Imagine a round red balloon, filled tight with air and floating in the middle of a room.
Got that image in your mind?
Ok, then let me explain why it’s important.
You’ve probably heard of Gene Schwartz’s ideas of market sophistication and awareness.
These two ideas are critical in writing advertising that sells. That’s because they tell you how to 1) get your prospect’s attention and 2) have him believe you, at least for a bit.
In a nutshell, sophistication is how skeptical your prospect is. Awareness is how much time he has spent researching his problem.
But here’s the trouble. I learned about sophistication and awareness years ago. And today, I still don’t have a 100% intuitive grasp of these ideas. I always have to “count on my fingers” when it comes to adding up where my market is in terms of these two measures.
Maybe I’m just not very smart. Even so, there are other problems with sophistication and awareness.
For one thing, these are two separate dimensions. That’s complicated. One dimension is simpler and more elegant than two.
To muddle things more, sophistication and awareness are not orthogonal. If somebody has zero skepticism to your claims… odds are good he hasn’t spent much time researching the problem.
And also, parts of the awareness and sophistication scales are not relevant to most sales copy. You’re probably not getting hired to write to a stage 1 awareness market (“$4 off Safeway pork chops this Friday!”). And if you are, you’re not getting paid much for it.
Which brings us back to that round red balloon floating in the middle of a room.
That’s my image of the typical direct response market. It combines sophistication and awareness, at least the parts that are relevant to sales copy. And it forms one simple, easy-to-understand-and-visualize dimension.
And for people who are subscribed to my email newsletter, I went into detail about how the red balloon of sophistication and awareness works, and how it simplifies things. But it’s not something I am willing to put on my blog.
Why? Because it might scratch your itch a little too well. Because frankly, my goal with these blog posts is to get people onto my email lists, where I can have more direct and immediate contact with them.
If you don’t ever subscribe to anybody’s newsletters, I can understand. And fare well.
But if you do occasionally subscribe to newsletter’s, then consider subscribing to mine. If you do decide to try it, here’s where to go.