I’m staying in a beautiful coast town these days so I just went for a walk along the shore. The sun was shining, the trees were doing their thing, and the sea, a few cliffs below where I was walking, was shuffling restlessly from side to side. I got tempted — for just a moment — to take out my phone and take a picture.
“But what’s the point?” I told myself.
Because I realized a long time ago that the only time I think to take a picture is when I come across a scene that looks like pictures I’ve seen before.
“Gee, this looks just like a postcard. Better create another postcard myself!”
If you love to take pictures with your phone, my point is not to razz on you. Instead, I just want to point out, in case you feel like I feel — that so much photography is repetitive and redundant — that there’s a word for this.
The word was coined in 2014 by a guy named John Koenig. Koenig called this vague intuition many of us have probably had — he called it vemödalen.
So now, when you and I talk to our friends, we can call this feeling by its name and we can communicate it to others. We have a handle on it, and it’s much more real in our minds. (Well, it would be, if we could only remember the word vemödalen and know how to pronounce it.)
Before you start thinking I’m getting sentimental, let me turn things around to hard-core direct marketing. Specifically, something marketer Travis Sago shared once in a podcast, about how he does email marketing:
What’s different and what I found works really well and takes a lot of lifting off the writing is bringing out what symptoms do they have, what symptoms are they seeing or feeling or hearing in their life? What is he saying? What’s happening in their life and starting out with the symptoms.
[…]
I’ll have to admit, some days I’m just brain dead and I’ll just go with the problem. But it’s way more powerful to go with the symptom.
What Travis doesn’t say in this quote is that when he talks about a symptom, he will often focus on a “new” symptom. Not new in the sense that it just popped up… but new in the sense that nobody else has talked about it, and even his prospect might not have a conscious awareness of it.
Even better if you can give it a name. Kind of like vemödalen. That’s what Travis does — and he manages to convert something like 25% of his list over time.
But speaking of unnamed symptoms:
Do you know that feeling when you’re nearing the end of a novel, and you start to feel a bittersweet angst, knowing that the characters you’ve made friends with over the past weeks will disappear from your life? I checked, and it’s called lithatonophobia.
The good news is, you never need to feel lithatonophobia at the end of one of my blog posts. Because I write a new email each day with new marketing and copywriting content. And if you’d like to keep that in your life, here’s where you can join my newsletter.