Insight Marketing

Guilt deflection

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Here’s a powerful persuasion tactic for your copy and private life. Let me illustrate it with a dramatic scene from the Seven Samurai, in which the samurai find the farmers’ hidden stash of armor and weapons.

A bit of background in case you haven’t seen the movie:

A poor village is being strangled by marauding thieves. So the farmers hire seven samurai for defense. The samurai aren’t getting paid much, but they agree because of the honor of defending the poor helpless village.

And then they find the hidden stash of armor and weapons.

How did the farmers get it? There’s only one way. They must have killed and robbed to get it. And they killed and robbed retreating samurai.

Six of the seven samurai are disappointed and angry. Then the seventh samurai, Kikuchiyo, played by Toshiro Mifune, starts to fume.

“Well, what do you think farmers are? Saints?”

Nooo, he explains. Farmers are cowards who lie, cheat, pretend to be oppressed… and yet they have hidden stores of food where you will never find them.

“They are the most cunning and untrustworthy animals on Earth,” Kikuchiyo says.

And then, he suddenly stops.

“But who made animals out of them? You!”

The other samurai are stunned. How are we to blame, they seem to say.

“Each time you fight,” Kikuchiyo explains, “you burn their villages, you destroy their fields, you take away their food, you rape the women and enslave the men. And you kill them when they resist.”

And then Kikuchiyo falls to his knees and starts to sob. It turns out he is not really all that samurai… he also comes from a farmer family.

Anyways, the point is that in the movie, this works. The samurai accept the farmers for what they are, and they stick around to defend the village.

I call this guilt deflection. It’s a powerful technique to use in your copy.

Because where there’s trouble, there’s guilt being assigned. As I’ve written before, in the copywriting space, that guilt is often directed inwards.

People feel there’s something wrong with them… that they are the ones to blame for their ongoing unsolved problems.

You can’t just skip over that. If you do… if you jump straight into your promise and how great it will be to finally get there… you will just make your prospect disappointed and maybe angry.

So here’s what to do instead.

Yell at your prospect. “Yes, it’s true! You are the most cunning and untrustworthy animal on Earth. But who made you that way?”

And then deflect your prospect’s guilt. Give him an explanation that shifts that guilt somewhere outside him. To other people… to institutions… to ways of doing business.

And like I said, this can work in your private life, too. I learned this from a friend who told me the best way to deal with a woman’s accusation is to accuse her of something in turn. I tried it and… well, I guess that’s a story for another time.

Exploiting the disorder spectrum for marketing mischief

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About ten years ago, Dean Burnett went on TV and invented a new psychological disorder.

The background of the story is this:

Some English TV channel was making a documentary about personality quirks. So they invited Burnett to say something, since he is a neuroscientist with a diploma to prove it. At the end of the segment, they asked if Burnett had any personality quirks of his own.

Burnett was stumped. He had nothing to report really. But he didn’t want to disappoint under the glaring lights of a TV studio.

So he told a personal story about baking a potato, and he turned it into a condition.

Burnett was once baking a potato in the oven. He sat in the kitchen, reading a book, occasionally checking the potato. It looked so lonely, Burnett thought, all alone in the large oven. So he popped open the oven door and threw in another potato to keep the first fella company.

Back in the TV studio, Burnett concluded:

“I only found out later I’ve got what’s known as lonely potato syndrome.”

It was meant as a joke, or something like it. But it took on a life of its own. A crew member in the studio took Burnett aside later. “I might be suffering from lonely potato, too.” The show producer confided the same. Burnett says that now, years later, he still hears of people who feel afflicted by this condition.

In case I’m not making it clear, these people are serious. And they are concerned, or at least intrigued.

And here’s where I want to tell you my idea of a disorder spectrum:

On the one extreme of this spectrum, you’ve got genuine insights.

Some smart and caring person spots that a bunch of symptoms tend to go together. This gives hope for a common cause to it all, and maybe a common treatment. So this smart and caring person gives it a name — attention deficit disorder, shiny object syndrome — and puts it out into the world for people to be aware of.

But then there’s the other side of the spectrum. It’s something I heard marketer Will Ward speculate on a few days ago. It’s where you name a new disorder or syndrome, with no insight, research, or value to back it up.

When Will brought up this idea, I didn’t think it had legs. Not without some kind of real substance. But the Dave Burnett story changed my mind. It seems a new name, along with a bit of authority, is all you need to create a disorder out of thin air.

So where do you take this?

That’s for you to decide. Maybe you can just create a harmless identity for your followers. But it certainly seems like this could open the door to marketing mischief. At least in the hands of the right person, suffering from “uncertain identity” disorder.

Don’t know about uncertain identity disorder? It’s something I discuss in more detail in my email newsletter. But you’ll have to sign up to find out more. Here’s where to do that.

Stop reading this blog unless you want to march in my army

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How do you overcome somebody’s confirmation bias?

That’s something I found out today in a provocative article titled the “Curation/Search Radicalization Spiral.”

The article tells the story of a 13-year-old Jewish kid from Washington D.C. who became a true-believing moderator of an alt-right subreddit.

The story itself is less interesting than it sounds. What is interesting is how Mike Caulfield, the author of the article, explains how this kind of “grooming” happens.

How could a Jewish kid from a liberal family be persuaded to join a far-right community, made up of people who are often hostile to Jews?

And more broadly, how is it possible to overcome somebody’s confirmation bias… and implant ideas that were once inconceivable?

I won’t repeat Caulfield’s entire argument here. But the gist is the idea of gradual curation. Here’s how it works:

1. A person (the mark, for short) goes to a subreddit or a Facebook group or somebody’s blog.

2. There he gets exposed to a curated claim. This is a claim that is carefully selected, provocative, but not threatening to his world view.

For example, the 13-year-old above was accused of sexual harassment by a classmate. So maybe he came across a claim on Reddit that said, “Study in Cambridge Law Journal reports up to 90% of rape allegations are false.”

3. At this point, the mark is intrigued but also a bit cautious. So he goes on to verify the claim for himself by doing a quick Google search. There it is, “Rumney, Philip N.S. (2006). ‘False Allegations of Rape’. Cambridge Law Journal. 65 (1): 128–158.”

4. Mind is blown. Now the mark is ready to repeat the process one level down… with another curated but more provocative claim, which gets him closer to the alternate reality.

None of this is news to marketers. Curating facts is what good direct response copy is all about, and Gene Schwartz wrote about “gradualization” back in 1966.

There are even copy tricks to simulate verifying something yourself. But maybe it’s a bit tasteless to give you a step-by-step here, since we started by talking about the radicalization of a 13-year-old.

So instead, let me tell you what I personally get out of this. It might be relevant to you also:

The upshot for me is to avoid curated content as much as possible. That means turning off social media… news sites… and I hate to say it, newsletters like mine.

Because everybody has an agenda. And if you give somebody a freeway into your mind that’s open 24 hours a day, every day, it gets harder to resist that agenda.

You start being groomed… and the next thing you know, you might be marching in somebody else’s army, fighting somebody else’s war, fully convinced it was your idea all along.

Learning from my hurt sense of importance

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I had a run in with the police two weeks ago.

They stopped me on a dark and abandoned road. They frisked me. They rifled through my wallet. They opened my box of takeout food and sniffed at the dumplings inside.

In the end, they gave me a fine. “Would you like to pay now?” they asked.

I said no.

They seemed surprised. “Then you have five days to pay at the police station. Otherwise you won’t be able to travel or leave the country.”

I’m telling you this story because it illustrates Dale Carnegie’s first rule of dealing with people. Carnegie says, never criticize, condemn, or complain.

When the policemen stopped me, I was pretty sure I wasn’t doing anything wrong. But when they gave me the fine, I became 100% sure I wasn’t doing anything wrong. The policemen were being arbitrary and stupid, and I could prove it. Or as Carnegie says,

“Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself.”

But that’s not all.

Because I never did pay the fine. “What can they do to me?” I reasoned.

I pictured the two cops checking their police computer, day after day… seeing my fine not being paid. In my fantasy, they shook their heads in frustration. “All that work we put in… for nothing!” A smile spread across my face.

But I also imagined getting stopped at the airport when it was time to fly out. I imagined being taken to a small windowless room, with those two same policemen waiting for me.

It made me nervous for days. But no matter. I would spite myself and not pay the fine — just to spite the stupid and unjust police.

And that’s part two of Carnegie’s argument against criticism:

“Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.”

This applies if you’re talking to people one-on-one. And it applies to your copy also.

Some copywriters — particularly when starting out — try to be edgy and insult or mock the prospect. Like this weight loss ad that started:

“ATTENTION ALL FAT PEOPLE! DOES YOUR GARBAGE MAN DELIVER INSTEAD OF COLLECT, AND THEN YELL ‘CHOW TIME!?'”

Don’t scoff. That radio ad was written by a young and cocky Gary Halbert. It pulled in a grand total of 3 sales after thousands of dollars of ad spend.

Of course, your prospect might really be in the wrong. He might be the one to blame. But if that’s what you want to make him see, don’t say so.

Only do it indirectly. For example, by telling him a cautionary tale of somebody else making a similar mistake. Otherwise, your prospect might spite himself — even if he might want your product otherwise — just to spite you.

Hopefully your sense of importance is still in tact. And if you’d like to subscribe to my email newsletter, 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.

The breakthrough from the first time Parris Lampropoulos met Clayton Makepeace

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Parris Lampropoulos once told a story about the first time he got to hang out with one of his mentors, Clayton Makepeace.

At this time, Clayton was one of the most successful freelance copywriters in the world. He had a list of controls longer than a giraffe’s tail. And he was pulling in over $1M a year, back when that was Hollywood money.

In part, Clayton did it by having a stable of talented junior copywriters, including Parris, working under him.

So at one point, Clayton invited the copywriters working for him out to Lake Tahoe. And it was a sight to see.

Clayton was staying there at the presidential suite at a ritzy hotel… getting pampered with massages and facials… eating out at the fanciest restaurants… and picking up the tab for his guests.

Generous.

And for Parris, a breakthrough.

Because at that time, Parris had already been a freelance copywriter for several years. He said he knew intellectually that a freelance copywriter could make Clayton-levels of money… but he still didn’t feel it deep inside.

He needed to see it with his own eyes, in order to make it a reality in his own life. Which is exactly what happened — in the months and years following that first in-person meeting with Clayton in Tahoe.

I bring this up because:

1) It might be useful to you if you are also hoping to reach Hollywood levels of success, and because

2) On a psychological level, your prospect is the same as Parris was back then.

Your prospect might know intellectually what you’re trying to convince him of… but odds are, he still doesn’t feel it deep down.

That’s why the most common writing advice is to show and not tell. And that’s why the most common copywriting advice is to use stories and demonstration. Because these are the most powerful tools you have to drive home a point — even one your prospect has heard a million times — and finally make it real.

And then, you can make your pitch. For example:

I have an email un-newsletter, where I talk about not new, but still valuable, fundamentals of persuasion and marketing. If you’d like to subscribe, here’s where to go.

Intuition pump

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Let me share a fictional story I just read in an anarchist copywriter ezine:

One morning in a certain November, a man named John Bejakovic walked out onto his driveway and down to the mailbox.

All around, the street was empty, as it had been for days. His neighbors, like most people around the world, were in a panic, and stayed out of the open as much as possible.

Each night, experts on the teletron warned of unusual bursts of cosmic gamma rays. The experts said these gamma rays could cause serious DNA damage. And while some people seemed to handle the gamma rays just fine, others suffered for weeks with strange symptoms. Still others died.

John opened his mailbox. Among the usual junk mail — magalogs from Boardroom and Phillips Publishing — he saw a thin white envelope. He recognized it immediately. It was an occasional newsletter John was subscribed to, written and published by an expert in persuasive communication.

As always, on the top of the white envelope, in large black letters, there was a “teaser.” This week, it read:

“AN HONEST MISTAKE?”

John walked back inside, magalogs under his arm. He tossed the magalogs into the trash, sat down on the couch, and ripped open the envelope.

“I’ve been warning you all year long,” the newsletter started. “The world is finally starting to realize that the Great Gamma Ray Hysteria is nothing more than a seasonal flareup of space radiation. The question is, how did we get here?”

The newsletter then went into a bunch of reasoned arguments. John scratched his head, and scanned over the remaining pages. Expert opinion… statistics… data. Not only was this whole gamma ray thing not real, the newsletter argued, it was purposefully fabricated.

“Yawn,” John said out loud, even though nobody was in the room with him. “How could an expert in persuasive communication write something like this?”

John tossed the newsletter aside, and grabbed an issue of the New Yorker from the coffee table. He was in the middle of an article about philosopher Daniel Dennett. The article picked up:

“Arguments, Dennett found, rarely shift intuitions; it’s through stories that we revise our sense of what’s natural. (He calls such stories ‘intuition pumps.’) In 1978, he published a short story called ‘Where Am I?,’ in which a philosopher, also named Daniel Dennett, is asked to volunteer for a dangerous mission to disarm an experimental nuclear warhead.”

“Now that’s what I’m talking about!” John said, slapping the page. He rushed to his writing desk and got out a piece of paper. “I’ll show him,” he said out loud, even though there was nobody else in that room either.

Hey it’s me again. I mostly wanted to share this fictional story because the main character has the same name as me. What are the odds?

But the story gets increasingly pornographic after this point, so I won’t bother reprinting it verbatim.

The gist of the action is that the guy started to write a letter to the persuasion expert. He wanted to complain about the boring newsletter. But he ripped the letter up because he realized he was making the same mistake of trying to make his point through argument.

So instead, he wrote a short story about unicorns, and about an evil wizard who poisons their meadow. He published his story in Teen Vogue, where it went viral, and wound up being read verbatim on the Dr. Oz teletron show.

What nobody realized is that the story was just an exercise — a trojan horse to make the same point about the gamma rays, but in a more persuasive way.

And after the story was read on Dr. Oz, people around the world had a mass change of heart and started walking out onto the streets again. And you can imagine how that went, with all the surging gamma radiation raining down from heaven.

Anyways, like I said, a fictional story. But I had to share it just because of the coincidence of the name. And who knows, maybe you can draw some value out of it.

Speaking of newsletters, I’ve also got one. It’s email, not paper, and it arrives every day, not only occasionally. Here’s the optin.

How to create a selling style people love to read

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Let’s talk about the infamous Arthur P. Johnson.

I say “infamous” because the man was as unlikely as anyone ever to become a successful sales copywriter.

Johnson graduated from Swarthmore College with highest honors. He then went to Oxford University for a graduate degree. He had ambitions of becoming a poet, and a backup plan of becoming an academic.

Yet, through a chance runin at a bar with a former classmate, Johnson gradually got sucked into the world of direct response. He first worked at the Franklin Mint, writing copy for collectibles (a good education — how do you sell something with no obvious benefits?).

He next worked in product development at another collectibles company. Finally, even though he did not want to write copy any more, he stumbled into freelance copywriting. And that’s when things really took off.

Johnson wrote controls for a number of major publishers, including Boardroom and Agora. He made himself a fortune in the process.

He was so successful he made it onto Brian Kurtz’s Mount Rushmore of greatest copywriters, along with Parris Lampropoulos, David Deutsch, and Eric Betuel.

And here’s the lesson. When Arthur P. Johnson was asked what he attributes his success to, he said the following:

“I think that I’m able to sell products in a more entertaining way than a lot of other people are. I think that being entertaining while you are selling is a big key to success in a very crowded marketplace these days, because you really have to buy people’s attention.”

Johnson did most of his work in the 90s and 2000s. But this lesson, about having to be entertaining to sell, is even more true today than it was back then.

I’m proof of this.

Not with these emails, where I rarely sell anything.

But starting earlier this year, I’ve helped move hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ecommerce products.

​​I’ve done it by writing emails, much like this one, that tell some kind of story or share a joke or just a funny picture. And those emails most often link to advertorials I also wrote… which contain more of the same — stories, fake personal confessions, and light humor (so I think).

The thing is, I’m not particularly entertaining in real life, or when writing things other than copy. In other words, all this entertainment stuff can be learned by rote.

So how do you learn it?

Two ways:

First, start paying attention to the books, shows, emails, and movies you yourself find entertaining.

Second, read or re-read Commandment IX of my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

No, this chapter is not a how-to for writing entertaining copy. But it will give you some successful examples of such copy that are running right now.

Plus it will even give you some advice on who and what to study if you want to get better at entertaining in your copy.

And once you start to entertain in your copy, expect people to comment on how interesting your writing is. Expect to have them say how they look forward to hearing from you. And most of all, expect to have them buy — as long as you’ve got anything to sell.

Speaking of which, I happen to have something to sell tonight. In case you don’t yet have my 10 Commandments book, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

A three-act election story

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I broke my long-standing rule of not reading the New York Times to bring you the following:

In Povalikhino, a tiny village in the Russian heartland, the incumbent mayor was running for re-election. But there was a problem:

He had no opposition candidate.

According to the NYT article, Russian elections always need an opposition candidate. That’s to make it appear fair, because the ruling party candidate always wins. Well, almost always.

In this case, the political machine went in search of a patsy to run against the mayor. They asked the local butcher, cobbler, and the high school chemistry teacher.

Nobody was willing to get roped in.

Fortunately, Marina Udgodskaya, the janitor at the mayor’s office, finally accepted the role of running against her own boss.

And she won. In a landslide.

Nobody’s quite sure where it all went wrong. But the fact is that the villagers of Povalikhino voted Udgodskaya into office. She now sits behind the mayor’s desk in the office she used to clean. She said her first priority will be to fix the public lighting in the village.

Meanwhile, the old mayor refuses to speak to the media. According to his wife, he never even wanted the job himself. He finds the topic of losing to the cleaning woman painful… and blames his wife. “You got me into this,” Mrs. Former Mayor reported her husband as saying.

I’m not sharing this story with you to illustrate the importance of voting. I’m of the school that voting doesn’t matter (well, unless you’re voting in a village of three hundred people).

Instead, I just thought this was a good story.

It’s got an Act 1, an Act 2, an Act 3. It’s got tension, drama, and surprise.

I bring this up because I often see people telling “stories” in copy that don’t have these basic elements.

“Mayor needs an opposition candidate, but cannot find one. The end.”

“Mayor needs an opposition candidate, gets a local lawyer to run against, and then the mayor wins as usual. The end.”

“Mayor needs an opposition candidate, which is how things go in Russia, for example this other time there was a second election and…”

Those are events, yes. But they are not stories — at least the kind that suck readers in and sell something.

Incidentally, if you want an education in how to write good stories in your copy… you can’t go wrong by reading the New York Times. Not for the facts. But to observe the outrage they evoke in their readers, and for the subtle sales techniques.

Or you can just sign up for my daily email newsletter. It’s not as outrageous as the New York Times. But it can teach you something about sales and storytelling. If you’re willing to take the risk, click here to subscribe.

Bring out the T-Rex to persuade the unpersuadable

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Picture the following fantastical scene:

Venture capitalist John Hammond is having lunch with three scientists and one lawyer.

Behind Hammond, on the dining room walls, photos are flashing. They show different planned rides at Hammond’s future entertainment complex.

Hammond in opening a place called Jurassic Park. The three scientists are there to give their expert opinion on this project.

They have just seen their first live dinosaurs. It was an awe-inspiring experience.

So Hammond is expecting an enthusiastic endorsement. But then one of the scientists, a black-clad mathematician named Ian Malcolm, starts to speak.

“The lack of humility before nature that’s being displayed here staggers me,” Malcolm says. “Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet’s ever seen. But you wield it like a kid that’s found his dad’s gun.”

Malcolm goes on to explain the root cause of the problem. Success came too easy… Hammond put in no effort to make this achievement… and that’s why he gives no thought to responsibility or consequences.

The other two scientists carefully agree. Hammond, they believe, does not realize the risks he is dealing with.

So what do you think happens?

Does John Hammond say, “By Jove, I hadn’t thought of it like that. I’ll have to give this more thought. In the meantime, let’s put the opening of the park on hold.”

Of course not. You’ve probably seen the original Jurassic Park movie, from which this scene is taken.

What happens is that Hammond listens patiently. He’s a bit surprised the scientists are not on his side.

But no matter. With a chuckle, he shrugs off their warnings. And he sends them on a disastrous tour of the park.

If you’ve been reading my site for a while, you know I’ve written about the persuasive power of analogies and the problem mechanism.

Well you get both in the scene above. “Like a kid that’s found his dad’s gun” is the analogy… “Success came too easy” is the problem mechanism.

And yet, no change of heart.

Because to a person like Hammond, who’s set enough in his current ways of thinking… no argument will be persuasive.

So what can you do if it’s your job to persuade somebody like that?

Simple. But not easy.

You bring out the T-Rex.

After the T-Rex eats the lawyer… and the velociraptors almost eat everybody else… Hammond finally has his epiphany. His park might be a bad idea. Life will not be contained.

Perhaps you’re wondering what my point is. So let me close with the words of Claude Hopkins:

“No argument in the world can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration.”

If you like dinosaurs, you might like my daily email newsletter. Click here to join.