Psychology Behind Advertising

How to get your worst customers or clients foaming with rage at you and impotent to do anything about it

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I was walking home down a dark street just now. It was empty and quiet and I was lost in thought when — screaming and scratching — a cat scrambled out of a dumpster right next to me and bolted away.

I won’t lie. The bitch startled me. I might have missed a step and my heart definitely missed two beats.

I cursed out the cat and collected myself. I turned around to make sure nobody saw me in my unmanly state. And I picked up my path home, still a little alarmed.

“But what about the cat?” I thought. “I bet I gave her a good scare, too. Must be why she bolted like that! But she deserved it.” And a sly smile spread across my face.

You might think I’m a miserable person to gloat over possibly scaring a cat. Perhaps you’re right. But I’m reporting the more shameful parts of my life to bring you an idea. A copywriting idea. A copywriting idea which I think might be powerful.

It goes like this:

1. Think of your prospect

2. Think of other people who are around your prospect, and who are causing your prospect fear, harm, humiliation, despair, etc.

3. Write your headline: Here’s how to cause fear, harm, humiliation, despair, etc. to those other people

You may this is deranged. Again, perhaps you’re right. But aren’t you at least curious to see this idea in action? If so, here are three successful examples:

1. Gary Halbert. Selling his own newsletter. His prospect? Anybody who’s trying to sell something… and is finding it frustrating or even humiliating. Gary’s headline:

How to make people line up and beg you to take their money!

2. A top Clickbank offer right now, called His Secret Obsession. It’s targeted at women. Who want to win a man’s “love, attention, and total devotion for LIFE.” But not just any man! There’s a very specific guy these women have in mind, because (my guess)… they are OBSESSED.

3. John Carlton. Like Gary, John also poked into dark places of the soul. It might be horrible… but it works. Even to sell golf instructional videos:

How Does An Out-Of-Shape 55-Year-Old Golfer, Crippled By Arthritis And 71 Lbs. Overweight, Still Consistently Humiliate PGA Pros In Head-To-Head Matches By Hitting Every Tee Shot Further And Straighter Down The Fairway?

“The answer will shock and delight you!” writes John.

​​I bet. After all, just imagine. You’re not as disadvantaged as this overweight, crippled golfer… and Tom, Dick, and Horace down at the country club definitely aren’t PGA pros… so the humiliation will be immense! But they deserve it.

By the way, if you’re curious about the “How to” promise in my headline today… you can find these special client management strategies inside my daily email newsletter. Here’s where to sign up.

Anatomy of a laugh that didn’t happen

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“I can handle this. Handle is my middle name. Actually, handle is the middle of my first name. [Insert canned laughter]”
– Chandler Bing, Friends

You probably know from Cialdini’s Influence about the power of social proof. That’s why shows like Friends insert canned laughter. We laugh more when we hear other people laughing, even if we know it’s fake.

But:

It turns out to be more tricky than that.

Some scientists in Australia tested this out. They wanted to see if WHO is laughing matters. And the answer is yes.

I won’t burden you with the details of the experiment. In a nutshell, the study subjects (university students) had to listen to audio recordings of a standup comic, with canned laughter and without. But there was a twist:

One group of students was told that the canned laughter was other students from the same university.

A second group of students was told that the canned laughter was sympathizers of Australia’s far-right One Nation party, which apparently would like to build a wall with Mexico, and have Mexico pay for it.

And the results?

When the canned laughter was present, group one laughed four times more than without the canned laughter. Makes sense. Other people like them found the material funny. So Cialdini was right, and so was Friends.

But no such thing happened in group two. The students didn’t laugh any more with the canned laughter than they did without it. How could they? Obviously the comic isn’t very good if those horrible xenophobes find him so funny.

I’m telling you about this because it applies to direct marketing as well.

Just like the producers of corny sitcoms, marketers know about the power of social proof. That’s why we stick tons of testimonials into our sales letters.

And testimonials are good. But:

Testimonials are much better if they come from people like the prospect. (At least that’s what Dan Kennedy says, but he should know.) You want to find testimonials that have the same gender… same race… same age… same ideas about building the wall… as your prospect does.

And what if you don’t have any testimonials like that?

Well, then you can just sweep your arm over your offer and say something like,

“I write a daily email newsletter. Many successful marketers and copywriters find it very valuable. Click here to subscribe.”

Influence 2.0 (your choice)

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“The washing machine cannot be fixed,” my landlady texted me today. “So I don’t know what’s better. To replace it and bother you with the workers coming and going. Or to just have you wash your stuff at my place.”

I considered my options.

It would be nice to have a working washing machine. But I’ll only be in the apartment until the end of the month. The landlady lives downstairs. And she does have a point. Workers coming and going to take out the old machine and set up the new one… it would be a hassle and a distraction.

“No problem,” I texted back, “I’ll do the laundry at your place.”

Only then did it occur to me how this was a clever strategy on her part. Had she said, “The washing machine cannot be fixed. But it’s no problem! Just use mine! It will be easiest for you!” Had she said that, I would have raised all kinds of objections. At least in my mind.

As you might know, what the landlady did is a classic persuasion technique. It’s called giving people a menu. From Jonah Berger’s  book The Catalyst:

Try to convince people to do something, and they spend a lot of time counterarguing. Thinking about all the various reasons why it’s a bad idea or why something else would be better. Why they don’t want to do what was suggested.

But give people multiple options, and suddenly things shift.

Rather than thinking about what is wrong with whatever was suggested, they think about which one is better. Rather than poking holes in whatever was raised, they think about which of the options is best for them. And because they’ve been participating, they’re much more likely to go along with one of them in the end.

Berger gives examples of using menus to persuade your kids to brush their teeth and your clients to accept your plan of action. But here’s a warning:

If you abuse this, it can turn into a standard pushy salesman’s grift. “So Mr. Bejako… do you want that new Miata in red… or in black?”

“Hold on buddy. I never said I want a Miata. Why are you trying to trick me?”

So keeping this in mind, I want to leave you with a couple of choices. Of course, you are perfectly free to ignore both and to take no action.

Choice one is to go and check out Berger’s The Catalyst, which I mentioned above. I really like this book, and I think of it as a kind of 2.0 version of Cialdini’s Influence. If you want to see why, check out this page for more info about The Catalyst:

https://bejakovic.com/catalyst

Choice two is to not bother reading the nearly 300 pages of The Catalyst. Instead you can simply sign up for my email newsletter. That’s where I share the best marketing and persuasion ideas I come across.

In fact, that’s where I already shared some great ideas from The Catalyst, and where I’m sure to share more. Here’s where to click if you’d like to sign up.

Man, or mouse?

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Marketer Andre Chaperon once wrote an intriguing email/article titled, Chefs vs. Cooks. Here’s the gist in Andre’s words:

When you go to a restaurant: there are two types of people who cook the food that diners order.

One type typically works in Michelin star establishments, like the Aviary in Chicago, or Gordon Ramsay in London, or the Mirazur in Menton, France.

These people are called chefs.

The other type are cooks.

You’ll find them in places like McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Chili’s Grill & Bar. Even your local “pretty good” restaurant.

The difference between the two is vast, of course.

Andre’s point is that there are chefs and cooks among marketers too. “Nothing wrong with that,” Andre suggests. “The world needs both!”

Thanks, Andre. But who the hell wants to be the marketing equivalent of a pimply 16-year-old, wearing a Wendy’s paper hat, shoveling out 15 lbs. of french fries from a cauldron of bubbling canola oil?

Nobody, of course. Not if they have a choice. Which is why Andre offers you the choice to join his course for creators at the end of his Chefs vs. Cooks pitch.

Dan Kennedy calls this man-or-mouse copy. And he explains how this isn’t just about men, or mice, or chefs, or cooks:

Great direct response copy makes people identify themselves as one or the other. Great direct response copy is all about divide and conquer. It is all about, you tell us who you are — smart/dumb, winner/loser, etc. — and then we’ll tell you the behavior that matches who you just said you are.

Dan says this is one of the four governing principles at the heart of each of his hundreds of successful campaigns.

Which brings up a man-or-mouse moment for you:

A lot of marketers have a certain contempt for their market. “Make them pay,” these marketers whisper. “Because when they pay, they pay attention.”

In other words, these marketers think most people are too stupid to value a thing properly if it’s given away for free.

And you know what? There’s probably truth to this.

But I hope you’re smarter than that.

Because that Dan Kennedy quote above, about making people identify themselves, is from Dan’s speech that I linked to yesterday.

This was the keynote speech at the Titans of Direct Response. The Titans event cost something like $5k to attend… and it still costs several thousand if you want to get the tapes.

But for some reason, at some point, Brian Kurtz, who put on the Titans event, made Dan’s keynote presentation available for free online. In my opinion, Dan’s is the most valuable presentation of the lot. And if that’s something you can appreciate, you can find it at this link. But before you go —

I also have an email newsletter. If you got value out of this post, and if you’re about to go watch Dan Kennedy’s presentation, there’s a good chance you will like the emails I send. If you want to try it out, you can sign up quickly here. And then go and watch that Dan Kennedy presentation.

Hollywood tear-jerker: Billion-dollar psychology lesson for cheap

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“Look at what they’ve done to you. I’m so sorry. You must be dead… because I don’t know how to feel. I can’t feel anything any more. You’ve gone someplace else now.”

You recognize that? It’s from E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. One of the biggest movies of all time.

When I was a kid, the main movie theater in my town for some reason kept the marquee for E.T. long after the movie had stopped playing.

I was too young to see it when it came out. And I suffered for years, seeing that marquee. I wanted to watch the movie so badly — a real life alien, and cute too! On Earth! Makes friends with a little boy and gets the boy’s bike airborne!

It’s everything my 5-year-old self wanted in life. But the movie was no longer in theaters, and there was no VHS either.

So a few weeks ago, I downloaded E.T. to finally heal this childhood wound and to see why this Spielberg fantasy is called the #24 greatest film of all time.

Unfortunately, the moment has passed.

I couldn’t really get into E.T. But I did get some use out of it. That scene above.

That’s when E.T. dies, about nine-tenths of the way through the movie. And the boy, Elliott, who had a psychic link with E.T. and who has felt everything E.T. has felt, suddenly cannot feel anything any more.

I can imagine that when E.T. played in movie theaters, both the kids and the parents choked up at this point. The kids, because the cute little extraterrestrial is dead. The parents, because they felt on some level how this scene might be about their childhood dreams, hopes, and capacity for joy and wonder… which have been drained out of them as they grew up and became adults.

And then of course, E.T. comes back to life and everything works out just fine. Which is the insight I want to leave you with today.

I recently re-watched Dan Kennedy’s Titans of Direct Response keynote speech. In one part of this amazing presentation, Dan tells an Earl Nightingale story. Two farmers each thought the other guy’s farm had the greener pasture. And when they get their wish and swap farms, it turns out the other pasture is no greener.

Dan: “Earl didn’t tell that story to be a marketing lesson… but I got the marketing lesson out of it.”

And you can too.

If a story reaches mass popularity — greener pastures, E.T., Bad Santa — it’s because it makes people vibrate. The thing is, social order must be maintained. That’s why each mass-market story either has a happy ending (if the characters were deep-down deserving) or a moral to be learned (if they were not).

Don’t let that fool you.

Market-proven tear-jerkers like E.T. can really show you true human nature — if you don’t wait until the end. The end is just tacked on to muddy the waters. But the psychology lesson is all the emotional buildup that happens before the turnaround.

That buildup shows you how people really are. Those are the real problems and desires people respond to, and that’s what you should speak to. Everything else is just Hollywood.

By the way, Brian Kurtz generously made Dan Kennedy’s keynote speech freely available online. If you haven’t watched it yet (or in the past month), it’s time to fix that.

But in case you need more convincing about the value hidden inside this speech, you might like to sign up for my email newsletter. In the coming days, there’s where I’ll be sharing some more Dan-inspired marketing ideas, like the one you just read.

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.

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 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.

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.