Lesson 14: “No vision, no decision”
Lesson 14: “No vision, no decision”
All about creating a vision of Sam's future with your offering in it
This is the much-loved motto of Jim Camp, one of the world’s best negotiators. I’ve learned a great deal about persuasion by studying negotiation tactics — but let me back up a little so I can explain this.
Veteran copywriter Dean Rieck describes good writing as being like a store window: it should be clean and clear, providing an unobstructed view of the contents within. His point is that copy should be “invisible;” as long as Sam doesn’t notice it, his attention remains fixed on what you’re offering.
This is why clarity is so important.
But notice the point implicit in the analogy:
Your copy must give Sam a clear vision of what you’re offering.
You have almost certainly heard — many times — that Sam buys for emotional reasons rather than rational ones. Reason is like the steering wheel, but emotion is the engine that gets him to the sale.
Yet when we sit down to write copy, what is our first impulse? In my experience, it is usually to break out the spreadsheets and dig into the facts and figures — to show Sam the airtight logic of the case for buying.
There are all kinds of factors that go into Sam’s decision...but the emotional ones always come before the rational ones. The better you can connect with Sam’s emotions, the better you will do.
Sam’s vision for himself
This being the case, you need to know:
What is the reason Sam is reading your page at all?
You probably have a good idea; at least superficially. But now I want to dig deeper. What is his vision for himself? What does he imagine happening when he buys? You must work to build up this vision in his mind, to emphasize it, in order to move toward the decision you want.
As the saying goes, most people don’t go to the hardware store for a drill. They go to the hardware store to buy the ability to make a hole. But even making a hole isn’t what they really care about. They want to hang a painting. But hanging a painting is itself just a means to an end: they have a vision of life with that painting on the wall. They have a vision of the beauty of it. Of their friends admiring it. Of feeling sophisticated. Or opulent. Or something.
Creating a vision is all about figuring out the end Sam will use your offering as a means for achieving.
Notice how this is not the same as emotion-based decision-making. You aren’t trying to get Sam to make a decision based on how he feels in the moment. You aren’t playing on his impulsiveness or his desperation. Rather, you are looking for the emotional reason behind his reading your copy in the first place.
This is the vision you must connect with and build up.
How to create Sam’s vision
Sam will, of course, create a vision automatically. That’s just part of how our minds work — if someone tells you about something you think you might want, you’ll naturally imagine having it, and using it.
But that automatic vision is often dim, ill-defined. We don’t think it through very carefully. Because of this, it is not nearly as attractive as it could be.
Good copy builds out the vision, to make it as vivid as possible, and to emphasize the most attractive points of it.
But how?
1. “Imagine”
You may have noticed that if you ask a stranger to do something — especially to buy something — they tend to balk. Their natural reaction is to question the instruction. To find a reason to disagree with it. The critical mind throws up objections.
What’s interesting, though, is this doesn’t happen if you just ask someone to imagine something. If you ask them to imagine the outcome of the sale, rather than making the purchase itself, there is very little resistance.
This is because we don’t see imagining as a “real” task. It’s just a mind-game. An enjoyable game; a distraction from life — as with fantasies.
In fact, it’s really hard not to imagine something if someone suggests it.
By asking Sam to imagine something, you bypass his critical mind and “sneak in” through the back door of his imagination. The lizard brain remains lulled. And once you’re “in,” you can give Mr. Lizard a bit of a tickle under the chin, as it were.
Now here’s the strange kicker that makes this important:
The brain literally cannot tell the difference between imagining reality and experiencing it.
As far as Sam’s brain is concerned, there’s no difference between when he visualizes enjoying your offering, and when he actually buys and enjoys it.
This makes his imagination a deceptively powerful ally. Remember — the fear of loss is far stronger than the desire for gain. So if you can get Sam to feel a sense of ownership for your offering, if you can make him feel like it is already his, then not buying it feels like a loss.
By doing so, you invoke a much stronger desire than you can by merely explaining benefits to him. In getting him to imagine owning those benefits, enjoying them, experiencing them, it becomes as if he already has. And the natural thing for him to do then is to keep what he “has”...which means making the purchase.
Sam’s sense of ownership over what he imagines is surprisingly deep-seated. When you think about it, this makes sense. Our youngest years are ruled by our imaginations. Kids are highly possessive of their make-believe ideas and characters and worlds. They don’t like to be told they aren’t real. And although as adults we’ve managed to conceal that affection for our fantasies under a veneer of pragmatism, the same effect still governs our behavior at a subconscious level. Why do you think so many people want to write novels?
Here’s a real life example written by Daniel Levis. I choose this one because Daniel is quite overt, making it easier to see what he is doing. Notice that you don’t have to just use the word “imagine” — synonyms are equally good:
Imagine spending a fraction of what your competition does to attract new business. Picture customers buying from you again & again, as they lap up your simple yet oh so delicious marketing messages.
It would be like having a mysterious profit faucet that you just twisted open or closed, at will, confounding your competitors at every turn.
You’re thinking it sounds too good to be true. But what if it were good & true? Would you want to know more?
2. Engage all the senses
You might have heard copywriters speak of “appealing to multiple modalities.” That’s just fancy jargon for “help Sam see, hear, taste, touch and smell your offering.”
You have probably heard that some people are visual learners, some aural, and some kinesthetic. I think this is overstated, but it certainly does reflect a general truth — so by using language that appeals to all these modalities, you increase your chances of engaging Sam’s imagination and creating that vision we just talked about.
Daniel Levis’ example above demonstrates this aptly. Here’s another — it’s actually hard not to invoke Sam’s imagination if you get him to engage his senses, and vice versa. Notice that I don’t just talk about how the chess set looks. I talk about how it feels. How it sounds. Even how it smells. Smell is especially powerful because it is processed in the limbic system — aka the lizard brain.
Picture this chess set sitting on a table in your lounge. Your friends give it admiring glances — and their fingers reach to feel the fine textures, hand-carved into the walnut pieces. Imagine the challenge of a hard-fought game. The sliding of soft felt on fine hardwood as you move your piece to take another. The delicate scent of beech...and the satisfying clunk of the enemy king toppling at the end.
There are other ways to engage multiple modalities than straight descriptions, of course. I like to use figures of speech that rely on sensory metaphors:
Look, here’s the deal
If you see what I mean
The sweet smell of success
You may have heard
Roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty
3. Case studies
We’ll talk a lot more about case studies when we do email. I greatly prefer them to made-up stories like those above, because you can use exactly the same sorts of imagery — but since they’re true stories, you don’t run the risk of seeming manipulative. Sam will put himself into the story automatically, because that is how we experience stories: through the characters.
(A case study doesn’t have to be labeled as such, by the way; it is simply a story of someone happily using your product. It can even be you.)
I don’t tend to use case studies on sales pages precisely because they are so perfectly suited to email. Why make the sales page longer when you can put the case studies into an autoresponder sequence instead? So we’ll keep these in reserve for when we start writing emails, but remember, you can always re-use content. If it makes sense to put these on the web (say, if you have a whole website dedicated to your offering), then do it.
4. Testimonials
Testimonials are like case studies, but with two big differences:
They are in your customer’s own words, which are likely to be similar to Sam’s words, making them very powerful;
They are quite short, which means less detail, but more versatility.
Testimonials are also well-suited to emails, but because they’re shorter, they’re great on sales pages — at least in opportune places. They can be very helpful for illustrating some feature or benefit you’ve just described:
Our clinicians are all trained and experienced in fitting hearing aids to the highest level of precision and satisfaction. Because they fit far more of the latest hearing aids than average for our industry (because of how specialised we are), they gain experience very quickly. In Australia, the average clinician fits 17 hearing aids per month. Most of them are entry-level. Our clinicians fit up to 45 per month. Many of them are high-end.
This is why we routinely receive emails like this one from Kelly, a lovely lady who traveled all the way from Canberra to our clinic in Sydney:
Many thanks for all your help in fixing up my underperforming hearing aids. I have seen two others before you without much success. I congratulate you on your special skills and conscientiousness which now have made my aids suit my hearing needs so much better. —Kelly E
This is how I generally recommend using them, rather than pasting them one after another at some point on the page and hoping Sam will read them. Even if he does, he often wonders if they’re real. Inserting them as illustrations tends to bypass that critical reaction, because how they are fitted into the narrative is a natural way of telling your own experience. Sam’s critical mind doesn’t work so well when he is reading stories.
The one way that I will use testimonials “in bulk” is via external review widgets. These have a great deal more credibility with Sam because he knows you can’t curate them to your benefit. Here’s an example from a lead-generation site I built for a client in insurance:
5. Analogies & metaphors
You might have noticed I use analogies and metaphors in a lot of the copy I write (including my emails). Perhaps my most outrageous metaphor, which is also an analogy, was once at the beginning of my sales page for the Attention-Thieves’ Communiqué:
Sometimes I feel a bit like Satan.
Now, there’s more going on in that opening, copywriting-wise, than just using a metaphor/analogy — but it plays a major part. So, what is so special about them?
Actually, a couple of things.
They emphasize and illustrate, often in entertaining ways. This makes them interesting and memorable. That’s one of the big things I’m going for with my “Satan” opening. The same goes for how I’ve been known to compare most Internet Marketing information with filthy, fetid garbage. The more you can entertain and stand out in Sam’s mind, the better you’ll tend to do — especially if he is comparing options and trying to decide whether to buy from you or someone else.
They are very powerful for both introducing and explaining unusual or difficult concepts. Apple did this brilliantly with their original iPod slogan, “1,000 songs in your pocket.” I know the songs aren’t literally in my pocket, so the metaphor tells me two of the iPod’s killer features: its portability and its storage space.
Flint McGlaughlin of MarketingExperiments also uses this to great effect when he explains a landing page in terms of dating. You don’t ask for marriage in the headline — and you don’t say stupid things like, “Hey baby, I’m the leading bachelor in New York City.” So he is explaining a complicated concept in relation to something that is also complicated (so the analogy works), but at the same time easy to understand because of our experiences and intuitions about people.
6. Multimedia
This may sound like cheating since it isn’t technically writing at all, but if you’re selling a physical product then high-quality photos, or preferably videos, are absolutely vital. The more the better.
Nothing creates a vision like actual visual stimulation. I can’t count the number of times I’ve bought one product over another simply because I could see it properly on my screen, instead of having to peer at low-resolution pics.
Homework
This lesson has been long on theory, so let’s end with some practical steps that will help you put these ideas into action.
If your offering is a means to some emotional end, what is that end? Spend some time brainstorming the underlying vision that Sam has. You don’t need to get very complicated here — you just want to draw as many connections as possible (this is why I recommend brainstorming rather than listing).
Look through any email correspondence or testimonials you have from previous customers. Earmark those that might come in handy for illustrating parts of Sam’s vision.
Brainstorm mundane things that your offering — or features and benefits thereof — can be compared to. What are some familiar concepts that are similar to something about your offering? What kinds of analogies or metaphors can you create?