.  I leave you with two things:

1) A spe­cial thanks to Steven Press­field for his books and for this inter­view, and

2) This trailer for The Seven Samu­rai:

Actu­ally, the title should say Myths, as there are two of them.

Stradi­var­ius Myth #1

The first Myth is that there is one sin­gle iso­lated ele­ment respon­si­ble for the unique sound and virtue of a Stradivari.

Most the­o­ries about the Stradi­vari magic fall into the “sil­ver bul­let” cat­e­gory. Accord­ing to them, just one, soli­tary fac­tor or ele­ment make these vio­lin tower over all other merely mor­tal vio­lins. Some say it’s the wood den­sity; oth­ers the resin or chem­i­cals used to treat the wood, or the way the wood was shaped or con­structed. But the vast major­ity point to just one thing.

Almost no one claims that the unique sound sig­na­ture is due to a hun­dred smaller aspects pushed in the right direc­tion and work­ing together syn­er­gis­ti­cally. Supe­rior crafts­man­ship, after all, usu­ally involves the arti­san mak­ing thou­sands of deci­sions and get­ting them all right, not just in iso­la­tion, but in terms of how each deci­sion affects the whole. So one might fig­ure that most the­o­rists would sug­gest a mul­ti­tude of ele­ments rather than “One Big Thing.” Yet pre­cious few ever sug­gest this.

We sim­ply don’t think of expla­na­tions like this because we’ve lost touch with the nature of craft in this mass-produced, hyper-rationalized, “7 Steps for dum­mies to earn riches in their sleep” world of ours.

We not only des­per­ately want there to be an eas­ily ana­lyzed and dupli­cated short­cut, but balk at acknowl­edg­ing excep­tions to this because they imply a rebuke. To sug­gest that excel­lence is made up of a total­ity rather than one secret for­mula is to sug­gest that there’s no sub­sti­tu­tion for long dili­gent prac­tice, for study, for mas­tery of craft, and for atten­tion to detail.

And who wants to hear that?

Stradi­var­ius Myth #2

The Sec­ond Myth is that Stradi­vari really are bet­ter than the very best mod­ern violins.

Believe it or not, there are highly trained crafts­man that have ded­i­cated their pro­fes­sional lives to cre­at­ing vio­lins to the same stan­dards of the Stradi­vari. And by every objec­tive and sub­jec­tive test some of them are as good as those leg­endary vio­lins that sell for 100 times as much money. Whether it’s sci­en­tists record­ing and ana­lyz­ing the sound qual­ity, or it’s expert musi­cians and vio­lin­ists lis­ten­ing “blind”  to a com­par­i­son, there’s no evi­dence that the Stradi­vari out­per­form the best modern-made violins.

So the supe­ri­or­ity of these vio­lins is largely sub­jec­tive, encom­pass­ing far more mag­i­cal think­ing and leg­end than fact, such that, when put to the pepsi-challenge, many Stradi­vari devo­tees end up pre­fer­ring the sound of the mod­ern violins.

So what does this tell you?

It tells you that expec­ta­tions over­ride perception:

• Wine in an expen­sive bot­tle tastes bet­ter than the same wine out of a jug or box.
• High-end name brands not only make us feel bet­ter about the prod­ucts, but about our­selves, as well.
• And pre­cious few peo­ple can pick out qual­ity on its own mer­its alone.

So here are 2 Mar­ket­ing To-Dos:

To-Do #1 = Get the Lit­tle Big Things Right; Aim for Mastery

This one is hard, but cru­cial. Just as the Stradivari’s excel­lence resides in hun­dreds of ele­ments, deftly aligned and opti­mized, so too is your brand made up of scores of touch points: your park­ing lot, bath­rooms, pack­ag­ing, on-hold mes­sag­ing, cus­tomer ser­vice reps, auto-responders, Web­site copy, and so on. And the same goes with any brand.

Case in point: after every launch of an Apple prod­uct, some knock-off jumps into the fray, her­alded as an i-killer due to it’s supe­rior specs or 1–2 killer func­tions. Yet these so-called i-killers always end up slaugh­tered in the mar­ket­place.  Why?

Because the appeal of Apple’s prod­ucts never rests on price, func­tion­al­ity, or specs alone. Apple prod­ucts are the Stradi­vari of the mar­ket­place because Steve Jobs and crew under­stand Myth #1; they push hun­dreds of small, seem­ingly tiny ele­ments in the right direc­tion to cre­ate a whole that’s much big­ger — and far more prof­itable — than the sum of its parts. Which is why the invari­ably leave the “sil­ver bul­let” prod­ucts in the dust.

So com­mit to mas­tery and push for added excel­lence on each small piece that goes into the process. Don’t rely on just one thing to pull you through.

To-Do #2 = Cre­ate Your Own Brand Mythology

This one’s a bit harder to explain, let alone pull off, but for starters, why not let your adver­tis­ing “Man­age Up” your sales, ser­vice, and tech­ni­cal staff? If you don’t cur­rently have a gen­e­sis story, worth shar­ing, why not go dig one up and pol­ish it off? In other words, share your pas­sion, so peo­ple know you have the raw emo­tional volt­age to power your­self to mas­tery of your craft.

Addi­tion­ally, focus on cre­at­ing the right mar­ket­ing cues.  Cues that’ll alert your cus­tomers that your prod­uct and ser­vice is the result of craft and not just auto­mated process. It could be as sim­ple as an expen­sive look­ing pack­ag­ing, or a hang tag on an item that nor­mally doesn’t have hang tags. Leav­ing a bit of skin on your “hand cut” french fries and sea­son­ing them with sea salt. There are hun­dreds of oppor­tu­ni­ties out there for busi­ness own­ers who’ll stop to search for them.

And while you’re think­ing about cues, spend some time pon­der­ing over what goes into the mythol­ogy behind a brand like Stein­way, Red Wing Boots, Snap-on Tools, etc.  Obvi­ously, qual­ity plays a huge role, but what else?  Why are these names pre­em­i­nent and known amongst the gen­eral pub­lic when Mason & Ham­lin pianos, White’s Boots, and Klein tools are not?

What can you do to help mythol­o­gize your brand?

Deep emo­tions almost always come as two-parters: emo­tions cen­tered on loss, trans­for­ma­tion, or full­fil­ment & redemp­tion all require a before and after. You have to show what a per­son had BEFORE in order to hit your audi­ence with the sense of what was lost AFTER.

This is why war movies always have a scene where the about-to-be-killed char­ac­ter shows his pic­ture of his girl back home and tells his bud­dies what he’s going to do after the war. The direc­tor is set­ting you up to feel the loss when the poor sap gets mowed down.

Among fic­tion writ­ers this before and after for­mat is known as a set-up and pay-off, and this two-part combo is an inte­gral part of any solid plot. With­out the two part struc­ture of set-ups and pay-offs, you just can’t pull off the pow­er­ful emo­tions that will really move your readers.

Nat­u­rally, this has tremen­dous impli­ca­tions for copy­writ­ing as well as fic­tion, report­ing, and so on. So I’ve cov­ered this essen­tial copy­writ­ing skill in depth in a two-part series (natch) over at Copyblogger:

• The Block­buster Secret to Seduc­ing Your Audi­ence, Part 1

and

• The Block­buster Secret to Seduc­ing Your Audi­ence, Part Deux

I hope you enjoy the series and that read­ing them pays off for you in your own writing.

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.