Insight Marketing

Marketing prediction: Welcome to the Age of Insight

by

A year ago, I sent out an email with the subject line,

“Business Prediction: Welcome to the Age of Aquarius”

In that email, I made the claim that the world has gone through three distinct ages of consumption.

The first was the Age of Stuff. That age was made up of straight-up consumerism — Cadillacs and and Frigidaires and Armani suits — which became dominant after WWII. It was about what you own.

The second consumption age was the Age of Experiences. It began around 1990, or at least that’s when I became aware of it. Amazing Thai food, swimming with the dolphins, a visit to Ernest Hemingway’s favorite bar in Key West. It was about what you’ve done.

My claim was that the third age of consumption, in which we are now, is the Age of Transformation. It’s about who you would like to become. Crossfit, sex-reassignment surgery, Masterclass subscriptions.

Like I said, I sent that email a year ago. A year is a long time. I have been enlightened greatly in that time, and I want to share with you some of the things I have seen.

What I have seen is that, mirroring the world of production and consumption, there have been parallel shifts in the world of marketing and advertising.

What I have seen is that the world has gone through three distinct ages of marketing.

The first age was described by copywriter John E. Kennedy. Kennedy correctly divined that advertising is salesmanship in print. As a result, Kennedy gave birth to the Age of Promise:

“Let this Machine do your Washing Free”

The second marketing age was identified by a clever astrological duo, Al Ries and Jack Trout. According to their occult research, some fifty years after Kennedy, advertising had gotten to a point where promises were insufficient — there were just too many players in the market. As a result, we entered the Trout and Ries age, the Age of Positioning:

“Avis is only No. 2 in rent a cars. So why go with us? We try harder.”

And now, if my calculations are right, we are now entering the third age.

It’s the Age of Insight.

Today, a hundred years after John E. Kennedy, it’s no longer enough to make a promise and build up desire.

Today, fifty years after Trout and Ries, it’s no longer enough to give people a mental hook to hang your name on.

Today, the smartest marketers — people like Rich Schefren, Travis Sago, and Stefan Georgi — are doing something different. They are using specific and subtle techniques to take the disgust with manipulation, the disappointment of previous purchases, the confusion and uncertainty and indifference that most of us feel on some level…

… and transform them into something new. Into something motivating. Into something contagious.

Into the feeling of insight.

Maybe you find that idea intriguing. Or maybe you find it confusing.

If so, don’t worry. You are in luck, or rather, you are in the right place at the right time.

I’ll be telling you more about insight over the coming two weeks.

Because, as you can probably guess, I’m promoting something. I’m promoting a series of live trainings, all about the Age of Insight. In these trainings, I will tell you how you can align yourself to this new age in such a way that you prosper and surpass those marketers who do not yet possess this esoteric knowledge.

The first of these live training calls will happen on December 1. So I will be talking the Age of Insight until the end of this month, when registration for this training will close.

If at any point you decide that this is an opportunity you do not want to miss, you can get the full details on my Age of Insight training, or even register for it, at the page below:

https://bejakovic.com/aoi

My recipe for writing a book that influences people and sells itself

by

I just spent the morning reading statistics about the best-selling books of the 20th century so I could bring you the following curious anecdote or two:

The year 1936 saw the publication of two all-time bestselling books.

The first of these was Gone With The Wind. That’s a novel that clocked in at 1,037 pages. “People may not like it very much,” said one publishing insider, “but nobody can deny that it gives a lot of reading for your money.”

Gone With The Wind was made into a 1939 movie with Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, which won a bunch of Oscars. Without the monstrous success of the movie, odds are that few people today would know about the book, even though it sold over 30 million copies in its time.

On the other hand, consider the other all-time bestseller published in 1936.

It has sold even better — an estimated 40 million copies as of 2022.

And unlike Gone With The Wind, this second book continues to sell over 250,000 each year, even today, almost a century after its first publication.

What’s more, this book does it all without any advertising, without the Hollywood hype machine, simply based on its own magic alone.

You might know the book I’m talking about. It’s Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends And Influence People.

One part of this success is clearly down to the promise in the title. As Carnegie wrote back then, nobody teaches you this stuff in school. And yet, it’s really the fundamental work of what it means to be a human being.

But it can’t be just the title. That’s not reason why the book continues to sell year after year, or why millions of readers say the book changed their lives.

This includes me. I read How To Win Friends for the first time when I was around 18. It definitely changed how I behave.

For example, take Carnegie’s dictum that you cannot ever win an argument.

​​I’m argumentative by nature. But just yesterday, I kept myself from arguing — because Carnegie’s ghost appeared from somewhere and reminded me that I make my own life more difficult every time I aim to prove I’m right.

This kind of influence comes down to what’s inside the covers, and not just on them.

So what’s inside? I’ll tell ya.

Each chapter of Carnegie’s book is exactly the same, once you strip away the meat and look at the skeleton underneath. It goes like this:

1. Anecdote
2. The core idea of the chapter, which is illustrated by the anecdote above, and which is further illustrated by…
3. Anecdote
4. Anecdote
5. Anecdote
6. (optional) Anecdote

The valuable ideas in Carnegie’s book can fit on a single page. But it’s the other 290 pages of illustration that have made the book what it is.

In other words, the recipe for mass influence and continued easy sales is being light on how-to and heavy on case studies and stories, including personal stories and experiences.

Maybe you say that’s obvious. And it should be, if you read daily email newsletters like mine. But maybe you don’t read my newsletter yet. In case you’d like to fix that, so you can more ideas and illustrations on how to influence and even sell people, then I suggest you click here and follow the instructions that appear.

A man, a woman, a gun, and some crickets

by

Picture the scene:

It’s dark.

Crickets are chirping.

A beautiful school teacher is moving quickly around her empty and isolated prairie house.

She’s undressing after a long day.

She gets down to her white chemise. She turns around from her closet to her bed and— SHRIEK!

She sees there’s a man sitting there in the dark, hands crossed on his chest.

“Keep going teacher lady,” he says with a hint of menace in his voice.

The school teacher stands there, breathing heavily, her hand at her chest, with a look on her face that says, NEVER.

The man slowly reaches over, picks up a gun, and points it at the school teacher.

“Don’t mind me,” he says coldly. “Keep on going.”

The woman looks down at her chemise in shame. She starts to untie the top. Now her face seems to be begging the man to let her stop.

But the man is obviously enjoying the show. He looks the woman up and down while still keeping the gun pointed at her.

The woman continues to undress. She’s now down to just her britches. She holds her chemise against her body to keep some dignity.

The man takes a deep breath.

“Let down your hair,” he says.

She does. The chemise drops to the ground and she’s just left in her one-piece underwear.

“Shake your head,” the man says.

She does. Her hair falls across her face.

The man doesn’t say anything more. Instead, he just gestures with the gun. He wants the woman to do away with the remaining underwear also.

She hesitates. There’s a mixture of fury and resolve on her face. Eventually, with decided movements, she starts to untie and unbutton her underwear.

She stands there, almost naked, with the underwear barely on her shoulders, ready to slip off.

The crickets keep chirping.

The man lowers his gun. Slowly, he takes off his gun belt. He stands up and walks to the woman.

He reaches inside her untied underwear.

The woman can barely control her fury.

“You know what I wish?” she says with her teeth clenched.

“What?”

“That once you’d get here on time!” And she puts her arms around the man and they kiss.

As you might know, that’s a scene from the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

It’s the first time we see the character played by Katharine Ross, the school teacher who was Sundance’s lover and who accompanied Butch and Sundance all the way down to Bolivia.

I’m using this scene to express an idea by Mark Ford, which is itself an expression of a much older idea:

“Ideas in and of themselves have little value. The value lies in the way they are expressed. New ideas are never new. Nor are they the product of a single mind. Rather, they are the particular articulation of general ideas that are in the common marketplace of ideas, repeated endlessly until one particular articulation catches fire. Remember this when you have a new idea that you are excited about. If you want to have it accepted, you must be willing to express it in dozens of different ways.”

A man and a woman in love. Not new.

A man and a woman in love, meeting after a long absence and hungrily reaching for each other. Not new.

An apparent rape, which turns out to be a man and a woman in love, meeting after a long absence and hungrily reaching for each other. That’s something you win an Oscar for, which is what happened to screenwriter William Goldman after he wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Whatever. Maybe you see where I’m going with this. And maybe you don’t. If you don’t, then I guess I’ve done my job, and that job ain’t easy. As A-list copywriter Jim Rutz said once:

“You must surprise the reader at the outset and at every turn of the copy. This takes time and toil.”

Do you see where I’m going now? I want to make sure that you do, so let me spell it out:

I write a daily email newsletter about copywriting, marketing, and influence. If you’d like to be surprised on occasion, and maybe get exposed to some valuable ideas as well, you can sign up for my newsletter here.

Today is a possible keyframe moment in your life

by

About two months ago, I reconnected with an ex-girlfriend I had not talked to for over 5 years, pretty much since the day we broke up.

She seems to be thriving now. Maybe because of that, she wrote me a short email this summer to wish me a happy birthday. We exchanged a few more short emails and she suggested we get on a call and catch up. So we did.

It was an oddly pleasant and chirpy call that lasted over an hour.

I’ll tell you one detail from the call that stands out in my mind.

It turns out that in those five years, my ex started her own law office.

“I didn’t want to do it,” she said, “even though it was always the plan. Actually, in a funny way you were responsible for why I did finally do it.”

The “funny way” was this:

Back when we were together, my ex and I used to play-plan, and talk about sharing an office together one day. She could have one room, where she could write serious real estate contracts, and I could have the other room, where I could write serious dog toothbrush advertorials. We could share the coffee machine and the secretary.

It was a nice idea in my mind, and I guess in her mind as well. Because, as she told me during that oddly pleasant and chirpy call, it was this memory that made her finally decide to get the office and to start her own law practice.

All this popped up in my head today when I learned of a new word, watashiato:

“Watashiato: n. Curiosity about the impact you’ve had on the lives of the people you know, wondering which of your harmless actions or long-forgotten words might have altered the plot of their stories in ways you’ll never get to see.”

Watashiato, the word, comes from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. That’s just a blog by some guy, who’s inventing new words for feelings and experiences most of us have, but cannot put a finger, or tongue, to.

And that’s it. That’s all I’ll share with you today. That new word, plus The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, plus the quick personal story.

I did have more to say about this, including talking about keyframe moments.

But I saved that for people who are signed up for my email newsletter, and who get these emails live, instead of getting these emails archived on my website. In case you would like to join them, click here and possibly enter into a strange new area of your life.

Free info on free reports

by

Copy Riddles member Andrew Townley takes advantage of the Copy Oracle privilege to ask:

I was listening to a Dan Kennedy program today that got me thinking about all those direct mail “free reports.” I was wondering if you had a source of any guidance on how to build one. I remember Parris describing the process somewhere on a podcast or something, but I can’t find it now.

The background, as you might know, is this:

A-list copywriters like Dan Kennedy and Parris Lampropoulos are experts at selling newsletters. Newsletters are a direct marketing staple because they are great for the publisher. Money comes in like clockwork, on your own schedule, without any added selling of your vague and broad and cheap-to-produce subscription offer.

For those same reasons, newsletters are a suspect deal for the subscriber. Many potential subscribers instinctively feel repulsed at the thought of paying good money, every month, for a “cat in the bag” piece of content, whether they are eager to consume it or not.

Enter free reports. Free reports are one effective strategy that guys like Dan and Parris use to overcome the resistance of skeptical newsletter buyers. The recipe is simple:

1. Go through your past content (newsletter or really anything else)
​
2. Find the sexiest stuff. It can either be a single bit of info, or a small number of related items you bundle together.

​3. Put that sexy stuff in its own little package.

​4. Give that package a sexy and mysterious new name.

​5. Repeat as many times as your stamina will allow. I believe one Boardroom promo offered 99 free reports along with a newsletter subscription.

When you think about it, this is really just the same work that a copywriter would do normally. Look at what he has to sell… figure out the sexiest parts of that… highlight it in the sales material, and of course, make it sound as sexy and as mysterious as possible.

And now for the pitch that probably won’t convince you:

I write a daily email newsletter about copywriting, marketing, and persuasion.

But like I said, that probably won’t convince you to sign up.

So let me take my own advice, and offer you a free report when you sign up:

“Become a Repositioning Specialist”

This report shows you how to start a profitable repositioning business, with your own home as headquarters. In case, you want this report, follow these steps:

  1. Click here and sign up to my free daily email newsletter
  2. When you get my welcome email, hit reply and tell me you want the free report

Using Stefan Georgi in your copy

by

“It might take some figuring out to do it to where people aren’t pissed at you and you do it right, but I think this could actually be a home run thing that just absolutely CRUSHES it.”
— Stefan Georgi

So now let me ask you:

What is it?

What is Stefan talking about in the quote above?

I’ll give you a hint:

It’s a little gimmick, which Stefan advises you to use to start off your ad and VSL copy. It ties into that all-powerful driver of action, curiosity. And additionally, it creates a feeling of insight.

No? you don’t know the gimmick Stefan has in mind? Let me give you one more hint:

It starts with the letter R…

Then I…

Then D…

Then another D…

All right, fine — it’s riddles. In a recent video, “Using riddles in your copy,” Stefan advises using riddles in your ads and VSLs.

Why riddles?

Because riddles — “How many months have 28 days?” — consistently go viral on social media.

And what Stefan and many other smart marketers like to do is to camouflage their sneaky sales pitch and make it look like something — a riddle, for example — which you might want to consume for your own ends, and not for theirs.

And now, let me throw off my cloak and hold up my wizard staff, and with a blinding light shining from behind me, admit in my deep and resonant voice that this is exactly what I’ve done with this email.

Because the underlying idea Stefan is recommending — people enjoy riddles, so give ’em riddles — is at the core of my Copy Riddles program.

My goal was to make Copy Riddles fun. So I covered up the teaching, the learning, and the transformation bit in what I call copy riddles, hence the name of the program. ​​Did it work? Here’s what copywriter Cindy Suzuki, who joined Copy Riddles a few days ago, thinks about it:

Hi John,

I am having a blast with copy riddles so far. It feels like a game. I love it when learning is actually fun. Was on the fence until the last day, and I’m so glad I bought it 🙂

Cindy

If you like fun and games, and maybe some sales, then don’t join Copy Riddles. But see if you can sign up for my email newsletter. You can get started on that puzzle right here.

Have we reached “peak storytelling”?

by

This week’s New Yorker features a cartoon of a puzzled couple in front of an apartment door.

​​The man is holding a bottle of wine, so the couple are probably guests coming for a party. But they are hesitating, because the welcome mat in front of the door doesn’t say “Welcome”. Instead, it says,

“Welcome?”

This cartoon connected in my mind to a “law” I found out about a few day’s ago, Betteridge’s law, which states:

“If a headline asks a yes or no question, the answer is always no.”

Ian Betteridge is a technology journalist. And his argument was, if the answer to that yes/no question were yes, the writer would definitely tell you so, right away, as a matter of shocking fact.

Instead, the writer didn’t have enough proof to support his claim. But he decided to make it anyhow, as a question, in order to say something more dramatic than he could otherwise, and to suck you into reading. Like this:

“Will AI and Transhumanism Lead to the Next Evolution of Mankind, or Doom It?”

No. And no.

Betteridge’s law is an instance of the persuasion knowledge model.

​​That’s a fancy, academic term for the fact that people become aware of manipulative advertising and media techniques. And after people become aware, they also start resisting — “Don’t even bother reading this article, because the answer is sure to be no.”

That’s how in time, people become dismissive of intriguing headlines (“clickbait”), of being told something new about themselves (r/StupidInternetQuizzes/), even of effective stories (the entire TV Tropes website).

That’s not to say that curiosity, categorization, or stories no longer work or will not work as ways to persuade or influence.

But it does say that the effort and skill required to make them work today is a bit greater than it was yesterday — and it will be a bit greater still tomorrow.

And so it is with what I’ve been calling the Most Valuable Email trick.

Like stories, categorization, or curiosity, my MVE trick is based on fundamental human psychology.

​​It will continue to work forever — just how a well-told or fascinating story continues to work today, in spite of the fact that you probably have 20 story-based daily emails sitting in your inbox right now.

The thing is, if you act today, you get bonus points for using the MVE trick.

​​The day may come when the persuasion knowledge of the market becomes aware of this trick, and maybe even takes evasive measures. But today, practically nobody is aware of the MVE trick, especially in emails. As copywriter Cindy Suzuki wrote me after going through the Most Valuable Email course:

I’m looking back at your old emails with new eyes. You know that moment people get epiphanies and the entire world looks different? I’m feeling that way about your writing now. You’ve helped me unlock something I didn’t know existed. So incredible.

In case you’d like to take advantage of this opportunity while it’s still early days:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Nobel Prize-winner shows just how right I, John Bejakovic, was

by

Trust me for a moment or two while I tell you about the following interesting people:

On October 3, 1918, a man named Grover Bougher sent a letter to his brother George, a Private in the American Expeditionary Force.

Two days later, Grover was killed in a train wreck.

Grover’s letter was returned unopened the following April, with a note from the Command P.O. that George had also been killed, fighting the war in France.

Neither brother ever learned of the other’s death.

But life goes on. Eventually, Grover’s widow, Lulu Belle Lomax, met and married a man named Vernon Smith.

Smith loved children, including Lulu’s two daughters by Grover Bougher. And while Lulu had often said she would never have any more children, Vernon’s love for her two daughters changed her mind.

​​The result was Vernon Lomax Smith, born on January 1, 1927.

Fast forward to 2002:

Vernon Lomax Smith is awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. Well, actually he shares the prize with Daniel Kahneman. Like Kahneman, Smith did work in behavioral and experimental economics, so the Nobel committee thought it okay to split the prize among the two of them.

Fast forward even more, to 2022:

Vernon Smith, now aged 95, has taken part in an interesting experiment. Except, he is not the investigator. He is part of the experiment itself. The experiment runs as follows.

Smith and a lesser-known coauthor (one without a Nobel Prize) submit a paper for publication.

Will the paper be accepted for publication? How will Smith’s name influence those odds?

Result:

If Smith’s Nobel Prize-winning name is revealed to peer reviewers, they are more likely to accept the paper for publication.

If Smith’s name is hidden to peer reviewers, the reviewers are less likely to the accept for publication.

Common sense, right?

Except, what was not common sense, what was not obvious, and what was in fact shocking to the scientists who conducted this experiment, was the size of the effect of revealing Vernon Smith’s name to peer reviewers.

If Smith’s name was revealed to peer reviewers, they were 6x more likely to accept the paper than otherwise.

Same paper. Same quality of ideas inside. 6x difference in response.

6x!

Yesterday, I, John Bejakovic, wrote an email advising you to give your prospects mental shortcuts to make their decision-making easier.

One of the most valuable of such shortcuts is, as I have long trumpeted, to sell people, and not ideas.

Ideas are vague, hard to grasp, and hard to judge.

People, on the other hand, sell much better. How much better?

Well, thanks to Vernon Smith, we now have the answer:

​​6x better.

Like I said, this is something I have known for a long time. But I still need to remind myself of it often.

For example, I have lately been promoting my Most Valuable Email training.

I’ve given you all sorts of idea-y reasons why you might want to buy this training and learn the “Most Valuable Email trick” inside.

What I haven’t done yet is tell you maybe the most important reason.

While I have used this MVE trick heavily – more heavily than anyone I know of — I did not invent it.

In fact, I have seen some very smart and successful marketers, including Gary Bencivenga, Parris Lampropoulos, and Mark Ford reach for this trick it in non-email content.

It’s much rarer to see this trick being used in emails — outside my own — though I have spotted Daniel Throssell using this trick on occasion.

So many names.

So many people.

So many reasons to buy my Most Valuable Email training.

In case you are interested:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

I’ve done my best to hide a valuable lesson inside today’s email

by

“I was in hell. I knew all the salesman’s tricks. Why wasn’t I rich? Why wasn’t I successful? I opened the Bible, and I read the 18th Psalm. ‘The Lord is my rock and my fortress.’”

That’s from the “Christ in Commerce” sermon in Elmer Gantry, a 1960 film that I believe should be required viewing for anybody interested in copywriting, marketing, and influence.

Elmer Gantry should be required because fun should be required. And Elmer Gantry is a fun, loud, and entertaining film starring Burt Lancaster, possibly the most manly man of all time.

But Elmer Gantry should also be required because it’s about a huckster, a scammer, a traveling salesman turned revivalist preacher, once he figures out that preaching pays better than selling electric toasters.

Elmer Gantry tells of a time in US history that also gave birth to direct response advertising.

In fact, the Elmer Gantry type of big-tent sermonizing was a cousin discipline to direct response marketing.

​​It continues to be so to this day. Just think of people like Dan Kennedy and Tony Robbins — and the thousands of marketers who have learned from them — speaking in front of an audience of ten thousand, while a hungry sales team waits near the exits.

All right, that’s it for my email today. In case you’d like to learn how to write emails like this, you can find that inside my Most Valuable Email training. The link to that is below.

“Whoa there,” I hear you saying. “Why in the Elmer Gantry would I want to learn to write emails like this? Just something from an old movie? Where’s the cleverness or the conceit in that? Where’s the valuable marketing idea? What exactly did I learn here?”

I promise there’s a valuable idea in this email, and it’s not just that Elmer Gantry is a fun film.

Perhaps you can figure out this idea on your own.

In any case, you can find it explicitly explained in MVE #14 in the Most Valuable Email Swipes, which is something you get with core MVE training. In case you’re curious:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Feelings of entitlement may signal copywriting potential

by

Today I read a viral pop-science article that made my head spin. The article reported research from Stanford University. The research consisted of two parts.

In the first part, the scientists tested a bunch of people to see whether those people were prone to feelings of guilt.

In the second part, the scientists had those same people interact in group settings, like planning a marketing campaign.

And get this:

The scientists found that the people who tested the most guilt-prone… were also voted as being the most leader-like. That’s according to the other participants in the study.

The underlying message of this research was clear:

If you yourself get burdened with deep guilt from time to time, there might be hope for you yet. In fact, it might be a sign that you secret talents – maybe even a purpose, a mission — that you just aren’t aware of yet.

Inspiring, right? No wonder this article went viral, with billions of upvotes and trillions of comments.

Aye, but here’s the rubbety rub:

The Stanford scientists didn’t just test whether subjects were guilt-prone or not. Instead, they actually tested whether subjects were more prone to either guilt… or to shame.

Guilt? Shame?

Maybe you’re not sure what distinction there is between those two. I wasn’t sure. But the Stanford scientists have their own definitions of the two terms.

Guilt is proactive: You feel bad about something you did, and you want to make amends.

Shame is passive: You feel bad about something you did, and you want to hide and not be seen.

Aaahhh…

So it turns out this inspiring Stanford study was really a bit of clever categorization and reframing. The article I read was titled, “Feelings of Guilt May Signal Leadership Potential.” But really, it could have been more honestly titled, “Proactive Behaviors May Signal Leadership Potential.”

But whatever. This article cannot in any way help us with persuasion and influence. So let’s just drop it.

And in entirely unrelated news, let me pay off today’s subject line:

Perhaps you sometimes catch a sneaking sense of entitlement coming over you.

​​Perhaps you get angry when you cannot get what you want… or you feel you are special and should not have to accept normal constraints… or you cannot discipline yourself to complete boring or routine tasks… or you become easily frustrated… or you have trouble giving up immediate gratification to reach a long-term goal.

All those might sound like very negative behaviors and thought patterns, ones that are destined to keep you from success.

But what if I told you that feelings of entitlement might actually signal copywriting potential?

The missing thing you might not have realized is that there are two related but actually distinct states.

One is entitlement. Entitlement is thinking you are better than others, and is rooted in a sensitivity to outside stimula, to social cues and responses, as well as to your own internal states and your place in the world.

The other is arrogance. Arrogance is thinking you are better than others, but is based in dullness and a lack of sensitivity, both to outside and inner sensations.

And that’s why arrogant people cannot make for good copywriters. They are not interested enough in observing the world, in how others behave and react, in what it all means.

On the other hand, entitled people, well, their sensitivity actually predisposes them to become immensely successful as copywriters.

I won’t name names here, but when I look at some of the most successful people in the direct response industry, both now and in the past, I suspect they felt a strong, even dominant sense of entitlement. Even if they appeared to be modest, self-effacing, humble people.

All right, let’s wrap up this pop science article.

Final words:​​

In case you are trying to make it as a copywriter, and you’re wondering where to start, then here’s a resource that may help you make the most of your latent copywriting potential:

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