Distribution

Ben Settle’s strange interest in selling to distracted and damaged addicts

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Marketer Ben Settle wrote a strange email on Friday to promote his mobile-first, app-based, course-delivery platform Learnistic. One of the arguments Ben gave for why mobile apps like Learnistic are the future is this:

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Everyone’s basically Gollum now.

Stroking their Precious phone in the dark.

Looking at it, checking in on it, making sure it’s safe and pulling it out just to make sure… not able to rest or bear to be too far away from it — all while scrolling, consuming content, and wrapping their very existence around it.

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By that same logic, I’m surprised Ben is still writing and sending emails.

I mean, if he’s interested in selling to distracted and damaged addicts, which is what he seems to be saying above, then it would make more sense to get himself on TikTok, or at least back on Facebook, rather than to keep writing and sending emails, a relatively low-addiction technology.

My experience, like I wrote a few days ago, is different. I’ve found that if you treat people how you’d like them to behave, then more often than not, they actually meet your expectations. Treat your customers like capable human beings, instead of like Gollum, and you will often find them to be that way.

But really, all the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes. That applies to Ben, and it applies to me also.

The fact is, I dislike my phone, and I hate apps. So maybe everything I wrote above is just justification for that.

I held out for years before I got a cell phone, even as everybody else around me got one. I held out much longer before I got a smart phone — basically until girls I was talking to started getting suspicious, and thinking my old-school Nokia must be a burner, and that I must really be married and hiding it.

Even now, with a smart phone in my pocket, I still refuse to use or download all but the most essential apps. And as much as I’ve learned from Ben himself, and as curious as I’ve gotten several times when he teased free content through his Learnistic app only, I’ve never once been tempted by him to download Learnistic.

That’s also why I host my courses inside the members-only area of my website, using technology from caveman days. It’s also why for my own personal work — journals, notes, research — I mainly use text files on my hard drive, a pre-caveman technology.

Anyways, tonight was the end of the launch for my Insight Exposed program. I only made that program available to people who are signed up to my email list. If you’d like to get on my email list, you can sign up for free by clicking here.

Promiscious upgrading is a very bad plan indeed

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A Copy Riddles member named Paul writes in:

Hello John,

I purchased Copy Riddles some months ago.

Will you give me (and all previous buyers) access to the member’s area now that the program is delivered on a website?

The answer is yes and no.

I definitely gave Paul access to the members-only area of my site where Copy Riddles is now hosted.

Hence the yes part in the “yes and no” above.

But I won’t do the same for all previous buyers — not unless they write me and ask. ​​Hence the no.

The reason I am not giving access automatically to all previous buyers is that I have to do it manually, and that takes some time and effort. And why go to that expense for someone who might not appreciate it? ​​In the words of the godfather of modern advertising, Claude Hopkins:

I consider promiscuous sampling a very bad plan indeed. Products handed out without asking or thrown on the doorstep lose respect. It is different when you force people to make an effort.

As it was for bars of soap a hundred years ago, so it is for the new Copy Riddles today.

If you have gone through Copy Riddles previously, in its old, email-based form, and you’d like me to upgrade you to the new, web-based form, just write me and ask. I will do it, as Joe Sugarman used to say, promptly and courteously.

And if you haven’t yet gone through Copy Riddles yet in any form, here’s what Paul (same Paul as above) had to say after I upgraded him to the new Copy Riddles:

What you offer in the “Copy Riddles Course” is a very clever and powerful way to improve our copywriting skills. It’s based on the work of the greatest copywriters. But it’s the kind of practical value you wouldn’t generally find in the books they wrote. In fact, I think there are very few copywriting courses that offer this level of practical value. Best of all, yours is very affordable. Thanks again John. Oh, and by the way, my mother tongue is French and I find that everything you present is clear and well explained, even though I am not a native English speaker.

In case you’d like to join Copy Riddles before the price goes up:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Become a scheme man

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“How the Grecian Mother Bathed her Baby”
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“Fine oils were cleansing agents for young and old. The Grecian mother used nothing else to bathe her babies, together with soft, tepid water. Modern science prescribes the same method for new-born infants.“

That’s from a 1915 ad for Palmolive soap. The ad was written by Claude Hopkins, who was on the Palmolive account back then.

Copywriters today are told to study Hopkins’s ads like this one. For the intriguing headline that gets attention… for the appeals to self-interest… for the proof in the form of reason why copy.

Fine. That’s all important stuff.

But you know what? Hopkins wasn’t primarily a copywriter. Primarily, he was a scheme man.

That was the term at the time for somebody we might call a marketer today. Because what marketers today do is really just apply and adapt ideas that guys like Hopkins invented at the start of the 20th century.

For example, do you know how Claude Hopkins took Palmolive from a product with almost no sales… to the biggest soap brand in the U.S.?

He didn’t do it with clever copy. He did it with a scheme.

Local grocery stores at that time didn’t stock Palmolive. Why should they? Nobody had ever heard of Palmolive, and there were plenty of other decent soaps.

So Hopkins ran ads. First, in one local market. Gradually, all over the country.

“This Coupon Gets You Something Worth 10¢”

The “something” was a bar of Palmolive soap. It cost 10¢ in 1911, and that was something. Something women wouldn’t throw away. Something they would demand from their local grocer.

Hopkins knew that they would do this… so he sent the same ad to grocers before running it in the newspaper. The message was clear:

“Women will come to you asking for their 10¢ gift of Palmolive soap. If you don’t have it, they will still get it, even if they have to go across the street to your competitor.”

So grocers stocked up on Palmolive soap before the newspaper ad ran.

And Hopkins’s initial Palmolive campaign… after the free giveaways were paid for… well, it created a 4-to-1 return on ad spend. With that kind of math, Hopkins soon had almost every woman in America holding a bar of Palmolive in her hand.

Frighteningly clever.

Because at the heart of it wasn’t the appeal to the fine “cleansing agents for young and old.” Sure, Palmolive soap was good enough for women to keep buying. But that wasn’t the key thing that sold it in the beginning.

It also wasn’t the free 10¢ Palmolive bar giveaway. That was important, but it wouldn’t have worked if women couldn’t get their hands on the actual soap.

No, the key was something else.

The key was the fear that Hopkins drove into the hearts of grocers across the country.

Because Hopkins didn’t try to appeal to the grocers’ greed. He didn’t say, “We have a great new soap. Stock it and you will profit.”

Nope.

He effectively threatened. “Stock Palmolive,” he quietly said, “or else you will lose your existing business.”

That’s a scheme. And if you’re a marketer, it’s a scheme that might be worth applying and adapting to your own brands and businesses today.

Anyways, that’s just one foundational thing I’ve learned from Claude Hopkins.

And clever as it is, it’s not nearly the most important thing I’ve learned from him.

The most important thing is something I wrote about in Commandment VI of my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

That commandment is not about copywriting tactics… not about marketing schemes… but about something much more fundamental that Claude Hopkins preached.

​​And yet, if you follow this one commandment, you will become a success… even if you’ve failed in everything until now… and even if you make all the mistakes you want going forward.

But you gotta read the book to find out the full story. Because if you don’t, other copywriters will. For more info:

https://www.bejakovic.com/10commandments