A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga once wrote an ad for an agency he worked for. The ad ran in the Wall Street Journal, and the headline read,
“Announcing a direct response advertising agency that will guarantee to outpull your best ad.”
As you might expect from Gary, this ad was packed with all kinds of proof. In fact, a quarter of the ad consisted of eight case studies of previous clients that hired Gary’s agency.
Seven of the clients got tremendous results. One did not, and they didn’t pay anything, as per the guarantee in the headline.
I thought of this ad today because of a book I just finished reading, called Transforming Your Self, by Steve Andreas. The book is about our self-concept — how we think about ourselves — and how to change that.
Right now I’ll only share one bit of this valuable book with you. It’s about the raw meat that your self-concept, at least according to Andreas.
(And bear with me me for just a bit. Because this does tie into Gary Bencivenga and sales and marketing.)
So say you think of yourself as “smart.” How do you know that? How do you know you’re smart?
Andreas’s answer is that you have a set of mental images, each representing an experience, which back up your claim to being “smart.”
Perhaps you see your parents praising you when you were 7… or some workplace triumph… or getting through a dense book and really grokking it.
Whatever. The point is you have examples that back up your claim to being smart. Probably lots of them.
But what about the counterexamples? What about that time the intimidating college professor asked you a question… and you just sat there squirming, like a sweaty turnip?
That’s the interesting bit.
According to Andreas, your self-concept becomes stronger when you include counterexamples in your mental database.
A counterexample makes your claim to a quality more real and believable. (I’ve tried it out personally… and I believe it.)
And by the way, that’s exactly what’s happening in Gary’s ad above. That one counterexample makes the ad more real and believable.
But what if you have more than one counterexample? What if they start to pile up? What if they rival, or even outnumber your good examples?
That’s what the rest of Andreas’s book is about.
But Gary, master psychologist that he is, figured it out intuitively. And if you read Gary’s ad, you can find the answer, both in the headline and in the offer itself. In case you want to crack the code, here is Gary’s original ad: