Ep 27: Copy Doesn’t Need to Be Unique to Stand Out, But is DOES Need to Be Clear

Welcome to Episode 27 of Write with Influence. Today’s episode is about how to stand out and be memorable. When we’re creating content, we want our customers to see and remember us but being memorable isn’t just about coming up with an approach that no one has ever done before and standing out doesn’t just mean being outrageous or doing something wildly different in your marketing.

It is easy to get distracted by trying to come up with clever taglines or headlines when really your time would be better spent producing clear copy about what you do, who it is for and why it’s important.

Listen to discover:

• Why you need to be CLEAR if you want to be MEMORABLE.
• Industry examples of good and bad advertising that stands out.
• A way to test how memorable your copy is.
• Dr Carmen Simon – the neuroscience associated with memorable content for businesses and why people remember things.

I get really frustrated when businesses are too vague and abstract about what they do, but on the other hand, if your marketing only talks about the facts and the concrete details it can end up reading like a the instructions to an Ikea flat-pack wardrobe. So, in this podcast I am going to show you how different combinations of the abstract and the concrete can work together to create memorable content. As always, I have sprinkled some light entertainment on top of my advice and guidance in the form of sketches performed by Moi. This week I’m breaking the ice of a corporate interview with a Lego challenge and contemplating the possible benefits of having a particularly forgettable face.

Hopefully this one will give you some new ideas for your copy and help to demonstrate the importance of being clear over anything else so that your customers understand what you do and why they should care about it.

As always, please feel free to leave any questions or comments below and click the link for more information about my Write with Influence course.

Links:

The Write With Influence Course

TRANSCRIPT

EP 27: COPY DOESN’T NEED TO BE UNIQUE TO STAND OUT, BUT IT DOES NEED TO BE CLEAR

AMY HARRISON

Hello and welcome to another episode of Write with Influence. The weather is still nippy where I am, but I’ve stocked up on a range of windproof, rainproof, weatherproof outdoor clothes to the point where I’m getting very excited about bad weather. Rain – bring it on! Hailstones – like a massage from the gods! I remember someone once telling me, “Amy, there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.” I remember thinking, what do you wear when you’re walking through a tornado then – Dorothy’s house … Of course, I didn’t say that because I’ve learned about social situations and the etiquette that goes with them. Okay, today’s episode is about standing out and being memorable and how one of the critical pieces of being memorable is being clear. We all want to be memorable – it’s nice to be remembered for the right reasons. Of course, if you’re not allowed back into the pub because you made an impression with your impression of Kevin Bacon, doing Footloose on top of the tables, complete with ripped up bar mats for confetti, well, that’s probably not going to do you any favours, but at least you made an impression. When we’re creating content, we want our customers to see us, of course, and we want to stand out and be memorable. But why do we want to be memorable? Well, because people take action on what they remember. At a very basic level, this could be getting milk from the shop because you remembered that you were out of milk, but it can also be the difference between someone contacting business “A” over business “B” because when the need for those services arose, the customer remembered business “A” for one reason or another.

Standing out doesn’t just mean being outrageous or doing something wildly different in your marketing. There was a billboard advert over here in the UK that received a lot of criticism, but which probably, at the time of inception, I’m sure was seen as a brilliant idea that would get a lot of attention. It was for a gym, and the advert was a large cartoon looking monster with the headline,

“Tired of being fat and ugly? Just be ugly instead.”

Ho-ho! I get it, I can lose my fat with your services, but I can’t do anything about my ugliness. Definitely different, but I’m not sure it worked well to stand out for the right reasons. I think this type of advertising is a mistake, not least because you’re insulting the very people that you’re supposed to want to help. I think people do it because they want to come up with something clever, you know, a phrase or a saying or a tagline that no one’s heard before, but that doesn’t guarantee that you’re even going to be memorable. In fact, I think the more you concentrate on trying to be clever, the more likely you are to sacrifice being clear. I’ve sat through many pitches for products with cleverly crafted sayings and phrases that at the end of, I still didn’t know what the product was, what it did, and more importantly, why I would care about it. Now, sometimes you might hit the jackpot and you come up with that Mad Men style headline that everyone is amazed with, they’ve never heard it before, it’s so different and so impactful, for example, phrases like “Data is the new oil.” That was provocative when it was originally coined in 2006 by Clive Humby. He was the British mathematician who developed the Tesco Club Card and he realized that using data to build refined customer profiles that could be used to create more personalized, more effective marketing was incredibly lucrative. This pithy phrase conjured this bold image of massive amounts of data that, like oil, could be mined for tremendous profit. That was memorable. But how often do phrases like this come up and actually stick? I really believe that people get distracted by trying to come up with clever taglines or headlines when their time would be better spent producing clear copy about what you do, who it’s for and why it’s important.

So being memorable isn’t just about coming up with an approach that no one has ever done before, I mean, there might be a very good reason why it’s not been done before.

[NEW SCENE – Interview]

Oil Boss: Come in.

{Amy enters}

Oil Boss: Take a seat. If you get this job, Amy, you’ll be in charge of the largest oil company in the world. So, for the next few hours, I’m going to be asking you some tough questions about, sorry, what are you doing?

Amy: I’ve been in hundreds of interviews. They’re boring – they’re all the same. So, I brought Lego.

Oil Boss: What is this?

Amy: It’s the Millennium Falcon Set. This is massive! Together, I think it’s going to take us about four hours to put together. I’ve got some snacks.

Oil Boss: I don’t know what’s going on here. What, what … this needs to all get off my desk.

Amy: Look, you want to get to know me and what better way to get to know each other than with a joint activity like this. Now, I hope you like gypsy jazz. Where did I put the instructions? Okay, I think we’re going to start with some pieces like this … here you can have a look at the instructions as well.

Oil Boss: You really need to get this stuff off my desk. What the hell is that?

{Sound of a cat meowing}

Amy: That’s Mr Whiskers, he must’ve followed me here, you can pet him?

Oil Boss: No belly rubs, no belly rubs! No, stop, that’s not going to work, that’s the lower boarding ramp – if you try to build around that first, you’re not going to fit the access ladder to the gunnery station.

Amy: You are so right.

Oil Boss: Look, we’ve not got long so we had just better get to work. Come on Mr Whiskers.

[END]

I don’t think you need to do things or be wildly different to everyone else in order to be memorable. I said at the start of the podcast that one of the critical parts of being memorable is actually being clear. Now, someone who has done a lot of research into memorable content is Doctor Carmen Simon. She is a neuroscientist and founder of a company called MEMZY. Carmen’s company creates memorable content for businesses, and it’s all based on brain science and studies about how and why people remember certain things – I’ll link to her website – and she also has a book called Impossible to Ignore, which is on my desk as I record this. Carmen has discovered and developed a number of different techniques within her methodology, but I wanted to share something that I learned, which has validated my belief around the importance of being clear. I’ve talked often about resisting that desire to talk only in general and vague terms and Carmen has a great explanation about why businesses tend to do this. The reason is because there’s a temptation to talk in terms of results and conclusions. We can feel like we’re wasting people’s time by sharing the details about how we came to those conclusions and it’s one of the reasons why I’ve always encouraged people to add proof to their promises in their copy – don’t just say that you are trustworthy, which you internally know that you are, explain what steps you’ve taken over the years to make sure that you are trustworthy and how you keep customer details confidential, for example, or how many people you have dealt with who have been really happy and been able to rely upon you. This is something that Carmen also endorses. She goes into a lot more detail of the subtleties in her book, but it encourages people to balance the abstract – the results with the concrete . . .  the How, I suppose. if things are too abstract, if we only talk in promises, for example, it just sounds too fluffy, too generic and easy to ignore – less memorable. The problem with being abstract is that it’s intangible. Now, Carmen has a great way to explain this by saying that “The abstract can’t be detected by the senses. It can’t be specifically imagined.” I think this is a great test of your copy – can someone picture it? Could they imagine what it would be like to see, taste, hear, smell, touch what you’re describing? Remember in episode 25, I talked about trying to describe your big promises by imagining you were making a movie trailer for them? This is why I get really frustrated with businesses that want to describe what they do as, for example, unlocking your potential. “What do you do as a business?” “Oh, we help people unlock their potential.” It’s too abstract. I don’t know what that looks like! I mean, I’ve said it before, never mind unlocking my potential, sometimes I struggle to unlock my front door and I know where my front door is and what it looks like most of the time. Being specific about what we do often feels like a challenge because these details are so obvious to us, but you have to describe them to your customers so that you can transport the vision that you have in your mind to one that they can see in theirs. Now, when I was teaching at a university in Barcelona, I had the students do an exercise in description which really anchors you in your power to translate a vision to someone else. So, everyone is in pairs and one person had an image, a simple image printed on paper that the other person couldn’t see. Now, they both had the same size pieces of paper, but the person who didn’t have the image had a blank piece of paper and a pencil and they had to simply draw the other image that they couldn’t see by the person describing it. Now, it’s a pretty fun exercise to do and it’s a real test of communication. You have to get very specific and very prescriptive and what I love about this exercise is that you can’t make assumptions. Sometimes in our marketing, we assume that our customers will know what we’re talking about or what we do or how we work, but with this exercise, we can’t make any assumptions. We know that this is a random picture, and the other person has absolutely no idea, so we have to start from scratch. However, if the pendulum swings too far this way, if your marketing only talks about the facts and the concrete details of how you do step-by-step, it can end up reading like a shopping list or the instructions to an Ikea flat-pack wardrobe and as a result, be just as easy to ignore. So, what Carmen discovers in her book is that different combinations of the abstract and the concrete work together and they work really well to create memorable content. Now, a good and simple copy example of this is from Airbnb and I really liked this. It was probably back in 2015 or 2016 … Airbnb used to have a very simple homepage and the headline just said, “Live there” which on its own, is definitely intangible. It tells me nothing about the business, the experience or what to expect. “Live there”, what does that mean? Can I see it, smell it, touch it, taste it? No, not really. But the tagline underneath said, “Book homes from local hosts and 191 plus countries and experience a place like you live there.” Now, here is what I like about this, and it’s a really smart, clever, small piece of copy … you have this lovely aspirational sounding abstract result of “Live there,” but then it tells you how it delivers those results in very specific terms with specific numbers. And here’s the other clever thing that it does … remember in episode 25 I talked about how some businesses are afraid to be specific in their marketing in case their services aren’t exactly the same for every single customer? Now, in that episode there was a sketch where a copywriter had created an advert to describe an Italian restaurant, but the business owner cut the description of what you would experience when you came to the restaurant so much so that all that was left was the restaurant name. Well, Airbnb does a very clever thing – it conjures a tangible image without specifically describing: “Local hosts in 191 countries.” Now, the tagline doesn’t try to describe Paris or Barcelona or London, instead, it actually allows the reader to bring the final piece of the message to complete the copy. So, whether I’m someone dreaming about visiting Texas or Tahiti, this tagline still helps me visualize the experience and the result of using Airbnb to have that experience without spelling it out specifically.

I once worked with a dietician and nutritionist who specialized in helping people that were struggling with weight and with issues around food. I remember her describing the work that she did and the transformation that was possible, and we came up with a message that said, “What would you think about if you never had to spend a moment worrying about food?” And I just thought, what a great way to describe the after picture in a way that’s very personal the reader but doesn’t require us to assume that we understand each individual prospect. It really spoke to the heart of people’s pain, just being all consumed all the time, thinking and fretting about good food, bad food, calories, etc, whatever the reason for their struggle, we knew that it consumed their thoughts. We didn’t need to list out those specifics in that high-level message because, again, people could complete the message themselves, but we were asking them to create this visual, vivid and specific situation where they could then understand the value that my client could offer. What would they do if they no longer had to spend that mental energy fretting about these issues? So, I want you to think about whether you can do something similar for your audience. Can you find that balance between the concrete examples of how you work and the aspirational results of what people can expect and is there a way to describe it in a way that your customers can bring the final piece of the message by visualizing their specific experience without you having to spell it out for them?

That’s all for this week, don’t forget that in between episodes you can always find me on Twitter @HarrisonAmy and if you don’t subscribe to my weekly column, you can find that over at www.writewithinfluence.com. It’s a short note that I write each week that’s vaguely copywriting related, but mostly light-hearted and just a fun read – we can’t be learning all of the time! Until next time, go out and be memorable, although sometimes, there are advantages to blending in …

[NEW SCENE – Audition]

Mum: How did it go?

Amy: He said my performance was forgettable. I spent days learning these lines. Forgettable!! Stupid script, stupid audition, stupid people, stupid, stupid …

Mum: Amy, no, stop it, there’s a policeman.

Policeman: Pick that up or I’ll issue you with a fine.

Amy: Sorry officer.

Policeman: What are you two doing?

Amy: Picking up this script.

Policeman: You shouldn’t be doing that. Where’s the girl who threw them down?

Amy: That was me.

Policeman: No, no, no. That wasn’t you, this girl looked like, um, you know, I’m not sure what she looked like … so strange. Well, thank you, it’s very kind of you, but look, you shouldn’t have to do that. I let her get away. Let me …

Mum: Amy, you just got away with a minor offense because he forgot your face in 20 seconds.

Amy: Maybe I am forgettable.

Mum: If you got away with that, I wonder what else you could get away with.

{Scene change – Amy running out of a pet shop}

Mum: What did you get? What did you get?

Amy: I just walked out of that pet shop with a puppy, a rabbit and a chinchilla. No one even batted an eyelid.

Mum: Oh my God! You are so forgettable – it’s like you’re invisible! You know what this means?

Amy and Mum in unison: Crime spree.

{News broadcast}

Newsreader: The town has been rocked by a series of crimes committed by an elusive crook. Some say she’s female, others believe she’s part wolf, but what everyone can agree on is that despite numerous CCTV footage of her robberies, she keeps giving police the slip.

{Amy running from crime scene}

Amy: A whole bag of diamonds! Quick! Run!

Policeman: That’s her … get her!

{Courtroom}

Judge: For these heinous crimes, I sentenced you to 15 years in prison. Take her down.

Prison Guard: Hey …

Amy: Yeah?

Prison Guard: Where is she?

Amy: Who?

Prison Guard: She was just here in those cuffs that you’re wearing.

Amy: What is it officer?

Prison Guard: We’ve got a master criminal at large. She’s just been sentenced and was in those cuffs. It looks like she’s given us the slip again and swapped places with you. I am so, so sorry, let me get out of those. Someone will escort you free from the courthouse.

Amy: Result!