Cashvertising

How to Use More Than 100 Secrets of Ad-Agency Psychology to Make BIG MONEY Selling Anything to Anyone

Drew Eric Whitman

• Publisher: Career Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781601638878
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

Barely one in a hundred businesspeople knows these facts about creating powerful advertising. Do You?FACT! Sixty percent of people read only headlines. Your headline must stop them or your advertising will likely fail.
FACT! Captions under photos get 200 percent greater readership than non-headline copy.
FACT! Ads with sale prices draw 20 percent more attention.
FACT! Half-page ads pull about 70 percent of full-page ads; quarter-page ads pull about 50 percent of full-page ads.
FACT! Four-color ads are up to 45 percent more effective than black and white.New York's biggest ad agencies use dozens of these little-known secrets every day to influence people to buy. And now--thanks to Cashvertising --you can, too. And it won't matter one bit whether you're a corporate giant or a mom-and-pop pizza shop. These techniques are based on human psychology. They work no matter where you're located, no matter what kind of product or service you sell, and no matter where you advertise. In fact, most don't cost a penny to use.Like a wild roller-coaster ride through the streets of Madison Avenue, Cashvertising teaches you the tips, tricks, and strategies that New York's top gun copywriters and designers use to persuade people to buy like crazy. No matter what you sell--or how you sell it, this practical, fast-paced book will teach you:

• How to create powerful ads, brochures, sales letters, Websites, and more
  
• How to make people believe what you say
  
• "Sneaky" ways to persuade people to respond
  
• Effective tricks for writing "magnetic" headlines
  
• What mistakes to avoid...at all costs!
  
• What you should always/never do in your ads
  
• Expert formulas, guidance, tips and strategies

CHAPTER 1
What People Really Want

Born in 1883, Daniel Starch was considered the nation’s leading advertising and marketing psychologist. His publication Starch Advertising Readership Reports opened people’s eyes wide. Why? Because his writings showed advertisers how much money they were flushing down the toilet.

“Think your ad is great?” he said, in so many words, to big magazine advertisers around the country. “Your ‘oh-so-great’ ads are ignored by more than half of everyone who reads the magazines!” he blasted.

“How could this be?” the ad men puzzled. “Our ads are marvelous … they show our entire factory, and all our wonderful equipment from several really unusual camera-angles, and tell about our incredible products!”

Starch blasted them again: “Guess what guys? People couldn’t care less about your smoke-belching factories! They don’t give a damn about how many people you have on staff, or how many square feet your company occupies. And they don’t give a flying flounder how fancy your equipment is, or your—gasp!—’unusual camera angles,’ or any of that other self-serving junk!”

Instead, Starch’s research showed that people care mostly about is (get ready for this earth-shaking revelation) … themselves!

They care about what products will do for them, how they’ll make their lives better, happier, more fulfilled. What a revelation! But isn’t this common sense? Doesn’t every advertiser know this today? Ha! How foolish of us to think so.

Just look around you. Look at today’s newspaper and magazine ads. Check out TV and radio commercials. Surf the Web and look in your e-mail in-box. You’ll find that what you and I might think was common sense … is apparently not.

Decades have passed since Daniel Starch issued his initial findings. Yesterday’s advertising researchers are probably screaming from their graves today: “Haven’t you learned a thing?! We dedicated years to researching how to make your bank accounts grow like Jack’s freaky beanstalk. Open your eyes!”

Sigh. It’s frustrating. The truth is, they haven’t learned a thing. Most (yes, most) of today’s advertisers still haven’t learned the basic lesson: people don’t care about you, they care first about themselves.

In 1935, H.E. Warren wrote an article entitled “How to Understand Why People Buy,” which every advertiser and salesperson should read twice. He said:

To understand why people buy, we … should know people and have a keen sense of human nature. We should know how people think … how people live, and be acquainted with the standards and customs affecting their everyday lives …. We should fully know their needs and their wants and be able to distinguish between the two. An understanding of why people buy is gained by a willingness to acquire proved and tested principles of commercial psychology to selling.

Okay, enough background. Let’s jump in. First, I’ll teach you the 17 foundational principles of consumer psychology. Once you understand how they work, I’ll teach you 41 easy-to-use, little-known response-boosting advertising techniques. Many of these will incorporate one or more of the 17 principles, and others will introduce you to psychological theories specific to advertising writing and design. Best of all, I’ll tell you how to use them in your own promotions to help light a fire under your sales curve.

Forget everything else. Here’s what people really want.

Consumer researchers and psychologists know what people want. They should—they’ve studied the subject for years. And although all researchers don’t agree completely with every finding, there are eight foundational “desires” common to everyone.

I call them the Life-Force 8 (LF8 for short). These eight powerful desires are responsible for more sales than all other human wants combined. Here they are. Learn them. Use them. Profit from them.

The Life-Force 8

Human beings are biologically programmed with the following eight desires:

1. Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension.

2. Enjoyment of food and beverages.

3. Freedom from fear, pain, and danger.

4. Sexual companionship.

5. Comfortable living conditions.

6. To be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses.

7. Care and protection of loved ones.

8. Social approval.

Who could argue with these things? We all want them, don’t we? But in how many of your ads do you openly use an appeal to one or more of the LF8? I bet few, if any. Why am I such a doubting Thomas? Simply because it’s unlikely that anyone ever taught you to do so.

Listen: When you create an advertising appeal based on any of the LF8, you tap into the power of Mother Nature herself. You tap into the very essence of what makes humans tick. You see, you can’t escape your desires for the LF8. You were born with them, and they’ll be with you until the day you die. For example:

Can you shake your desire to eat? (LF8 #2)

Can you suppress your will to survive? (LF8 #1)

How easily can you quash your desire for physical comfort? (LF8 #5)

Can you stop caring whether or not your child looks both ways before crossing the street? (LF8 #7)

You don’t need to conduct studies to answer these questions; the answers are obvious. These desires are biologically programmed in each of us. They’re part of what makes us human. They’re powerful motivators. And smart advertisers can tap into them like pushing a plug into an outlet.

What Can You Learn About Desire From a Master Bookseller?

When it came to making big money selling books, mail order guru Haldeman-Julius wrote the book. During the 1920s and ’30s he sold more than 200 million of them, in nearly 2,000 different titles. They were simple little books, and they all cost just 5 cents each. To advertise his books, he placed ads consisting of only the books’ titles. If a book didn’t sell well, he’d change the ad copy, but not the way you’d expect. He actually changed the titles of the books! Then he’d sit back and study the response. How clever.

Look what happened when the titles were changed based on the LF8.

According to Haldeman-Julius, the two strongest appeals were sex and self-improvement. Surprised? Neither am I. So again I ask you: How many of your current ads contain either of these appeals? When you tap into these innate desires, you harness the unstoppable momentum of the emotions that drive people every second of every day.

People buy because of emotion and justify
with logic. Force an emotional response by
touching on a basic want or need.

—“Seven Principles of Stopping Power,” The Young & Rubicam Traveling Creative Workshop

The Nine Learned (Secondary) Human Wants

Perhaps you read the list of eight primary wants and thought, “Heck, I want more than just these eight things!” Of course you do. We have many other wants. We want to look good, and be healthy, well educated, effective, and so on. (Don’t you?) These are called secondary, or learned wants, and nine have been identified:

1. To be informed.

2. Curiosity.

3. Cleanliness of body and surroundings.

4. Efficiency.

5. Convenience.

6. Dependability/quality.

7. Expression of beauty and style.

8. Economy/profit.

9. Bargains.

These secondary wants are strong, but they don’t even come close to the LF8. They’re way in the background, completely clouded by your LF8 dust. We’re not born with these secondary wants. We learned them. They’re not hard-wired in our brains as are the LF8. Used as tools of influence, they’re not as bankable as the LF8 because we’re not biologically driven to satisfy them. (Read that again.) And when it comes to human desires, biology is king. There’s nothing more powerful than tapping into a desire that you can’t shake. It’s like jumping onto a speeding train: Once you’re on, you don’t need to lift a finger to get it moving—you’re already flying along!

Think about it. Which desire would you respond to first: to buy a new shirt, or to run out of a burning building? If you’re single, would you be more driven to organize your desk or have amazing sex with the hottie whose been flirting with you at lunch every day? Would you first protect your spouse from a crazed attacker, or ignore the assault and instead go shopping for wallpaper for your guest bathroom? The answers are obvious. And the interesting thing about the LF8 is that we don’t even know—or ever question—these desires. We simply want them—no, we must have them. We can’t shake them no matter what we do. Again, they’re hardwired into us. These examples should give you a better idea why the LF8 are so powerful, and why using them in your ads can be so effective: You’ll be tapping into the human psyche, the core programming of the human brain itself.

But what exactly is desire? It’s a type of tension you feel when a need isn’t met. If you’re hungry, for example, the tension to eat arises and the desire for food (LF8 #2) kicks in. If you see a creepy-looking middle-aged guy chatting online with your 8-year-old daughter, the tension to protect your child arises and your desire to start monitoring her internet usage (LF8 #7) kicks in. If your office chair breaks your back after just 10 minutes of use, the tension to be comfortable arises, and your desire to buy a new chair (LF8 #5) kicks in.

So here’s the simple formula for desire, and the result it sets in motion:

Tension → Desire → Action to Satisfy the Desire

In short, when you appeal to people’s LF8 desires, you create a drive that motivates them to take an action that will fulfill that desire as soon as possible.

Now here’s an especially interesting fact, of particular importance to us advertisers. Not only is it pleasant for us to satisfy our eight primary desires, but it’s also pleasant for us to read about how others have satisfied them. It’s a form of vicarious LF8 desire fulfillment. Fascinating, isn’t it?

For example, by reading how consumer George Vincent was able to pay off all his debts using a radical new approach to real estate investing, you and I—on the giant projector screen of our minds—envision a brilliantly clear, superbly detailed account of ourselves paying off all our bills, laughing as we dash off checks to our creditors in a devil-may-care fashion, leaning back in our big leather chair, throwing our feet up on our desk, and enjoying a debt-free, piles-of-cash-in-the-bank lifestyle.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? But did you see what I just did? By using language that’s both specific and visual, I was able to install a mental movie inside your head. We’ll explore thes...