All decisions are driven by emotion. This has been shown by neuroscientists like Professor Antonio Damasio, in whose book, The Feeling of What Happens, you can read the experimental and clinical evidence for this claim. We use information to validate our decisions. But the impulse comes from our emotions. Simply put, when we have to choose between two or more competing options, knowing one is better is important, but feeling it is better is critical.
After we have decided – in a split second – that one course of action is the right one, we then review and possibly even select the data that back up our gut feeling. So what happens if we accept that emotions drive decision-making? How does it affect our copywriting? The answer is, not as much as you might think. Our planning stays the same. We have to figure out our reader’s point of pain, what rouses them from slumber at three in the morning. We have to figure out how our magazine, newspaper or website solves that problem.
And we have to understand the reasons why our customer might not want to subscribe. But having done all that, the way we approach the subscriber acquisition process is quite different. Rather than simply listing benefits – save money off the shop price, free delivery direct to your door, free access to our online archive – we need to sink a hook, baited with emotion, deep into the prospect’s primitive brain. That calls for strategies quite different from the argument-driven, intellectually-framed copy that many of us were trained to write. Strategies that owe more to the arts of storytelling, rhetoric and drama than classical economics, journalism or marketing.
Why do people do dumb things?
Classical economics and its adherents have always claimed that with perfect information comes perfect decision-making. That human beings, when in possession of all the facts, make logic-based decisions through a calm and rational analysis of the risks and benefits of each competing option. Recently, faced with the disconcerting evidence of their own eyes, (and possibly behaviour), economists have started to wonder why it is that human beings, when in possession of … etc etc, don’t make rational decisions.
Why do people smoke? Drink to excess? Have affairs? Break the speed limit? Eat fatty foods? Read articles by Jeremy Clarkson? To accommodate the evidence, classical economics has spawned an untidy, mutant offspring called behavioural economics. Behavioural economics is a fancy term for “psychology”. Itself a fancy term for “why the hell do people do such crazy stuff all the time?”.
After much head-scratching, experimentation, “modeling” and other pseudo-scientific thumb-twiddling, here’s what they have come up with. Ready? Sometimes people do stuff that’s bad for them because it feels good. But back to the power of logic. Of reason. Of accurate description.
Two groups who get into copywriting
This focus on description serves another trade remarkably well. Journalism. And because journalism has the written word as its stock-in-trade – but not, or not usually, the income that a smart copywriter can command – many journalists jump the fence and set up as copywriters. As they do, they bring with them an idea that what matters is one’s ability to describe things. Now, it’s true that descriptive powers do no harm in the hands of a skilled copywriter. In fact, they are one of the abilities that we should cultivate. But they are secondary to the real, scratch-the-surface-and-you-find-it skill that defines the advanced copywriter: empathy.
There is a second group of entrants to the copywriting game who do possess the ability to empathise. They are interested in what their interlocutor is feeling, more than what they are thinking, or saying. And they are skilled at paying attention to the cues that suggest a person is saying one thing but feeling another. Those people are sales people. They may have a classical sales background: in door-to-door selling, like David Ogilvy; in mail-order selling, like Drayton Bird; in face-to-face selling on shop floors, car showrooms or Tupperware parties; or in telephone sales.
They may have a direct marketing background, like mine, where every day we would open the post and count order forms returned to us by customers. Or they may have a broader marketing or commercial background where, nonetheless, they were judged on their ability to affect the P&L of the company that employed them. This second group is the one to watch. Having switched to the copywriting trade, they are less interested in advancing a coherent, logical argument than in arousing feelings in the breast of their reader. Three of their best friends are FUD, FAG and FOMO.
FUD = fear, uncertainty and doubt.
FAG = fear and greed.
FOMO = fear of missing out.
Hmm. Fear seems remarkably popular. Why is that? Well, it all started a long, long time ago. I want to introduce you to somebody who can help us understand why copywriters need to respect the power of fear. He can also help us to understand why people do irrational things. His name is Ug.
The story of Daddy Ug and Mummy Og
Ug lived 200,000 years ago. He lived with his wife and children in a small tribe of early Homo sapiens in a … well, in a cave of course. Ug had a hard life beset by problems. Here are the three things that bothered Ug the most. One, getting food to eat without dying from it. Two avoiding being eaten by something big and fierce. Three having sex. (On this last point, Ug hadn’t heard of Richard Dawkins, or the selfish gene, because a) he couldn’t read and b) Richard Dawkins hadn’t been born yet).
One day, Ug was sharpening his spear-point by the fire when he saw his children Little Ug and Little Ug (What? You were expecting Lily and Tristan? ) wandering off to play in a patch of red berry bushes.
“Hey!” called Ug.
“Yes, Daddy,” Little Ug called back.
“You see those red berries over there?
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Last week, Little Og ate some of those and guess what happened to her?”
“What, Daddy?”
“She turned green and fell down dead. Anyhoo, have fun, kids!”
Guess who didn’t eat any red berries.
Unbeknownst to Ug or Little Ug or Little Ug, the week before, an almost identical scene had played out on this very spot, between Mummy Og and Little Og. Here’s how that went.
“Hey!” called Og.
“Yes, Mummy?”
“Statistical and anecdotal evidence suggests that ingesting those red berries over there will lead to an early and painful demise. Here is an infographic charting child mortality and red berry-eating that makes the point rather well.”
“Oh, OK, Mummy.”
“So, don’t forget not to eat the berries.”
And here’s what Little Og heard.
“Hey! Blah, blah, red berries, blah, blah, child, eat the berries.”
All of which means that Daddy Ug managed to raise his children to the age at which they could start having sex and making Little Ugs of their own, and Mummy Og didn’t.
The power of storytelling
Storytelling, it turned out, and story listening, conferred evolutionary advantage. Which meant that, as the human race advanced haltingly towards the present day, our brains evolved to respond to stories. To the point where your brain, and mine, releases dopamine when we listen to stories. Dopamine is a natural pleasure drug secreted by the brain. It is not, as far as I am aware, secreted when we listen to a PowerPoint presentation. The part of the brain where stories work their magic is called the limbic system. It’s a collection of discrete but linked structures buried deep inside the brain just on top of the spinal cord and brain stem.
Although there are plenty of emotions that guide and shape our behaviour, fear is one of the most powerful. Going back to Ug and his problems, two were governed by fear and the third could only happen if he listened to his fears.
But we aren’t cave-dwellers. Surely we are governed by higher sensibilities than eat-or-be-eaten and get-it-when-you-can? We developed music, the internet, Angry Birds. That’s true. We did. With the amazing neurological architecture of our pre-frontal cortex – that squirmy, grey mass you see being eaten in zombie films, which we also invented.
However, dismiss the power of the limbic system at your peril. It’s still there, deep within the brainy skulls of neuroscientists, economists, university professors and copywriters. And it’s still doing what it always did. Responding to stories, shaping our emotions and influencing our decisions.
Limbic, limbic, limbic
So how does all this neuroscience and paleoanthropology affect the way we sell subscriptions? The same way it affects the way other marketeers sell everything else. The best way to build a profitable relationship with a customer is to engage their emotions. Make your product the one they feel will make their life better. Listing the usual ‘benefits of subscribing’ is not, in my opinion, enough. You can buy volume – it’s a tried and tested method of building your database of subscribers to whom your advertisers can sell their wares. But as advertising increasingly moves online, you need to be booking profits directly from your subscribers. Bribe-to-subscribe deals that cost you money on every new subscriber just won’t cut it any longer – if they ever did.
That means telling stories. Not necessarily long, involved narratives. Even a subject line can tell a story as this classic example I received fairly recently: The nurse said, ‘do this or die’. It means showing, not telling. Painting a picture of life with the product, not merely listing upcoming editorial features or describing a 10% discount as ‘exciting’. And it means thinking constantly of ways to present your title that makes it irresistible. Think FUD, Think FOMO. Think FAG.
