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.