Posts filed under 'Copywriting'
Sometimes people write words that mean nothing at all. And racking your brains on nothing is just like trying to divide by zero. All you end up with is a blinding headache.
That’s just what happened to Lewis Green when he read this article called Top 10 Marketing Processes for the 21st Century. Lewis’ blog post about his experience reminded me of a Richard Dawkins article called Postmodernism Disrobed, a review of the book Intellectual Impostors by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Richard doesn’t mince his words in his insightful opening paragraph.
Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.
Take this quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, for example.
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.
Enough to give you a bad migraine on a good day! Maybe people like this are just hoping that when you give up trying to figure it out, you’ll assume that you’re the dumb one and leave it at that. The best cure for this kind of headache is prevention and the trash bin is the doctor I’d recommend.
Of course the very same thing happens in advertising - not necessarily because there is nothing to say about a company or product, but because the marketers don’t dig deep enough to find the gold. Sometimes it’s down to there not being enough budget for proper research, other times it’s just lazy marketers to blame. After all it’s easier to weave a web of spin than to build upon solid, convincing facts.
Take the trouble to make every communication with your prospects and clients as clear and meaningful as possible. Find out what you really want to say and carefully choose the best words to express your ideas in a way that is easy to understand.
Of course you can be creative! And by all means use words that conjure vivid images in your reader’s mind. But make sure that the solid foundations your argument is based on show through. Your audience will respect and trust you for that.
October 19th, 2006
Bob Bly posed an interesting question last week, about grammar and ad copy.
Grammarians, he says, would point out that the word ‘free’ in the term ‘free gift’ is redundant because a gift is, by definition, understood to be free. I think another thing that’s redundant is pointing out that such grammarians are also annoyingly pedantic. It’s also understood.
The word ‘free’ is a recognised eye-catcher and is considered by many to be one of the most powerful words in the advertiser’s toolkit. Far from redundant!
The fact is that there are far more serious grammar rules that get sacrificed in the interest of writing compelling copy. Like using incomplete sentences such as this one. Or this other one. It happens all the time.
Often this deliberate disregard for the very rules so painstakingly drilled into many a young child is necessary to make the writing more interesting, create effect, or simply help it flow.
And yet it drives many a grammarian hopping mad. It’s hardly surprising they don’t get to write ad copy – not even for free!
September 18th, 2006
Whether you like them or not, puns are part and parcel of the advertising world. Used wisely, they can work well to attract attention or to make a product that much more memorable. Other times they fall flat. But the worst kind of pun has to be the one that creeps in completely unnoticed to undermine the very thing that your advert is trying to promote.
I recently came across one of these little horrors while waiting for my luggage to show up on the conveyor belt at the airport. “The car you need, just 40 steps away!” announced a car rental ad running along the conveyor. It obviously meant to say, “40 paces away”, but I could not help thinking of the kind of steps of the bureaucratic persuasion.
Call me pedantic if you like, but that was the thought that sprang to my mind as a potential client – and it was the exact opposite of what the advertisers intended. What’s more, in our impatient world where the time conscious measure efficiency in mouse clicks and milliseconds, I’m sure I’m not alone!
September 6th, 2006
There’s a big headline debate raging in the copywriting circles. It’s not about whether the clever-sounding ones are better at getting people to read the rest of the copy. They’re usually not, like I pointed out a couple of weeks ago. And that’s a fact.
The hot question is whether long headlines are more suited for the job than short ones – you know the kind I’m talking about. You probably have seen websites with a bright red headline that goes something like this one I made up:
Top businessman reveals 5 quick and easy marketing strategies that will supercharge your business and make you up to 132% more profit in just 20 minutes a day. (So that you earn tons of money and still have plenty of time to spend it!)
Long headlines like these are common in direct mail, where they often out-perform shorter alternatives, but you’ll find them on many websites too. So, do they really work better online than a five or ten word job? Or rather, when do they work better?
I have just come across this excellent article by Michel Fortin, titled The Truth About Mega-Headlines, which sheds some much-needed light on the topic.
If you’re in charge of writing or choosing online headlines, you really must read it. I know it thought me a thing or ten.
And don’t let the article’s length put you off. It’s all juice!
July 13th, 2006
I recently commented about the unfortunate fact that many businesses lose sales by failing to recognise the value of good copywriting.
And in another post, I touched upon the importance of testing your advertising so that you find out what works best in a particular circumstance and do more of that.
It all makes sense when you think about it.
But wouldn’t you expect me, a copywriter, to push my own trade and to even suggest that you get me to write multiple versions of your copy so we can choose the winner? After all that would mean more business for me, right?
Well, Armand Morin, one of the world’s top Internet marketers, stresses these two points when he asks, “Why is copywriting always last on the list?” I suggest you read his post and get some fine marketing wisdom straight from the horse’s mouth!
July 5th, 2006
The realm of the esoteric seems to have invaded that icon of modern technology that is the World Wide Web. CNN reports that some Indian web designers are advocating the use of the ancient philosophies of Indian Vaastu Shastra and Chinese Feng Shui to resolve the harmony imbalances that, they say, cause websites to perform poorly.
Earth is the layout, fire is the color, air is the HTML, space is name of the Web site, and water is the font and graphics,” says [Dr. Smita] Narang, adding that each must be chosen carefully and strike a balance with the other.
Narang, a vaastu expert who has spent four years analyzing around 500 sites, says a Web site that is not designed according to vaastu rules will have few hits and will negatively affect the business.
What ever is the world coming to?
As Seth Godin aptly comments, “it’s easier than working on content”, and besides, this new craze is bound to make its proponents some nice and easy money at the expense of naïve business people who should know better.
All this kind of reminds me of what often happens with many advertising campaigns, where there is too much emphasis on ‘cool’, impressive ideas. After all, even in my own field of copywriting, it is easy to come up with a cunning play on words for a headline or caption. The real challenge is to write one that actually yields results by making the reader itch to read the rest of your copy.
Unfortunately these kind of headlines are on the rare side and ‘Feng Shui’ headlines that sound nice, but do little else, are often preferred – an all too common mistake.
June 28th, 2006
Marketers and copywriters strive to differentiate a particular product from the competition and get consumers to switch brands. It’s not just their job, it’s their whole raison d’être.
Enter one of the sharpest tools in the marketing box: the Unique Selling Proposition. Rosser Reeves, author of Reality in Advertising, coined the term to refer to a product’s one major benefit that makes it stand out from the crowd. By dramatising the Unique Selling Proposition and stressing it again and again, marketers get consumers to view that feature as unique to the brand, and thus to view that brand as unique. When consumers perceive the USP as sufficiently important, they are encouraged to change brands.
Herbert Ahrend, founder of Ahrend Associates, says that even when a product is similar (or possibly inferior) to the competition’s, it can be differentiated by making a Unique Selling Proposition out of a feature that competitors have not stressed.
Bob Bly illustrates this with an interesting anecdote in his book The Copywriter’s Handbook.
Once, a copywriter visited a brewery in the hopes of learning something that could set the brewery’s beer apart from other beers. He was fascinated to discover that beer bottles – like milk containers – are washed in live steam to kill the germs. Although all brands of beer are purified this way, no other manufacturer had stressed this fact. So the copywriter wrote about a beer so pure that the bottles are washed in live steam, and the brew’s Unique Selling Proposition was born.
Seth Godin recently mentioned a couple of other examples where product features that are common to all brands are turned into a particular brand’s Unique Selling Proposition. Seth blogs about ads for ‘line-caught swordfish’ and ‘antibiotic-free eggs’, when all swordfish is caught using fishing lines and no eggs contain antibiotics. He adds:
Sometimes, marketers add a label where no label is needed. And that label is an effective way to highlight something about the product (or hide something).
And very effective it can be too!
I am sure you can think of a huge number of restaurants, where the food is by far Finger Licking Better than KFC’s. Yet, the Unique Selling Proposition that KFC’s food is so good that you will want to lick it off your fingers is so ingrained in the consumer’s mind that any marketing campaign by another brand based on that particular premise is surely doomed to failure.
So, what’s so special about what you’re selling? If you can’t tell me right off the bat, you’ve got some serious thinking to do!
June 22nd, 2006
Reading David Garfinkel’s post Plagarism? Or Creative Adaptation? Or Neither? reminded me of the adage that there are no new ideas – just adaptations of old ones. Not that I can say I entirely agree with that. Want an example? Einstein.
David says:
In direct marketing copywriting, we always strive to build our message on structures, concepts and actual words that have worked before. It’s no crime.
Hey, in this business, swiping is admired.
In other words, there is no point in reinventing the wheel. In a highly competitive environment such as direct marketing, where performance is meticulously tracked for maximum results, small tweaks and changes to past efforts are much less risky than all-out innovation.
Of course, different established methods, as well as choice of media and other variables, should be evaluated against each other whenever time and budget allow. This holds true for all kinds of advertising and not just for direct mail. After all, anything, from a different audience, a different culture, or even something apparently trivial such as a different time of the year, can throw a tried-and-tested marketing campaign completely off track.
In a nutshell, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but test, test and test again to make sure everything still runs at least as well as you expect it to.
June 21st, 2006
The lovely, sub-tropical, Spanish island of Gran Canaria has all the makings of a freelance copywriter’s paradise. Thousands of businesses need to communicate with the millions of tourists who visit each year. A third of these visitors come from the UK or from the, largely English-proficient, Scandinavian countries so, as an expatriate copywriter, my work schedule ought to be jam packed with local writing jobs, right?
Wrong!
In the course of my networking efforts I have come to realise a rather bitter truth that has forced me to look elsewhere for business. Spanish entrepreneurs and marketing folk have absolutely no clue about copywriting. Much less do they realise the vital role it should play as an integral part of their marketing efforts. There probably are some exceptions to this rule, but, my luck being what it is, I still have to come across them.
From multi-million dollar hotels to family-run diving schools, the response has been the same. Many think that a 10-cent-per-word translation service will do the trick of getting their message through to the English-speakers and convert these prospects into clients. Worse still, others say that they have ‘someone who has studied English’ on their payroll and so they’re covered, thank you very much. The very same goes for businesses in mainland Spain too.
Not even the franchises of giant international corporations like McDonald’s seem to be free from the economise-on-the-writing syndrome, as you can see from the photo of a sign that I took during a recent stroll by the beach.
Now, a trivial gaffe on a McDonald’s sign is more likely to elicit a few chuckles than to put a sunburned family off their fast-food calorie fix. Still, the fact remains that Spanish businesses at large are failing to make the most of the huge amounts of money they spend on marketing. Just like the fisherman who buys a top-dollar fishing rod only to skimp on the bait, they blow their budget on glitzy marketing campaigns and then make do with fast-food copywriting that’s all fat and no muscle. Hardly a thought about their message, how to deliver it effectively and how to make sure it achieves the effect they want it to have.
Then they sit and wonder why no one is biting!
Of course, the Spanish are not alone in the quagmire of ineffective communication. Even in the English-speaking world, many people who should know better still have to understand the simple fact of the matter. Just like the serious fisherman cannot do without prime fishing bait, quality copywriting is absolutely crucial for businesses that are determined to attract as many clients as possible and pays for itself many times over in terms of results.
Are you one of the unenlightened? I hope not!
June 19th, 2006
