Part II: The Body Copy
Your body copy does the selling by influencing your customer’s view of the world -> your product becomes the solution to his deepest desires.
To create this world, your copy must expand or alter one or more of the three dimensions of his already-existing world. This is the role of the body copy -> should be long enough for that.
The length of your ad will depend on three factors:
- How much copy you need to build his desire for that product as much as you can.
- How much copy you need to get him to imagine his life with your product.
- How much copy you need to counter objections.
The answers to these three questions determine
- the length of your ad
- its structure
- its development
- its style
- its pace.
Desires: they drive your prospects through life. Desires can be physical (being strong, thin, getting rid of acne), material (money), sensual (a cold beer, a hot partner).
You can’t create desires, but you can expand them or channel them. This is the art of salesmanship.
Advertising is the literature of desire.
Your job is to show your prospect every possible way that they can fulfill their desires.
A copywriter’s first qualifications are imagination and enthusiasm.
Your job is to show your customer in detail all the tomorrows that your product makes possible for him -> must take unformulated desires and translate them into reality.
The sharper you can draw your pictures, the better it is.
How much space can you give to this process of Intensification?
This depends on two factors:
- the amount of space allotted to you for the entire ad.
- the number of ways you can present your images without giving the feeling of repetition or boredom
You are working against two opposing forces:
- The ads that the customer saw about similar products (market sophistication). If your prospect has read the same phraseology before, he will be bored by it.
- The phraseology of your own ad. Once you have presented your basic fulfillment in a certain way, you must vary your viewpoint in your second description, or not present it again.
Identifications: These are the people your customer wants to play in life. People buy a diet for health, but they also buy it to project an image of health and attraction. Put these identification traits in your product.
Beliefs: These are the opinions, attitudes, and conceptions of reality that your prospect lives by.
It is not advertising’s mission to argue with them. And no one advertiser can change them.
Accept reality as it is, don’t change it!
The beliefs form a filter through which the information regarding the product pass, get accepted, or rejected. You start with these beliefs as a base. You build up from them by using your prospect’s logic, not your own, to prove that your product satisfies his desires.
We will now look at 7 techniques of breakthrough copy.
Seven Techniques of Breakthrough Copy
The First Technique of Breakthrough Copy: Intensification
Intensification: the presenting of a series of fresh, new, and different fulfillments for your prospects dominant desire.
Here are 13 ways to intensify. These are the 13 parts of the body copy.
The thirteen parts of the body copy.
- First present the product or the satisfaction it gives directly with a specific description: MORE ROSES THAN YOU EVER SAW ON ANY ROSE BUSH
- Put the Claims in Action. Show not only how the product looks, and what benefits it gives the reader, but exactly how it does this (explain how the plane works).
- Bring In the Reader. Tell your customer what will happen to him the first day he owns that product.
- Show Him How to Test Your Claims. Turn the demonstration into a test. Let your reader visualize himself using the product. Must be specific.
- Stretch Out Your Benefits in Time. Show not for just an hour or a day, but over a span of weeks and months.
- Bring In an Audience. Tell the audience what happened with the people that actually got the product.
- Show Experts Approving.
- Compare, Contrast, Prove Superiority. Show the difference between those that have the product, and those that do not.
- Picture the Black Side, Too. Make their problem worse, and solve it for them.
- Show How Easy It Is to Get These Benefits.
- Use Metaphor, Analogy, Imagination. There are infinite opportunities for the use of imagination to present those facts in more dramatic form, outside of the rigidly realistic approach.
- Before you’re done, summarize.
- Put Your Guarantee to Work. Call to Action.
The second technique of breakthrough copy: Identification
How to Build a Saleable Personality Into Your Product
Identification is the desire of your prospect to act out certain roles in his life.
You can do so in two ways.
- By turning your product into an instrument for achieving these roles.
- By turning that product into an acknowledgment that these roles have already been achieved.
Every product you work on should offer your prospect two different reasons for buying it.
- The fulfillment of a physical want or need.
- A method of fulfilling that need that defines him to the outside world.
This is the role your product offers to your prospect. It is the non-functional, super-functional value of that product. And it is built into that product—not by engineering—but by merchandising alone.
The way people represent themselves (or ways they wish people would believe them to be) are called roles. There are two types of roles.
- Character roles: progressive, liberal, sophisticated. These already belong to the customer who wishes to reinforce them.
The product can serve the prospect in three distinctive ways.
- Achieve mastery of his chosen character role.
- It can help simplify condense or speed up this mastery, such as a Speed-Reading Course.
- And third, and most important, it can serve as a symbol of that mastery.
They satisfy a need + play a role in representation. (buying a book on philosophy to learn AND impress your friends).
At least half of all purchases made today cannot be understood in terms of function alone (think about the Lamborghini).
These are often subconscious -> it’s your role to unearth them in your copy.
Your prospect is more likely to believe in the character roles you assign to him, than he is in the actual capabilities of the product. Tell him that the product makes him sophisticated etc.
- The second type of role is achievement role: executive, home-owner, entrepreneur, NYT bestseller.
Display is vital because these are not obvious. This car is not any car. It is the number one car driven by top executives.
Thus products become more than products. They are status symbols. They announce our achievements, define our role in life, document our success (Rolex…).
When you have two identical products with the same price that perform the same thing, the differentiation factor will come from the achievement role the product highlights. It is your job to create this role in your ad.
First, your job is to discover the character roles your prospect wants to identify with and that are embodied by your product. Choose the most compelling one.
You need to seek what achievement role the buyers of the product have, then build these qualities into your product.
Identification longings are a separate and immensely powerful form of desire. A desire not for physical satisfaction, but for expression and recognition.
The primary image of the product
The product you are given already has an image attached to it. That’s the primary image.
For example, a piston is a precision-made machine and full of mechanical beauty. You think you could improve the sales by making it virile and masculine. Here’s how to do so:
You do this in two ways: First, by changing the intensity of your primary image. By emphasizing and dramatizing that primary image, if it is already acceptable, or by toning it down, if it is negative or neutral.
For example, the male virility naturally associated with cigarettes is a definite sales ad, even with women. The sheer physical act of smoking—of “playing with fire”—of “breathing fire”—has been for centuries an assertion of manhood and of daring.
Marlboro took this image of virility and intensified it in three ways:
- First, they presented men who were themselves, virile.
- Second, they presented these men in situations or occupations that demanded virility.
- And third, they took the further “Creative Gamble” of affixing to these men’s hands one of the most primitive symbols of virility known to history: tattoos.
Sometimes the primary image may be negative. Or it may be neutral. Some have tried to discard these images, or replace them, and it didn’t work.
You cannot contradict accepted images or beliefs in advertising. In order to overcome these unfavorable images, incorporate them into a larger, overall image, and lower their emotional intensity.
If you demand that your prospect jumps across a believability chasm, your ad will fail. If, however, you build a bridge of ideas or images across that chasm, starting on his side, take your prospect by the hand and lead him over the chasm, then he will let you lead him almost anywhere.
The Third Technique of Breakthrough Copy: Gradualization: How to Make Your Prospect Believe Your Claims Before You State Them
The copywriter seeks the fusion between desire and belief.
What is belief?
It is your prospect’s mental picture of the world he lives in. But even more important is the vast amount of emotional security he derives from these beliefs.
NEVER VIOLATE YOUR PROSPECTS’ BELIEFS.
But, if you can channel the tremendous force of his belief behind your claim, then your ad will be powerful.
Beliefs cannot be changed but must be complied with at every step.
Every one of the statements you make in your ad must fit in with your prospect’s version of “the facts” at that precise moment. It is not the function of your ad to change those facts – but you can extend them.
You do so by building a bridge of belief
Start with beliefs your prospect has then lead him logically and comfortably through a gradual succession of more and more remote facts until the sales of your product. It’s called Gradualization.
Gradualization determines the structure of your ad.
Every claim, every image, every proof in your ad has two separate sources of strength.
- The content of the claim, image, and proof themselves
- The preparation you have made for the claim, images, and proofs
We can strengthen the power of each of these statements in two separate ways:
- By increasing the intensity of the content: by making greater promises
- By changing the place or position of the work you have done.
Make no mistake, it is acceptance that we are looking for.
Effective advertising is built out of reactions.
We are creating a stream of acceptances.
This is the essence of building your ad.
We now know that Gradualization is starting your ad with a statement that will be accepted, and then building a chain of subsequent acceptances upon this first statement.
The purpose of this chain of acceptances is to lead your reader to a goal conclusion, which he will then accept, but which he would not as readily or as thoroughly have accepted without all of this groundwork.
Ex: selling a TV repair guide.
Before you sell it, you must make the prospect believe he can repair his TV himself.
As such, the headline they chose was “why haven’t TV owners been told about these facts?”
The next sentence was “Was your TV purchased after the spring of 1947?” The answer was yes in 95% of cases to reinforce inclusion.
“Then here is the full, uncensored story of how you can avoid those $15-$20 repair bills— avoid those $30-$60 year service fees— and still get the perfect, movie-clear pictures you’ve dreamed about”.
Nothing about repairing the TV yourself, it’s just about saving money by avoiding repairing fees.
Then they talk about how TV experts discovered the truth about the TV, that it should not break down more than once a year, and that by the way, repairing a TV is so simple that anyone can do it.
The new claim was not written in a new sentence at the beginning of a new paragraph but was linked directly inside a claim that had been previously accepted.
One fully-believed promise has ten times the sales power of ten partially-believed promises.
Now, how do you strengthen this believability structure?
What are the devices you can choose from to add believability to any promise, in any ad?
- The Inclusion Question
Asking a question your prospect would answer yes to.
Eg: do you find it difficult to talk to girls on Tinder?
2. Detailed Identification
“Did you buy your TV after 1974?”
3. Contradiction of Present (False) Beliefs
“I know you think this is true; but I’m going to show YOU it’s false.” Best used, of course, in conjunction with strong authority strong enough to contradict present (unpleasant) beliefs, and get away with it.
“Forget everything you think you know…”
4. The Language of Logic
Your objective is to build belief at the same exact time that you build desire. To do this, you interlace each new promise to the language signals that show that it logically follows from everything that has been proved before.
| Simply because | The reason for | As an example |
| Habitually | There is a basic, underlying reason for this. | Find that reason |
| Explains | The means | As easily and logically as this |
| “This has been proved In/ thousands. . . .” “ | Sound impossible? Not at all. It’s actually as simple. . . .” | “Here’s why. . . .” |
| “And, most important of all, is the fact that. . . .” | “Therefore . . .” | “This was, without a doubt, the most thorough. . . .” |
| “They discovered— in case after case—that. . . .” |
5. Syllogistic thinking
“The bigger the spark, the bigger the explosion. The bigger the explosion, the faster the car goes.”
6. Other Belief Forms
Once you grasp the fundamental idea that form (structure) determines believability, then all sorts of opportunities open up to you. You realize that simply by the arrangement of your claims, you can add to their believability.
- Contingency Structures: If…..then…
- Repetition of Proof: Echoing: These experts found… These experts found… These experts found
- Promise-Belief-Promise Variation: every sentence of promise must be followed with another proof so that the reader does not question what is stated.
- Paragraph Parallelism: where the same word structure used in an accepted statement is then picked up exactly, and used to borrow acceptance for a fresh claim.
The fourth technique of breakthrough copy: Redefinition
How to Remove Objections to Your Product
Give a new definition to your product. The objective is to remove a roadblock to your sale, before the prospect even knows it exists.
Some products have drawbacks that repel buyers. Your purpose is to take care of the drawback before the buyer is aware of it.
There are three types of drawbacks.
- Too complicated to use
In that case, one needs to use simplification, which is framing the problem in another way.
Ex: a very effective soap had a strong smell. To turn it from liability to asset, they framed people’s need to use their soap because otherwise they would smell bad and turn their friends away. In order not to smell bad, one needs the strongest of soap, one so strong its smell is smelled miles away. Fixed.
When something new brings in a new way of doing things that people do not accept as valid or important enough, you need to redefine, then mechanize the new simplicity.
The more revolutionary your product is, the more resistance you will face.
2. Not important enough
Escalation is giving your product more importance than it is credited for. You need to redefine your product, widen its application, broaden benefits, and show it applies to a dozen of vital situations.
Eg: You are paying 20 000 dollars for your car…and a 10 dollars part could rob you of the enjoyment and service the car is providing to you.
Suddenly, that 10 dollars part seems important.
3. Too expensive
Your product costs too much because customers compare them to other products in the same field. You need to get the customer to focus on the product.
-> inflate the value of the product and give a great discount at the end. Say that each added to one another, the product is worth 30 or 40 dollars but if you act now you’ll have the chance to get them for 3 each.
It’s selling dollars for dimes.
The fifth technique of breakthrough copy: Mechanization
How to Verbally Prove That Your Product Does What You Claim
When your prospect reads copy, reactions are happening in his brain.
1. Demands for more information, more image, more desire.
2. Demands for proof. He knows he wants it. Now he wants to know whether what you are saying is true.
3. Demands for a mechanism. How does it work?
Let’s focus on this mechanism thing. The question about mechanism is not whether you should include it in your copy or not, but merely how much of it should you include?
Stage one: name de mechanism
If your prospect is aware of the mechanism, just name it: “take astounding pictures with this Sony Camera”.
Sometimes, the mechanism cannot simply be named, for two reasons:
Stage two: describe the mechanism:
- Because the prospect doesn’t understand their mechanism.
You build a strong, quick promise—and then you follow up with the reason why you can deliver that promise.
“Who else wants a whiter wash with no hard work?
2. Because everybody else has the same mechanism, and the same promise, and the same price. And the market is getting tired, and you need a new way to compete.
Stage Three: Feature the Mechanism
When the market is highly sophisticated, or your mechanism is extremely strong.
The mechanism can be inside your ad, to prove your main claim, or on top of the ad, elevated by the state of your market to becoming the main claim.
The sixth technique of breakthrough copy: Concentration:
How to Destroy Alternate Ways for Your Prospect to Satisfy His Desire
No successful copy ever sells a product. It sells a way of satisfying a particular desire.
Ways to beat up the competition
- Get the best product
- Better promise (in the copy, in the product, like “guaranteed for life”)
- The product role, the role the person that buys the product can play (Ferrari)
- Response and reaction: the capacity to adapt one’s marketing faced with the competition
- Direct attack: the technique we will discuss here: it’s the art of showing your prospect the weakness of a competitor’s product that your product does not have.
Concentration is the process of pointing out weaknesses in the competition then proving to customers that your product gives them what they want without them.
One way to do so is to explain what the product of a competitor does, and what yours does (better). It’s about comparing. “Most lamps consume huge volumes of electricity while being detrimental to the eye and brain. Not Electra. Electra lamps feature a…”
You point out what competitors do badly, then point out how you do it well.
Sometimes, the side effect of a competitor’s product is an experience. In that case, you want to use a method that outlines “what happens when you use the product now” (headache, unease, etc) and then explain “what will happen once you use the new product”.
Washing product ads are good at that. “On the left, a competitive product. On the right, Cilitbang”.
The seventh technique of breakthrough copy: Camouflage:
How to Borrow Conviction for Your Copy
Make an ad that looks like a newspaper article (in style, words, etc).
Conclusion
No sentence can be effective if it contains only the facts alone. It must also contain emotion, evaluation, impact, if those facts are to be given meaning and importance to the reader.
The same is true for every sentence you write of copy. That sentence should contain not only promise, not only image, not only logic, but as much of all three as possible.
You start your ad by creating your headline. You develop your copy story from that headline. But if the copy story doesn’t develop—if you gradually find that the headline isn’t really that good after all— then perhaps the very elements that are begging to come out of your 6-point type should be at the top of your ad.
This is what makes copywriting so interesting. You’re always being surprised—with ideas from the most ungodly places.
Just make sure you’ve got your eyes open wide enough to catch all of them.
Momentum: the energy which draws your reader into your copy and incites him to read it.
There are two types:
- The actual momentum: The first type, the momentum-phrases, are time-honored. You insert them in your copy primarily in your transition sentences, to keep interest from flagging. Examples:
- “They paid up to $22.50 a person to learn priceless techniques like these:”
- “Here’s how”
- “Here is the information you will find in this book.”
- “Let me explain.”
- “All I ask from you is this.”
- “What you are going to do, in the very first hour that you receive the book, is this.”
- “And yet, it’s only the beginning.”
- “THEN put this simple trick to work for you—that VERY SAME HOUR”
- “For example—”
- “Read the thrilling answer below.”
- “To start with . . .”
- “Just wait till you try this.”
- Incomplete statements, or teasers, that draw the reader further into the copy in order to complete them: It’s based on the simple principle that if YOU make a statement that interests your reader, and if you purposely do not complete that statement, so that there is a question of how it can be done, then he will read on to find out more. In other words, you are continually:
- Creating interest in a specific point.
- Raising a question in his mind about that point.
- Implying an answer to that question later in the copy.
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