Persuasion

My whole life has been leading to this

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1. Age 7, second grade. I’m standing in front of the class and reading a little story I’d written. It’s about a yellow raincoat I had and a googly-eyed giraffe sticker on it which I tried to rip it off and give to Ivona, the girl I was in love with back in kindergarten.

Some 7-year-old monster in my class gets restless and starts to talk. The teacher shushes him angrily. “Listen!” she says. “It’s such a wonderful story.”

2. Age 17, English class in 12th grade. We break into groups of four and read each other’s college application essays. Everybody else’s essay is a dutiful list of lessons learned and life goals to be achieved. My essay is about my first time waiting at the DMV. I know when people are reading it, because they first snicker and then start to laugh.

3. Age 23, senior year of college. I’ve taken an advanced math class, thinking I might go to graduate school for the same. Well, we’ll see about that.

“Roses are red,” the intimidatingly smart professor says. I nod. I believe I understand what he’s saying.

“If roses are red,” he goes on and faces me, “then violets are…?”

My mind is blank. I can’t follow his simple reasoning. I squirm in my seat. But he wants an answer.

“If roses are red,” I start, “then violets must be… a type of common flowering plant?”

Not the right answer, it turns out. Graduate school for math? No.

Instead, pretty much my whole life has been leading me to this point right here, where I write copy for a living and I write these daily emails for fun.

Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. In fact, it’s very much an exaggeration. But you might believe it, based on the little snippets I just shared with you.

And that’s my point. Because snippets are often all you need.

Yesterday, I gave you a Dan Kennedy story titled, “My chief asset was a cat who licked stamps.”

Part of that story was exaggeration and absurdity and humor. But there was something else. Because Dan’s story wasn’t really a story. It didn’t have a tail and horns and everything in between.

Instead, it was really a snapshot, a scene, an episode.

That’s often all you need. And in today’s world, where everybody and his cat is forcing their life to fit a “hero on a quest” story mold, you might even stand out as somebody more honest. A few snapshots from your life to add color. An episode to make a point — without making yourself out to be Luke Skywalker.

And by the way, if you want a real-life example of selling yourself for millions of dollars using this episode-based approach, track down Dan’s Magnetic Marketing stump speech. It’s available online, and it’s a great sales presentation. Plus, it’s as funny as a Bill Burr comedy special — pretty amazing, considering Dan gave these speeches almost 30 years ago.

And for more intimate snapshots from my private life, you might like to sign up to my email newsletter.

“My chief asset consisted of a cat who licked stamps”

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A few days ago, a reader of this newsletter wrote in with a problem.

He’s an expert in his field. But he feels sick telling his mess-to-success, rags-to-riches origin story. He hates hyping it up and repeating it over and over, even though it’s all true.

I can understand. So here’s an alternative. Take a look at the following background story from Dan Kennedy:

I often tell the story, when I went through a divorce and went broke I started over in info-marketing and my chief asset consisted of a cat who licked stamps.

My wife abandoned the cat and left the cat behind. We quickly came to an agreement that, if it was going to get fed, it had to do something other than hiss, and snarl, and scratch, and bite, which were unattractive attributes of this little monster.

We arrived at a working relationship where it sat on the coffee table, I sat facing the TV at night stuffing my envelopes and getting my mail ready. It sat facing me, and I took the strip of stamps and held it out and the cat licked them and then I did all my stamps.

I kept a little bowl of water there so the cat could, you know… I’m sure all that glue … but they’ve got nine lives! All the glue probably didn’t kill it, its personality probably did.

That’s the end of Dan’s story. In the presentation he gave, he moves on and talks marketing.

So what’s my point in bringing up this story?

You might think it’s humor. And yes, humor is a big part of the story above. If you can be funny like Dan, you are that much ahead of the rest of us.

But there’s something else to Dan’s story. Because it’s certainly not rags-to-riches, is it?

No, something else is going on. I’ll spell it out in my email tomorrow (click here if you wanna get it), and I’ll tell you how it’s relevant for your sales copy… or for your in-person, nose-to-nose, toes-to-toes origin story. Whether you are funny or not.

The opportunity of the Inner Ring

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“For all the world, Christian and heathen, repair unto the Round Table, and when they are chosen to be of the fellowship of the Round Table, they think them more blessed, and more in worship, than if they had gotten half the world; and ye have seen that they have lost their fathers and their mothers, and all their kin, and their wives and their children, for to be of your fellowship.”

That’s from a collection of stories about King Arthur, written down in the 15th century. Lots of things have changed since the 15th century, but a few things stay the same.

Such as, for example, the need to belong. And, in particular, to be on the inside of what C.S. Lewis called the “Inner Ring.”

It’s a very strong drive. It’s so strong it can even overcome self-interest, like in the quote above. Other times, the drive to the Inner Ring might disguise itself as self-interest. In Lewis’s words:

“I wonder whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost less in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. For of course, when promiscuity is the fashion, the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other people know. They are uninitiated. And as for lighter matters, the number of people who first smoked or first got drunk for a similar reason is probably very large.”

C.S. Lewis believed in a universal morality, and warned against lust for the Inner Ring. I do not believe in a universal morality, and have no issue with lust, for the Inner Ring or otherwise. That’s why I’ll leave you with the following:

The need to belong to an Inner Ring is not met for many people. That was true in the 15th century, and it is true today. It’s almost true by definition, because an Inner Ring is formed by excluding people.

So a lot of people have this yawning, unmet need… and they have few options for sating themselves. Do you know what this is usually called?

You guessed it. An opportunity.

Anyways, I’ve got my own Inner Ring. It’s a small group of people I write an email to each day with thoughts like what you’ve just read. I occasionally open up spots to a few new people to join… but not right now.

The value of being wrong

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I had a guy write in today and tell me to get my reporting straight.

This was in connection to a daily email I’d sent to the dog ecommerce list I manage. The email was about Lady Gaga’s stolen bulldogs.

Perhaps you know the story. There was a heist. Some guys pulled up on the street, shot Lady Gaga’s dogwalker, and then sped away with the two dogs.

In my email, I wrote the kidnappers arrived in a van, because, well, that’s how kidnappers do, at least in the movies I’ve seen.

But it was not a van. It was a car. And one upset reader rightly wrote in to correct me.

I’ve talked about this before, but often the best way to get a response out of somebody is to say something wrong.

Blood rushes to your prospect’s head, and he has to write in to tell you how wrong you are. Because you’re careless… you’re offensive… maybe even because you’re stupid.

Why would you ever want your prospect thinking that?

Simple. Because hate, irritation, and scorn, are much closer to love, identification, and sales than you might think. They are certainly much closer to each other than they are to indifference.

Sometimes you get lucky, like I did, and stir up a reaction by accident. But you can do it on purpose too. As long as you don’t mind being told you’re wrong, by people who feel strongly enough about the matter to take time out of their day to write and correct you.

Well. I doubt I stirred up any controversy with this email. And so you probably didn’t get any closer to loving me or identifying me. Still, perhaps you’d like to join my email newsletter. If so, here’s where to go.

The best copywriting tactic ever

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Why does a giraffe have the longest neck?

The canned answer is because it’s useful. It allows the giraffe to browse books on the top bookshelf.

The real answer is that giraffes love extremes. That’s according to V. S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist and psychologist at UCSD.

Ramachandran says giraffes, and all other animals, have to know who’s a sexual target and who’s not. Otherwise, they might waste their prime dating years humping couches or human legs or other animals species. (Clearly, something went wrong with dogs.)

So how does a giraffe find love?

The simplest and easiest way it can. It looks for shortcuts.

“Long neck? Gotta be another giraffe! Time to get the cologne.”

But here’s where it gets tricky and interesting:

If a long neck is a mental shortcut for a giraffe to pick out another giraffe… then a longer neck is an even shorter cut.

The conclusion is giraffes’ necks get longer and longer. The longer your neck, the more likely you are to get some giraffe action and pass on your long neck genes. In the end, the longest neck wins.

As I said, giraffes love extremes. Almost as much as humans love extremes.

Because the human brain is like a giraffe’s. We also like shortcuts. And we want to follow these shortcuts to the end. Which leads me to the best copywriting tactic ever:

Go to extremes, whenever you can get away with it.

The most successful direct response copy is filled with the most dramatic stories… the scariest warnings… and with superlatives like fastest, easiest, and best.

The world is complicated. Too many choices. Too much information. That’s why we seek out extremes, to make our lives easier. And that’s something you can use to make your copy not better, but best.

Speaking of which, here’s the safest offer you will ever hear:

Try out my email newsletter. If it doesn’t make the highlight of your day tomorrow, simply unsubscribe.

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.

Rolls Royce copywriting portfolio

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You probably know the famous Ogilvy Rolls Royce ad:

At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock

Wouldn’t it be nice to write ads like this all the time?

Wouldn’t you like to simply highlight the classy superiority of the product that you’re selling, instead of teasing people with the amazing secret of the one-legged accountant… or prophesying “The End of America”… or promising a passive monthly income of $5,378… $7,442… yes, even $11,246 — no cash, credit, or skills required?

Well, if that’s what you’re dreaming of, then all I can tell you is, be David Ogilvy. Because even though Ogilvy was a big fan of direct response, this electric clock thing is an ad for a brand.

Back in 1958 when this ad came out, American consumers already knew Rolls Royce well. In fact, they already knew that Rolls Royce was the fanciest car brand around. The electric clock thing was just a dramatic illustration of that.

That’s not to say you couldn’t do something similar in a direct response ad. You just need to have a brand that your audience already knows and likes. Those do exist, at least for very small and tight pockets of people.

But if you ain’t got a brand like this, then you’ll be better off calling out a problem or making a big promise. No cash, credit, or skills required.

But you probably already know this. The only reason I bring it up is in case you’re fresh to direct response copywriting. In that case, maybe you’re wondering why Ogilvy’s ad — celebrated even by Gary Halbert — looks so different than your typical direct response piece.

Actually, there’s a second reason I bring it up.

It’s because it’s relevant to that other newbie question, about creating a copywriting portfolio. Because everything I’ve just told you is basically the best advice I can give to anyone looking to create a portfolio.

Perhaps the portfolio point I’m trying to make is obvious. Perhaps it’s not. In any case, I’ll spell it out in my email tomorrow.

Guru to a bunch of bossy bottoms

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Today’s post is long and heavy. My intention in saying this is to deter you from reading on, but I am aware it might have the opposite effect. Still I feel I’ve done my duty by making this warning. So here goes:

In high school, I was friends with a girl I will call Caroline. Caroline and I liked the same music… liked the same movies… had the same sense of humor. It was like kismet.

Then one day, along with some friends including Caroline, I drank a bottle of gin.

I was not an expert drinker in those days, so I lost control. I started running around like a jackass… I made out with Caroline in a burrito shop bathroom… and then I blacked out for the rest of the evening. Eventually, I puked all over a friend’s car, was taken home, and passed out in my own bed, to wake up the next morning without even a hangover.

And here’s where the plot curdles:

I wasn’t pleased about the drunken burrito-shop makeout with Caroline, but I wasn’t ashamed either.

What I did find unsettling was hearing from several friends how Caroline was going around in the following days, elated that something had finally happened between me and her. She had been hoping for this for months, she said, and now it was finally here. It seems she had had a crush on me for a while.

And the weirdest thing happened. I began to really hate Caroline.

I guess there were two parts to it. One part I understood right then and there, back in 11th grade… the other I realized tonight. Let me tell you about both parts, and how they are strangely relevant to the world of copywriting and online marketing.

Back then, what I realized in a moment of insight was that Caroline had gradually adopted my personality.

I’m not sure how I didn’t notice this before. Maybe I was naive, or maybe I was egotistical.

But what became as clear as gin was that Caroline had picked up on the music I liked and then started listening to the same… she did the same with the movies I said I enjoyed… and she had mimicked whatever humor and mannerisms I had at that time. That was the explanation for the seeming kismet.

My 17-year-old self found this repulsive. The idea that somebody would abandon their own personality and adopt mine… it was the sign of a person who is weird and weak. Not somebody I wanted to be associated with. So in my typical fashion, I cut off all contact with Caroline, and didn’t talk to her for years.

That’s the part I realized back in 11th grade about why Caroline repelled me.

But I never took it one step further, until tonight. I never asked myself, what’s so bad about having somebody idolize you? Why not let them have their fun, and get what you can out of the relationship, which should in theory be a lot?

I’ll tell you what I discovered. The term of art for it is a “bossy bottom.” Or at least that’s what Michael Taft called it in an interview I heard with him today.

Taft teaches meditation, and he’s worked with lots of individuals as well as big corporations like Google and for all I know Halliburton. He has a best-selling book on meditation… he has a successful podcast on the same… and in this particular field, he’s apparently a bit of a celeb.

So Taft talked about how he won’t teach people who treat him as a guru and look up at him with glossy eyes. “I don’t want to teach people who are in a trance,” Taft said. “And plus, that’s not even the biggest issue.”

Because according to Taft, these entranced and enguru-ed people aren’t the passive followers they might seem. Taft believes they control the guru as much as the guru controls them.

These “bossy bottoms” can manipulate the guru by modulating what they allow to apparently affect them. “Oh when he does this thing, I won’t react… but when he does this other thing, I will react.”

So that’s part 2 of my repulsion for Caroline. It’s not that I found her weak and weird… but that I realized how she had actually manipulated me, controlled me, and influenced me, in a way that I was blind to. She had made me feel weak and weird.

Perhaps it’s now clear how this might apply to marketing. Because the high form of marketing is achieving guruship. It’s where you have the biggest and easiest influence. As Ken McCarthy said in a recent interview:

I don’t know where I first got the notion that being a celebrity was a great thing. And then somebody put it in my ear that really anybody can be a celebrity. It’s a manufactured thing.

And I’m like, wow, that’s interesting.

And then the next piece was, celebrity is relative. So you don’t have to be world famous to make a ton of money, you just have to be famous within a finite group of money-spending people, and you can have all the money you can handle.

And when those three items congealed in my brain, I was like: “Whoa, I’m going to be a celebrity.”

And it really can be easy. The steps to become a guru are by now well-known. There’s not much more to it than going outdoors, finding a soapbox no shorter than 6 inches in height, and standing up on it day after day.

Of course, there are other things you can do to speed up the process. But even with just your 6-inch soapbox, people out there will find you, listen to you, and start to follow you. And eventually, if you’re halfway decent and at least a quarterway successful, some of them will begin to idolize you.

As Ken says, it’s easy and it’s profitable. That’s the argument for it. And if you’re doing the Lord’s work or you really love your flock of followers, it can be the best thing in the world.

But if you are just looking to become a guru as a shortcut to freedom… or if you’re after power and control… then maybe today’s post will be an argument against becoming a guru. Because you can’t become a guru, not unless you agree to be completely and secretly manipulated in turn.

But if that don’t dissuade you… and you want to know in more detail what I mean by a 6-inch soapbox, you can see one here.

Powerful old males argument that doesn’t get used enough

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Back in 2018, a local newspaper in New York state published a racy article about actress Julia Roberts. The headline read:

“Julia Roberts Finds Life And Her Holes Get Better With Age”

The newspaper later ran a correction. Apparently they meant Julia’s roles, with an R, were getting better.

This story sounds almost fake, doesn’t it?

​​But apparently it’s true. Or at least it was fact-checked by the people at the BBC. They smugly called it a “spectacular reminder of why we need sub-editors – whose job it is to check spelling, grammar and facts in every article.”

There’s no great reason that I’m telling you this. Except one habit I have is to keep a document with unique sales arguments I come across.

Here’s one I read in a sales letter by copywriting legend Robert Collier. Collier was selling a news service for businessmen, and he wrote:

“You are paying for my services whether you use them or not, but you are paying in lost time, in needless mistakes and worries.”

This argument might be something you too can profit from. Because I don’t see this in sales copy today, but it seems very versatile.

You could use this argument to convince a prospect to buy your information product… or to engage your copywriting services… or, if you happen to be a sub-editor who can keep roles from turning into holes, to hire your eagle eyes.

In fact, that last service is something I myself could use, to keep from making needless mistakes in my email newsletter. But if occasional mistakes don’t bother you, and you’d like to get regular emails with ideas on persuasion, sales, and copywriting, then you can join my newsletter here.

Experts are baffled: The magic ingredient that makes a hit

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Back when Jim Morrison and The Doors released their first album, they were a bunch of movie school bums whose biggest ambition was to become as big as the cult LA band Love.

Who remembers Love today? Not many. But hundreds of millions know Jim Morrison and Doors hits like “Light My Fire” and “Hello, I Love You.”

This global success might never have happened. But The Doors, bums that they were, spent weeks calling up the local LA radio station, requesting that cool new song, Light My Fire.

​​The song eventually became a local hit… then a national hit… then the album became a hit… and then The Doors became the next big thing.

Maybe you can do the same. At least that’s one conclusion I drew from a mind-opening article by Duncan Watts.

The article is titled “Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?” You can find it on The New York Times Magazine site, and it’s worth reading from beginning to end. But if you’re pressed for time or attention, let me summarize it for you:

Conventional wisdom says the success of a book or a song or a movie is based on two things. One is the product itself. The other is what the market wants at that time.

And the conclusion, based on this conventional wisdom, is simple. If anybody fails to predict what will become successful, he is either too dumb or too lazy to read the writing on the wall.

Well, Watts had his doubts about this. So he set up a clever experiment to test it out. I won’t rehash the full details of how the experiment ran. The gist was it involved looking at which songs became popular among nine different segments of 14,000 people.

People in one segment had no information about how popular each song already was. People in the other eight segments knew how popular each song was, but only within their own segment.

This setup allowed Watts to test two ideas:

1. The most popular songs will be roughly as popular in the different segments.

2. The same songs will float to the top in the different segments.

Both of these hypotheses turned out to be very false.

First, in the eight “social influence” segments, the most popular songs became way more popular than in the “no social influence” segment. And the losers were more thorough losers.

​​Maybe that’s not so amazing. But get this:

In the different “social influence” segments, different songs became the most popular. And this wasn’t a minor reordering. A song could be no. 1 in one segment and no. 40 in another.

Watts explains this in a blindingly obvious way:

People do not make decisions independently of other people. The world is too complex… we usually don’t know what we want… and we often get more value out of a shared experience than out of the “best” experience.

All this means that small, random differences in initial popularity can have a massive impact in what becomes a hit and what doesn’t. That’s what Watts calls cumulative advantage. The rich get richer. And who gets rich initially? Well, that’s a coin toss.

This explains my Grinch story from yesterday. Chuck Jones had to pitch the Grinch 25 times, not because industry experts are too dumb or closed-minded to see the potential that was there… but because it’s genuinely impossible to predict what will succeed.

Randomness is the magic ingredient that determines a hit.

But what about The Doors? And what about direct response marketing, where decisions are more likely to be independent? And is there anything positive we can conclude from all this?

I believe so. But this post is running long already… so if you’re interested in more on this, I’ll finish it up tomorrow.