“All right, all right, I apologize.”
I want to quickly share with you a scene from my favorite comedy, A Fish Called Wanda. This scene might be instructive if you’re a marketer or copywriter.
In this scene, Kevin Kline, playing an ex-CIA assassin called Otto, forces another man to apologize.
That other man is who we see in the scene, standing stiffly against a brick wall, making the apology.
“You’re really sorry?” asks Otto, somewhere off camera.
“I’m really, really sorry,” says the other man. “I apologize unreservedly. I offer a complete and utter retraction. The imputation was totally without basis in fact, and was in no way fair comment, and was motivated purely by malice.”
As he says this, the camera rotates right side up.
It turns out the other man — a barrister named Archie Leach, played by John Cleese — is not really standing against a wall. Really, he’s being dangled out of a window, held at his ankles by Otto.
And here’s why this might be relevant if you do marketing or if you write copy:
Otto the CIA assassin fancies himself a bit of an intellectual. He reads philosophy books all the time, and he’s fond of quoting Nietzsche.
But he also thinks the central message of Buddhism is “every man for himself.” And he knows for a fact that the London Underground was a political movement.
In other words, Otto is a bit of an idiot, and somewhere deep down, he knows it. That’s why his tagline throughout the movie is, “Don’t call me stupid.”
So when he secretly overhears Archie… right as Archie is about to say that Otto is stupid… well, that’s how we end up with the scene at the window.
The point is, when someone is insecure about a quality, they take any challenge to that quality very seriously.
But you probably know that already. It’s standard playground psychology.
What you might not know is that there’s another possible reaction to being very insecure about some personal quality. And that’s buying direct response offers.
Because if you are insecure about a thing… you have the belief and maybe life experience that this is a part of your life that you cannot get sorted on your own. God knows you’ve tried. That’s why you’re in the market.
Of course, not everybody who buys direct response offers is insecure. Some small fraction of people are successful already or will soon be. They are just looking for a slight edge.
But those people are the tiny minority.
For the vast majority in any direct response market, you can count on a wounded ego… at least in relation to the problem you’re offering to solve or the promise you’re making.
So if you’re smart, you’ll be aware of this self-esteem thing in your marketing and copy.
On the positive side, it can be very valuable if you just soothe and calm that insecurity.
On the negative side, it can be even more valuable if you poke and prod that very spot.
That’s why one of the most successful direct response ads of all time had the headline, “Do you make these mistakes in English?”
And it’s why Gary Bencivenga… the most celebrated copywriter of the past 50 years… used the same “Do you make these mistakes” formula when selling his own book on job interviews.
In fact, If I had anything to sell you right now, I might subtly prod some secret insecurities I know about.
But I won’t do that. I’ve got no direct response offer for you today. Well, nothing for sale. Just the free offer to sign up to my newsletter, in case you’re looking for a slight edge.