Grasping the Disadvantage

In defense of bad headlines

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I like to get my contact with the world through a news board called Hacker News. It works just like other news boards — popular and interesting article stick around for a longer time. In general, even the most popular articles stick around for only a few hours.

Yesterday, I went on Hacker News and I saw a terribly uninteresting article had appeared on the front page. The headline ran:

“What’s SAP, and why’s it worth $163B?”

“Geez,” I said, “who cares? I know all I need to know about SAP. It’s some big enterprise software company. Why would I ever want to read more about that?”

So I ignored this article.

And I had to keep ignoring it because a few hours later it was still there, getting more and more upvotes.

This morning, I sat down on a park bench with a croissant and checked Hacker News again. “What’s SAP” was still there, with about 10x the average upvotes of all the other posts on the HN front page.
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I sighed, hung my head, and clicked to read this stupid article.

​​And you know what?

It was fascinating.

I won’t repeat the article here. I will just tell you that it put the current moment into a bigger context and taught me something new about my world. (And yes, that new thing was about enterprise software.)

But this article did more than that.

For example, did you know that until the 1990s, 90% of software sold was custom-built, and not off-the-shelf?

Of course, today, it’s the exact opposite.

Which made me think about the direct response business. Could we be in a similar, pre-1990s situation right now when it comes to DR marketing funnels and sales copy? As in, 90% of copy today is still custom-written, instead of off-the-shelf?

You might say it’s a stupid question, and that it’s impossible to have off-the-shelf sales copy and marketing.

​​Or you might say it already happened, with companies like Clickfunnels, and with niche marketing providers like Vyral Marketing for real estate agents.

Whatever.

The point of this email is not this question of custom-built vs. off-the-shelf marketing. The point is simply that the “What’s SAP” article got me thinking in a new way.

And that’s really what I want to share with you today. A defense of bad headlines.

Because if you find yourself magically attracted to a headline — “I gotta read this!” — odds are good it’s because you are looking for confirmation of previously held views… or perhaps some small update on a topic you already know too much about.

On the other hand, when you find yourself completely repelled by a headline (“What’s SAP”), it might be time to stop and say, “Sounds horrific! But let me see what this is about.”

A couple days ago, I shared a talk given by a very successful and very influential marketer, Dan Kennedy, about thriving during a recession. In that talk, Dan said:

You pay attention to everybody else who’s in your business. It’s like being Amish. It works just like real incest. Everybody gets dumber and dumber and dumber until the whole thing just grinds to a halt.

So you can’t do that. You’ve got to pay attention outside your little Amish community of jewelers or carpet cleaners or whatever it is that, up until tonight, you thought you were.

You’ve got to pay attention to other stuff because you ain’t going to find any breakthroughs in the five other people standing in a circle looking at you. They aren’t any smarter than you are. They are probably dumber than you are.

I think that covers the M and the B in my M+B+C email formula. Now as for that C:

You might or might not already know that I offer an Email Marketing Audit.

So far, I’ve been selling my Email Marketing Audit by referring to results I have achieved for businesses I’ve worked with. The increases in conversion rates in email funnels… the millions of dollars of sales made by writing emails and managing email lists.

But there’s another good reason you might want to get me to look at your email marketing:

​​My non-Amish breadth of of experience in this field.

Off top of my head, I’ve consulted and worked on email funnels to sell weight loss supplements… shipping containers… pet supplies… sex and dating info products… essential oils… Internet marketing… fermented food preparation kits… realtor services… and real estate investing education.

Do you think this breadth of experience might help you and your business get out of incestuous and closed-minded marketing practices?

In case you do, ​​here’s where to go to get my Email Marketing Audit:

https://bejakovic.com/audit

The truth about bad breath

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Once upon a time, the mighty Persian king Darab took a wife from Greece.

Her name was Nahid.

Nahid was beautiful and the daughter of the king of Greece, Filqus.

One night, while Darab and Nahid lay in the same bed, Nahid turned towards Darab and exhaled in her sleep.

“My God,” said Darab to himself, “the stench!”

The next day, Darab asked his court physicians to see what could be done about his wife’s bad breath.

They gave her an herb, sekander. It fixed Nahid’s halitosis.

But it was too late. Darab’s fire for Nahid had cooled. So he shipped her back to Greece to her father, even though she was already well pregnant.

Filqus, Nahid’s father, was embarrassed by the whole situation. And rather than admit his daughter had been rejected by the king of Persia, he thought it sounded better to simply claim that he, Filqus, had gotten his daughter pregnant.

Nahid eventually gave birth to a baby boy. She gave him the name Sekander, I guess to remind her of her shame and lost love.

When Filqus died, Sekander became king of Greece. He put together an army, invaded Persia, conquered all who opposed him, and wound up on the Persian throne, which was really his by right, since he was the secret son of the Persian king.

If you’re wondering what the hell you just read, it’s how the Persians, back in the 10th century, told the story of Alexander the Great.

I’m sharing this with you for two reasons:

1. Because it shows the lengths of unlogic we will go to to protect our pride and ego.

2. Because contrary to what you might have heard, modern advertising did not invent bad breath.

What it did do however, is make people sensitive to the idea they themselves have bad breath… and the consequences this could have.

So starting in the 1920s, women were told that nobody would want them if they were hali-toxic (“Often a bridesmaid… never a bride”).

And men were told that bad breath would get them canned (“Employers prefer fastidious people… halitoxics not wanted”).

Meanwhile, the sales of Listerine mouthwash kept going up and up and up. In 1921, when Listerine was promoted mainly to dentists, sales stood at $100k per year. In 1927, after ads warning of halitosis had blanketed the country, $4 million worth of Listerine was sold. That’s equivalent to about $62 million in today’s money.

So my point for you is:

Much good advertising works like this.

It’s not enough to only speak to the very few who are aware of their problem and looking for a solution.

Entire vast, untapped markets are out there, full of potential prospects… people who aren’t aware of the problem, or what that problem really means for them.

Speaking of which:

Are you plagued by uncertainty and doubt? It might be because of work trouble. Specifically, a lack of new marketing and copywriting ideas you can implement every day. Clients and customers prefer marketers with new ideas… bores not wanted. In case you’d like a fix for that serious problem, here’s where to go.

How to turn good copy into great copy

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For the past several weeks I’ve been milking content ideas from a recent interview I heard with A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos. And I ain’t done yet. Here’s another valuable story from the same:

Once upon a time, while Parris was still getting his copy sea legs, he apprenticed under Clayton Makepeace.

Parris would write some copy. He’d submit it to Clayton. Clayton would fix it up, and the submit it to the client.

The clever thing Parris did was to ask Clayton for the final drafts. He’d go through and compare what Clayton had changed to the original he (Parris) had submitted.

As Parris got better and better through this process, there were fewer and fewer changes.

Until one time, there was only one change.

It was in a bit of copy that Parris had written about part-time jobs for people during retirement. One of these jobs was to be a mystery shopper. And it could earn you as much as $50,000 a year.

Pretty good, right?

Yes. Good. But then Clayton made it great, by adding a few words along the lines of:

“Imagine, $50,000 a year — just for going shopping!”

Parris said that Clayton was a natural-born persuader. And one powerful thing he did instinctively was help people “grasp the advantage.”

That’s a term from Vic Schwab’s book, How to Write a Good Advertisement. Schwab said you first show people an advantage… them you prove it… and then you help them grasp it.

You can do this grasping part in a bunch of different ways.

Clayton’s example above is of the form, “You’re doing X anyways, so why not get Y benefit?”

But there are many others. I spelled out a few of them to my email subscribers.

What? You’re not subscribed to my email newsletter? But you’re reading my stuff anyways, so why not get the full story, with all the lessons laid out on a platter for you? Here’s where to subscribe.

A devious and cynical way to open up new markets

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“A woman’s arm! Poets have sung of it, great artists have painted its beauty. It should be the daintiest, sweetest thing in the world. And yet, unfortunately, it isn’t always.”

After James Webb Young wrote those lines in 1919, women in his social circle stopped talking to him.

Even his female copywriter colleagues gave him dirty looks.

Young was working for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. His task was to promote the first-ever antiperspirant, Odorono.

Young’s first crack at this account was a fairly standard ad. It attacked the popular belief that an antiperspirant is dangerous stuff.

Sales limped upwards, and then flattened.

A subsequent door-to-door survey revealed that women knew about Odorono. But only one third used it. Two thirds believed they didn’t need it.

So Young wrote another ad. The headline read, “Within The Curve of a Woman’s Arm.”

It was this ad that got him those dirty looks.

It also made Young’s career… it doubled sales of Odororno (which eventually became a million-dollar company, back in 1920s money)… and it made millions of women newly self-conscious.

The point of all this is the power of tying in what you’re selling to people’s insecurities.

Genuine insecurities.

Because today it’s enough to say, “Bad BO?”

But back in 1920, you couldn’t do that. Women smell-tested themselves. They smelled fine.

That’s why Young had to create a problem. He took the idea of perspiration… and he tied it to being undesirable — and clueless about it.

Devious? Yes.

Cynical? Absolutely.

Profitable? Like a mother.

And something to keep in mind, if you too are in the business of opening new markets.

(By the way, in case you think this is another example of horrible double standards for women… Men got their own deodorant, starting in 1935. Before then, man-musk was considered a good thing. So how did advertisers sell the American man on demusking himself? They did the same damn thing. They tied it to the possibility of stinking up the office… and the emasculation of being fired.)

One final point:

If you like cynical and devious ideas, you might like my daily email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

“Reach the maximum limits of your full potential market”

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“This is exactly how I ended up having to get stitches for the first and only time in my life.”

This spring, I had to sell a knife-sharpening gizmo. It was faster, cheaper, and easier to use than a whetstone.

But who cares?

There’s tiny demand for knife-sharpening gizmos of any kind, and it’s unlikely that many people will be swayed by a feature comparison.

What I needed to do was to expand the universe… to take it out of the small space of people who are looking for a better (or any) knife sharpener… and into the much bigger world of people who use kitchen knives but never give a thought to sharpening them.

So what to do?

I ended up telling a story involving a dull chef’s knife, a green bell pepper, and a cut that required four stitches. I created a problem in the reader’s mind where there wasn’t one.

“Dull knife? Yeah, I really don’t care.”

“Sliced-open finger? Geez, what can I do to make sure this won’t happen to me?”

In general, you don’t want to sell to people who are indifferent to the problem you claim to solve.

The only reason you ever would want to do this… is because you are very greedy. Because in most markets, the segment of indifferent prospects dwarfs the knife-sharpener connoisseurs. As Gene Schwartz wrote in Breakthrough Advertising:

“What do you have left [after you can’t talk about your product]? Your market, of course! And the distinct possibility that by broadening your appeal beyond price, product function or specific desire, you can reach the maximum limits of your full potential market; consolidate splinter appeals; and increase the sales of your product at a fantastic rate.”

That’s all on the topic of indifference for today…

Except, I want to ask if you consider yourself a marketing high-flier?

Because a lot of marketing high-fliers are joining my email newsletter these days. If you want to find out why, click here and try it for yourself.

Lost in translation

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“You can no longer function as a man.”

“When I came in to open up one morning, there you were, with your head half in the toilet. Your hair was in the toilet water. Disgusting.”

“You’re weak, you’re out of control, and you’ve become an embarrassment to yourself and everybody else.”

These are some of the great lines from a drug intervention scene in The Sopranos. Soon after that last line, a fight breaks out, and the interventionists end up kicking the drug addict in the ribs while he’s on the ground.

Of course, that’s not how an intervention is supposed to go.

The theory is that, when one person tries to persuade you, there’s always a translation problem. In other words, your brain is always asking:

“What is this goon really trying to say, and why is he saying it to me?”

That’s why interventions are supposed to work. Multiple people, shouting the same message, make it more likely that the message will get through.

But what if you don’t have the luxury of marshaling multiple people to kick your prospect in the ribs?

What if you only get one kick? How do you convince somebody who’s perfectly ok as is… that he’s got a problem and it’s time to get help?

I’ve got some ideas about this. In fact, I’ve shared them in previous editions of my daily newsletter. Ideas such as:

A) Showing your prospect how his indifference is not really his choice.

B) Using open-ended questions to get your prospect to paint a vision of his own horrible future for himself.

C) Working backwards from an outcome your prospect wants to avoid (that HE wants – not that you think he should want), and showing him why he’s currently headed there.

But I’m a sucker for lost causes, and that includes convincing people who don’t want to be convinced. And I’m always looking for more ways to get around the translation problem.

If this is something that interests you… and you want a report on what I find… you can sign up for my daily email newsletter by clicking here.

The first millennial saint and the miracle of concreteness

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Carlo Acutis, born 1991, died 2006, was beatified today by the Catholic Church.

The next step is for Acutis to be made a saint — the first millennial saint, if God and Church will it.

So what’s the story?

Acutis lived a pretty holy life before dying of leukemia at age 15. He worked to help the poor… he defended the rights of the disabled… he documented Eucharistic miracles and used his programming skill to make a website that catalogued them.

But that’s not what got him beatified. Instead, it took a literal miracle.

As you might know, when the pharisees came to Jesus to ask for a sign of his divinity… Jesus scorned them and sent them away.

But the Catholic Church doesn’t operate like that.

The Catholic Church requires you to perform a documented miracle in order to be beatified… and two if you want to become a saint. (Acutis supposedly helped a Brazilian boy get healed of a pancreatic defect.)

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not here to harp on the Catholic Church or to nitpick whether they’re consistent with the words of Jesus.

I simply want to point out that if, like the Catholic Church, you want to appeal to everyone (and the Catholic Church does, it’s right there in the name)…

Then you can’t be as dismissive as Jesus was when people ask you for a sign.

Because the multitudes need miracles… they need signs… or if you want to put it into persuasion and influence terms, they need concreteness.

Listing logical reasons and abstract arguments… that’s hard to people to get a grasp on. But giving demonstrations, showing case studies, or just citing specifics… well, that can be miraculously persuasive.

Perhaps you find all this blasphemous. Perhaps you feel that not every decent human act needs to be a lesson about persuasion and manipulation. In that case, you definitely won’t be interested in my daily email newsletter.

On the other hand, if you were not offended by the discussion above and you want to get on that newsletter… then click here.

 

Making missed opportunities hurt

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I’m at the seaside for a few days. Last night, after the fortieth glass of aperol, the decision was made to go for an “early-morning swim” today.

Today however, thanks to that same aperol, morning came later than usual. And then there was breakfast and some packing and a bit of standing around on the balcony. The early-morning swim plans turned into mid-day swim plans.

And then it started to rain. There would be no swimming after all.

Typical. At least in my life. Because in my experience, you can screw up in two ways:

You can take action and do something dumb… or you can not take action and miss an opportunity.

I’ve noticed in my own life that I’m much more likely to not take action, just like this morning, than to get overeager and get into trouble.

And I guess I am not the only one.

I read in Daniel Kahmenan’s Thinking Fast and Slow that we humans have a reliable bias in this direction.

It’s not just laziness.

But somewhere deep down in our monkey and lizard brains, we believe we will regret a mistake much more if we actively did something to bring it about… rather than if we just sat by, staring out the window, watching the clouds gather.

If Kahneman is right — and why wouldn’t he be, the guy’s got a Nobel Prize after all — then it’s another notch in favor of writing over-the-top, emotionally supercharged, manipulative sales copy.

Because sales copy, in spite of what many people will tell you, is not just like an ordinary conversation. You can’t just present a sober, reasoned argument and have people jumping out of bed.

Instead, you’ve got to create such desperation and fury in your prospect’s mind not only to overcome his natural laziness… but to overcome his fear of trudging all the way down to the beach, and then getting drenched in ice-cold rain. That’s gonna take some hyperbole. It’s gonna take some drama.

Finally, here’s a vision I want to paint in your mind:

I have an email newsletter. Each day I write a short email about copywriting and marketing lessons I’m learning.

If you like, you can sign up for the newsletter here. Or you can just wait. The opportunity will still be there tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that.

The “translation problem” of persuasion

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I recently learned about the “translation problem” in persuasion.

For example, if I recommend a movie to you (like I did in my post a few days ago), you don’t really know whether to take that recommendation.

After all, my taste in movies is probably not the same as yours. I might also be recommending the movie for some reason you don’t care about (like learning better storytelling).

In other words, when I tell you a movie is great and you should watch it, you have to translate what that really means for you.

But there’s another way to look at this problem, which is more relevant for every-cent-counts direct marketing.

Specifically, I’m talking about the marketer’s job of translating a message into language his reader cares about, or at least understands.

I gave an example of this in yesterday’s post. In 1983, President Reagan got convinced of the importance of cyber security. A part of how this happened was the format of that persuasive message — a story, as told in the movie WarGames.

But another part of this persuasive message was that cyber security — a non-issue in 1983 — was translated into the threat of nuclear war.

Think about this for a moment. Another story probably wouldn’t have worked. A movie in which a hacker controls a weather satellite for a business man’s evil plans (Superman III, also from 1983) probably wouldn’t have gotten Reagan to take action on cyber security.

So what’s that point here?

It’s the old story. It was financier Bernard Baruch who, according to copywriting legend, summed up what it means to persuade:

“Find out what people want, and show them how to get it.”

Except, there are many situations in today’s sophisticated market where you don’t want to make overt promises. So instead of focusing on the positive outcome, you focus on the negative present. In that case, the real translation problem of persuasion becomes:

“Find out what people are afraid of, and show them how to avoid it.”

But whatever you do, don’t put out a message and hope your reader will translate it into terms he cares about. That’s your job. As copywriting coach David Garfinkel likes to say, “Either you work and get paid, or your reader works and gets paid.”

Do you want more of these kinds of persuasion lessons? I’ve got an email newsletter, where I send out one such essay each day. If you find that it’s not for you, you can always unsubscribe. To sign up, click here.

Persuasion WarGames

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In 1983, nobody cared much about the Internet. The web hadn’t been invented yet. There was no AOL. And 99.9% of Americans had never heard the word modem.

Back then, not even sci-fi movies had a conception of anything like Facebook or amazondating.co. It took a special kind of visionary to see the big future of this new technology — and the possible risks it could bring.

Among these rare visionaries was then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

​​One evening at Camp David, Reagan watched a recently released film starring Matthew Broderick, called WarGames. Broderick plays a teenage computer hacker who hacks into NORAD’s missle control systems, and almost sets off WWIII by accident.

A few days after watching the movie, Reagan talked to his generals. He wanted some answers. Is this kind of scenario really possible?

The generals and their minions got to work investigating the topic. After some furious paper folding and shuffling, they came back with a report. “Mr. President, the situation is much worse than you might think.”

To make short tale, Reagan ordered this situation fixed immediately. So the U.S. government and military tightened up their cyber security. Several months later, Congress passed a comprehensive cyber crime bill. It’s still the centerpiece of Internet security law today.

This Reagan anecdote shows the power of a story in persuading. But it’s also an illustration of something more subtle — but just as powerful.

I’m talking about a way to persuade people who don’t currently see any problem with the status quo. This can be used widely to reach unaware audiences, and is a clever way to stir up interest and action, without triggering the brain’s anti-persuasion radar.

But today’s post is already getting as long as the script to WarGames. Interesting note about that script:

It was written by Lawrence Lasker, a family friend of Reagan’s and grandson to Albert Lasker, the “father of modern advertising.” The elder Lasker was the owner of the Lord & Thomas advertising agency, which employed such legendary copywriters as John E. Kennedy and Claude Hopkins.

But like I said, today’s post is already getting long. So I’ll tell you about this important persuasion principle in more detail tomorrow.

But do you want me to send you an email with that update tomorrow? If so, sign up for my daily email newsletter here.