[GordonJ]

What are you trying to sell? What is your offer?

As a marketer, I think markets first is better than product first, but there are many who disagree. The fastes and easiest way to write winning copy that pulls is to sell something to someone who has already bought something similar.

If not, then you add hurdles.

But they can be jumped over.

Begin with WHO. Call it a prospect, avatar, target but exactly WHO is that someone you want to buy from you?

Then, where are they? How will you get your offer in front of them at the right time?

What will you say to them?

It isn't as compicated as it is made out to be. But the problems occur at the set up, because everyone is trying to persuade someone to do something and copy writing teachers have to keep you believing that you are only one secret away from getting it right...hello million dollar promotion, lambo, beachs and cold drinks.

And the simplest of thoughts, What is in it for them, or as it is taught from the customer point of view, what is in it for me. WIIfm.

Tell them what they get.
What changes.
What happens.

Joe Karbo told a story in 3 sentences, I was living in the basement of my inlaws. I used this formula. Now I own a beach house and new cars all paid for.

Embarassament. Pride. Ego. Guilt. All felt in the "living in the basement of my inlaws". See.

You don't need page after page or long stories to evoke emotion, frame it in such a way it will resonate with what your target is thinking, and how do you know what that is?

You create the intersection with that in mind, taking their time in to account, and then the PO, the big red nose, or blinking ice cubes...in words, or a video, or audio...

Get their attention by breaking THEIR preoccupation.

More later today, questions anyone?

Now the MGRE.

Thanks to a brilliant professor, Gerald Zaltman, who has written many books, but the one must read for Copywriters is: MARKETING METPHORIA. A very successful marketer, John Assaraf is a big proponent of all things neuromarketing.

See, they have finally caught up to me.

The gap between what people say they WANT, and what they actually BUY, is very huge, and Zaltman explains it (my very simplification) by saying

don't believe people who SAY they want something, what are they really sinking.

I have been deep diving into neuro behavior for decades now, and today, I am very confident and these guys are reassuring my assumptions, as truth.

They first confirm, most people don't know what they want.

Second, what they say is really different from what they THINK.

We think, and BUY in pictures for the most part, but across the board have limited vocabularies to express those. The words used by consumers are for all intents and purposes, to be taken with a grain of salt until backed up by testing and research.

See, it all comes back to the subconscious.

I've written about getting the RAS (reticular activating system) to look the other way, for decades now.

I read Milton Erickson in the 70's, and worked with Fran Renner a decade before that, and Milton was a guy who showed the world the fallacy of a deep trance as a necessity to hypnosis, and of course there is argument still...

but, Erickson used technique, mainly distraction, a touch in many cases to trick the RAS into receptivity.

This is done in Copy much the same way Glenn shocks the waitress, he DISRUPTS her mundane, with shock and awe, in a positive way...and you can do the same thing with the written word.

Here's how: