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Off you run to the grocery store, chanting to yourself the seven ingredients you need for spaghetti sauce. But the display of Super Bowl snacks distracts you, and then Mary calls about the PTA meeting. You check out with five ingredients, a bag of chocolates, and a box of Kleenex.

Ayn Rand dubbed the fact that people can’t remember long, random lists “the crow epistemology,” or “the crow.” The name refers to an experiment to find out how much birds can remember. A flock of crows watched a man with a rifle enter the woods. They hid until he left. Two men entered the woods; the crows hid until both left. When three men entered and only two left, the crows waited until the third left. But if five men entered and only four left, the crows came out of hiding. Crow-counting goes “one, two, three, lots.” (Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, rev. ed., p. 62. For more about ITOE, see Inspiration: Laying Out the Welcome Mat.)

Rand told this story introduce the point that humans, too, can juggle only a limited number of random, separate items in their conscious minds. The number of items may be 6 or 7 for humans rather than 3 or 4 for crows—but it’s still a very limited number. And any new item will tend to displace something that’s already there. So those 7 items on your grocery list are difficult to remember and easily forgotten.

The crow and your potential customers

How does this relate to copywriting?

The crow epistemology is why every single book on copywriting tells you to focus on 1 or 2 important benefits. If you present the case for your product as a bunch of 10 random points (yes, dears, even bulleted points) … caw, caw, caw. Your potential customers will quickly lose track of the points and lose interest in your copy. And you can’t inspire them with a desperate desire to purchase your product if they’re not listening.

The crow is also why every book on copywriting tells you to persuade your potential customer to act now. No matter how brilliant your copy, it’s going to get bumped from the reader’s mind when the phone rings or the snacks are served.

The solution to the crow is to reduce the number of ideas you’re asking your potential customers to grasp and remember. How?

Conquering the crow: reduce the number of points

Jingles, brands, USPs, and taglines work brilliantly when they meld the product’s name and its promise into an inseparable unit in the customer’s mind. Need to make your eyes look less bloodshot? Visine gets the red out. Want a quick snack that won’t leave tell-tale smudges on your fingers? M&Ms melt in your mouth, not in your hands. But if the ad says, “M&Ms come in pretty colors, have a crunchy outer coating, don’t melt on your fingers, and are easy to share” … Caw, caw, caw.

Conquering the crow: organize your points

Stories are great sales tools because they reduce the amount a reader or listener has to remember. A story is an organized sequence. A logical sequence “reads” like one item. It’s easier for a reader to follow and remember a story than a bulleted list.

Conquering the crow: motivate your potential customer

The other option for getting past your reader’s crow is to increase his motivation to listen to your message. More on that in a future post. (If you’ve heard of Ayn Rand’s book on ethics, The Virtue of Selfishness, you can guess where I’ll go with this one.)

The crow and you as a copywriter

Your brain has the same limitations as those of your readers. If you have five brilliant ideas and the phone rings, several of the brilliant ideas will vaporize. Write now, edit later.

The crow is why I created worksheets and checklists to use on my own copywriting projects. If I see ideas on paper, I can compare and consolidate them, and ultimately write more forceful copy. Are there days when I don’t feel like bothering to go through this step-by-step process? Oh, yes. But I never regret doing it once I get started—and I never fail to find at least one valuable idea that had not occurred to me when I was letting the visions roam wild and free inside my head.

Try this for yourself with a sample page on analyzing the competition from the VersaQuill Copywriting Workbook.

What questions would you add? Give me a good suggestion and I’ll send you a free copy of the Workbook—a $60 value. Why? Because the Workbook is good, and I want to make it even better.