I have many fond memories of driving with my friend Sam to Costco, both for the $1.50 hot dogs and to stock up on 36-packs of Newcastle brown ale for our college apartment.
Costco, as you might know, is a chain of retail stores that operates through a membership club.
Costco has hangar-sized stores all around the North American continent, filled with everything you might ever need for your home — couches, outdoor saunas, gardening equipment, car tires, hot tubs, jugs of liquor, 72-lb wheels of Parmesan cheese, and 4-gallon buckets of mayonnaise.
Whatever you buy at Costco is always huge, and always at a huge discount over what you might pay elsewhere.
Now that you have that background, perhaps you can appreciate how chuffed I was to find out, after all these years, that Costco also has an in-house magazine, which goes out to more subscribers across the United States than Better Homes & Gardens, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic combined.
Sure, you might say, but who reads it.
Not only do people read the Costco magazine, but celebs fight to get on the cover of it.
Example:
Jimmy Kimmel, late-night talkshow host and four-time tuxedo-clad host at the Oscars, begged his publicity team to get him on the cover of Costco magazine.
Why?
“Because I love Costco,” said Kimmel in a recent NY Times article. Kimmel described the deep happiness he experiences when he comes home with 20 pounds of ground beef. “I go there for relaxation. I don’t like to run out of things.”
Think about it a little. How crazy is that?
I mean, we know people like security, that it’s one of our most basic needs. But 20 pounds of ground beef at Costco, to fill a need for security?
If you were ever tasked with writing an ad for Costco, I imagine you might emphasize the convenience, the money-savings, maybe even the club aspect of it.
But Costco as a salve for existential angst?
For me, the only way I would ever think of this as a selling point for Costco is to hear it from Jimmy Kimmel’s mouth.
Point being, the right sales angle can sell the strangest things (a four-time Oscar host, begging to be on the cover of Costco magazine, because security).
But how do you find the right sales angle?
You can get there by experimentation, by throwing spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks… though that might take more time than universe has before it turns into a cold and empty shell.
Or you can get there by research, going to your market, and really talking to them. I mean REALLY talking.
Again, do you think that if you ask somebody at the Costco parking lot why they come to Costco, that their first response would be, “Because I’m terrified by the scale and unpredictability of the universe?”
Or last, you can go and look at 3-5 top competitors in your market, particularly ones who are running long-form direct-response advertising.
See what they appeals they are making. Because those people have already done steps 1 and 2 above, and what’s floated to the top of that milk pail by definition is rich cream.
And now my offer, my old war horse, Copy Riddles.
I won’t pretend I planned to promote Copy Riddles today. I mainly wanted to share the above story of Costco magazine, and I didn’t think too much about how it would sell Copy Riddles.
But regarding research, or at least looking at top competitors in your market:
Take a source text such as a brochure describing some vitamins or hams or potato salad at Costco. Write your own sales pitch for that. Then look at what a top A-list copywriter, like Gary Bencivenga or Gene Schwartz or David Deutsch did with the same.
What you will find is, sometimes the A-list copywriters really will just make an appeal to money-saving or convenience.
But often they will do more than that. They will appeal to deeper, more fundamental psychological drives.
This is something you can train yourself to look out for, and even to do instinctively.
In fact, that’s what Copy Riddles is all about, using the approach I just laid out for you.
I don’t know what market you’re in, but odds are good that you’ll find examples of source material from your market inside Copy Riddles, along with bullets written to sell that source material by some of the greats.
There’s even a section inside Copy Riddles I call the Dirty Dozen, where I lay out some of the deeper, stranger psychological motivations that go beyond the convenience and money-savings, appeals that most B-level sales copy defaults to.
If you would like to get more info about Copy Riddles, and maybe find a bit of safety and control in this massive and incomprehensible world, here’s where to go: