VersaQuill

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.

It’s not a book you should curl up and relax with.

Print out the worksheets that are relevant to your current project. (There’s a sample worksheet for comparing your product with the competition’s at http://www.versaquill.com/VersaQuillSampleWorksheet1.4.pdf.)

Scribble the pages up. Cover your desk with leads and ideas that may turn out to be nothing … But that will be captured so you can judge them, rather than flitting about in your head. There’s a reason the wisdom of the ages is in written form: it’s what didn’t get lost when the phone rang or the dog needed to be walked.

Once you’ve filled in the worksheets, give yourself the godlike satisfaction of reducing chaos to order, using the Workbook’s summary sheets. Among the topics: What are the most important benefits? What emotions and ideas are driving your target audience, and why? What should the call to action be?

And then give yourself the pleasure of getting creative. With all the information you need gathered and fresh in your mind, start looking for a novel approach, a fascinating angle, an irresistible proposition.

The wondrous thing about systematically setting your thoughts down on paper is that in the end, it frees more of your mind and more of your time to be creative.

The Workbook is sold in PDF format specifically so you can go through this process for project after project. If you’re between projects, it’ll do wonders for your own marketing materials.

Send me your success stories: I’ll post some of them on this blog.

One of the pleasures of researching the VersaQuill Copywriting Workbook has been reading books by master copywriters. I find very refreshing their assumptions that the work they do is good and useful, and that business and capitalism are good things. (See the annotated list of Sources for specific book recommendations.)

I incorporated their advice into the worksheets and checklists of the Workbook, but when I came across an idea stated with particular pithiness or clarity, I added it to my file of advertising quotes. Here are a few favorites of general interest:

• Advertising is the poetry of capitalism. (Michael Maynard)
• The next time you’re in a meeting, look around and identify the yes-butters, the not-knowers, and the why-notters. Why-notters move the world. (Louise Pierson)
• He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts – for support rather than illumination. (Andrew Lang)
• When somebody asked Willie Hoppe’s manager how it was that Willie always won his billiard matches, the answer was, “Willie is always playing billiards; his competitors are always playing Willie.” (Victor Schwab)

And here are a few that relate more specifically to copywriting:

• Good copy involves digging for facts before a word is written, not whirling around to a typewriter keyboard, and starting to bang out words. (Victor Schwab)
• Remember the people you address are selfish, as we all are. They care nothing about your interests or your profit. They seek service for themselves. Ignoring this fact is a common mistake and a costly mistake in advertising. (Claude C. Hopkins)
• The advertisements which persuade people to act are written by men who have an abiding respect for the intelligence of their readers, and a deep sincerity regarding the merits of the goods they have to sell. (Bruce Barton, co-founder of BBDO)
• The headline tells the reader what the article is about. And thus gains his first attention. The illustration illustrates it. And thus sustains his interest. … Pictures alone, in publication advertising, do not sway the millions. Pictures mean little without words to explain them. People want to know “WHY”—and that takes more than a picture can tell. (Arthur Lasker)

Eventually I’ll organize this collection and sell it as an ebook. Meanwhile, I’m giving the work in progress free to purchasers of the VersaQuill Copywriting Workbook.

I’m a sucker for books on copywriting. Sometimes I can resist buying them – but I can never resist reading the descriptions and trying to find a good reason to buy just one more.

Alas, the return on these bibliographic investments is getting smaller and smaller. A lot of the books repeat what I’ve read elsewhere. Worse yet, when I sit down to write an ad, I can’t dredge up even half of the excellent advice I’ve read.

So why am I still tempted to buy them?

First, I keep looking for a way to make it easier to face that blindingly white, terrifyingly blank piece of paper.

Second, I’m very conscientious about giving good value for my services, so I worry that I’ve missed an obvious selling point or forgotten an important piece of information.

Faced with this ongoing problem, I finally decided last year to compile a set of worksheets and checklists to help me collect ideas, organize them, and check the copy. Having such material ready at hand turned out to be such a profound relief to my anxiety-ridden psyche that I decided to offer the material for sale as the VersaQuill Copywriting Workbook. The Workbook is an ongoing project and will be updated periodically. In fact, as I write this, two really, really interesting books are just begging for my attention. (I usually resist buying more of them – not always.)

I’ve posted the table of contents for Part 1 (Generating Ideas) and Part 2 (Writing the Ad) on my website, which includes further information about the Workbook and samples from it.

Have a look and tell me your thoughts: What would you add? What would you delete?

Click here to purchase the Workbook. To be notified of updates to the Workbook and occasionally receive free excerpts, subscribe to this blog (at right) and/or add your name to the VersaQuill mailing list.

(Incidentally, the title of this post is a riff on the title of David Ogilvie’s combination memoir / manual, Confessions of an Advertising Man, which is fascinating reading.)

Warning: the VersaQuill Copywriting Workbook, which I’ve just made available for purchase, is not for newbies. Why? Because newbies assume that “always” means “always,” and “never” means “never”; and they don’t have a broad enough context to distinguish a ghastly error from a brilliant innovation. The Workbook is full of alwayses and nevers, because it’s a compendium of advice from prominent copywriters plus standard practices in the field.

If you’re a copywriter but not a novice, you can skip this post and move along to the next one, Confessions of an Advertising Book Addict.

While I’m scaring people away, let me add that the Workbook is not going to be much use to you if you can barely write a grammatically correct sentence. Copywriting is, at its most fundamental, a form of communication. Applying the rules of English grammar is a prerequisite for communication – a fact that only writers of the most avant-garde fiction and poetry ignore. (And you can bet they don’t pay the mortgage with their writing income.)

If your grammar and style need work, you should curl up for a couple weeks with Foerster and Steadman’s Writing and Thinking: A Handbook of Composition and Revision, Zinsser’s On Writing Well, and/or Davenport’s Rex Barks. (Yes, really! I’m a very good writer, but when I taught my daughter English I learned a lot from Rex.)

Continuing in this negative vein, let me also discourage you from buying the Workbook if you routinely crank out 500-word articles for $10. If your style of writing is to type as fast as you can and submit your first draft, the Workbook isn’t going to be cost-effective for you. If, on the other hand, you’re charging $50-60 per hour and you’re serious about making your writing as clear, concise, and persuasive as possible, then the Workbook will pay for itself in a month or less, through savings in time stress.

If I haven’t scared you off, please do read the next post, Confessions of an Advertising Book Addict. Or you can click here for more information about the Workbook (including table of contents and sample pages).