I’m making my way through an old issue of The New Yorker, from Mar 2023. I’m reading an article about seed and garden catalogues, which offer different strains of cabbage or beet for purchase by mail.
Fascinating, right?
Well, hold on. These seed and garden catalogues are mail-order businesses, and some have survived since the 19th century.
If you’re doing any kind of online marketing today, there’s probably something fundamental and (ahem) perennial to learn from businesses that have sold in a similar way for 100+ years.
So I pushed through the first page of the article. And I was rewarded. I read the following passage about what these seed catalogues really sell:
===
Seed and garden catalogues sell a magical, boozy, Jack-and-the-beanstalk promise: the coming of spring, the rapture of bloom, the fleshy, wet, watermelon-and-lemon tang of summer. Trade your last cow for a handful of beans to grow a beanstalk as high as the sky. They make strangely compelling reading, like a village mystery or the back of a cereal box. Also, you can buy seeds from them.
===
This is a great though unexpected illustration of something I read in Dan Kennedy’s No. B.S. Marketing of Seeds And Other Garden Supplies:
===
As a marketer, you have a choice between selling things with ham-handed, brute force, typically against resistance, or selling aspirations or emotional fulfillments with finesse, typically with little resistance.
===
Perhaps you will say that’s obvious.
Perhaps it is.
But how many businesses insist on selling seeds, or even the promise of large or fruitful plants, when in reality what their customers want is a village mystery, the coming of spring, or the tang of summer?
It’s all gotta mean something. Whatever you sell has got to go in a gift-box, and I’m not talking about cardboard or paper.
And now it’s time to sell something.
My offer to you today is my Most Valuable Email training. The seeds inside this training are a copywriting technique you can use every day to create more interesting and engaging content than you would otherwise.
But what I’m really selling is something else — a path to mastery. The feeling of growing competence with each email you write… the joy of looking and seeing patterns others don’t… the ability to transform yourself at will, from what you are right now into anything you want to be, in an instant, like Merlin in Disney’s Sword in the Stone.
For more information: