There’s a memorable scene in the 1997 flick Boogie Nights:
It’s New Year’s Eve, 1980.
Party at the house of Jack Horner, the porn director played by Burt Reynolds.
The assistant director, played by William H. Macy (the main guy in Fargo), is wandering through the crowd inside Horner’s house, looking for his wife.
Nobody has seen her.
Eventually William H. makes his way to the bedroom.
And he finds his wife there, banging some other guy.
Yet again.
So William H. walks out of the house and to his car…
He pulls out his gun from the glove compartment…
Locks the car…
Walks back inside the house…
To the bedroom…
Where, in cold blood, he shoots and kills the wife and her hump partner…
Before walking out of the bedroom and blowing his brains out in front of all the partygoers.
I bring up this scene because it brings up the power of possessiveness. Not just about cuckolded husbands who are pushed past the breaking point. It also works in marketing. As Claude Hopkins, the father of direct marketing, wrote a hundred years ago:
“When a man knows something belongs to him, even if it’s a trifle, he will make the effort to get it.”
For example, when Hopkins and the OG marketers like Robert Collier had a boring offer, like a history book or an inquiry form for an insurance policy…
They often wouldn’t focus the sale on that boring offer.
Instead, they would just notify the prospect they had something that belonged to him.
Like a pen with his name etched into it… Or an edition of the boring history book with the prospect’s name engraved on the spine.
This kind of marketing tactic isn’t so common in the digital marketing world. Or at least it’s not being done well.
That might be an opportunity for you. As the Boogie Nights scene shows, possessiveness is a deep human instinct, and it certainly didn’t disappear 100 years ago with Hopkins and Collier.
So if you are selling something online, it might be worth thinking a bit about modern day equivalents of the name-engraved book. Or the wife banging another guy.
For now, if you want some more help with marketing, whether for selling your products or merely returning other people’s property, then take a look here: