Here is a video of a smart man talking about smart things: Please ignore the bit about the Wright Brothers. It’s tosh. The rest of it, though, is an insightful bit of marketing. We don’t buy the what, or the how, we buy the why. Let me put it another way: We buy based on our emotions. We buy based on how the purchase makes us feel, and what crowd it makes feel part of. The important part is not so much making sure that your...
Selling ice to Eskimos
I’ve talked about understanding your audience before… But seriously, this MATTERS. If you’re trying to sell something, it matters more than anything else. If you don’t understand who you’re selling to, then you can’t understand how to sell. If you can’t understand how to sell… well, let’s just say you should maybe put off that Caribbean holiday for another year. Every social group has...
Ogilvy on Advertising (and – whisper it – where he’s wrong…)
I love this video. Ogilvy, of course, is an old master. The man is the Leonardo Da Vinci of direct response copy. That said… I do think there’s something he’s missing here. He’s right about a lot of stuff. Direct response is the advertising that makes the money, and it does that because it doesn’t care about pretty. It cares about dollars. Direct response is what makes your customers take action, right now. But...
3 things no copy can do without
It doesn’t matter whether you’re telling a story to sell, persuade, or entertain – there’s 3 things you always need: A beginning that grabs A middle that keeps An ending that lingers I was reminded of this by a post on the Nieman Storyboard – it’s talking about storytelling in journalism, but the principles of writing something that sticks in the reader’s head well after they’ve finished are pretty...
What separates you from Warren Buffett
There’s a few people who, it is generally recognised, Know Their Shit. Warren Buffett: when he talks about investing, you listen. Gary Bencivenga: sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods through direct mail copy. Anyone trying to sell anything would pay money to listen to him snore. St Steve of Jobs: whether you love or loathe Apple, there’s no denying that Steve Jobs was a genius in product design and marketing. The...
Writing a JV page – what everyone gets wrong
Been a bit quiet over the last week or so. We’ve been making some changes to the launch plans and that means changes to the JV page, though they’re all for the better. It hangs together far more coherently and presents a far better argument for why you should promote us. I’ll put a link up as soon as it’s live. This JV page isn’t like most JV pages out there. They’re mostly glorified noticeboards. ...