Three Psychological Insights You Can Use to Improve Your Ads Today
Plus: Trending pet products and three new tests from the 2022 True Top Marketer
During my interview with Brett Curry, we discussed our mutual admiration for several direct marketers of yesteryear. One of them was Joseph Sugarman. Here’s a short Sugarman bio, courtesy of everyone’s favorite new AI assistant:
Prompt: Please give me a short bio of Joseph Sugarman that is no more than two sentences. Be sure to include his most notable works and achievements.
ChatGPT: Joseph Sugarman (1929-2018) was an American marketing and advertising legend, best known for his work as a copywriter and founder of JS&A Group, where he created iconic ads such as the BluBlocker sunglasses campaign and authored influential books such as “The Adweek Copywriting Handbook.”
I have several books by Sugarman on my shelf. Brett and I agreed that one of our favorites is Triggers, which I first read in 2005. Apparently that book, as well as the rest of the Sugarman library, had a big impact on me. I know because I made no less than three separate Sugarman checklists for future reference. They are titled:
“The Emotional Principles of Copywriting”
“The Seventeen Axioms of Copywriting”
“Thirty Psychological Triggers”
There are so many gems contained within these lists — too many to talk about in one newsletter. So I challenged myself to pick just one from each list.
SPEAKING OF AI, DRMetrix Founder Joseph Gray has a fascinating new blog post about how a company called Intelligent Handshake is “increasing revenue, conversion rates, and AOV” using “a combination of AI, machine learning and human touch to render and personalize a consumer’s online or phone offer.”
READ MORE HERE
DR Dynamite!🧨
Welcome again to the feature where I share high-impact advertising principles and techniques from the ‘Masters of DR’ — vital knowledge that has been mostly lost to time. Last week, we went back more than a century and met two guys named Lasker and Kennedy, men who gave us the answer to the most fundamental question of our craft: What is advertising?
Today, we’re going to fast-forward to the 1980s and 1990s and learn from a master who has a more direct connection to the DRTV industry. As ‘Chat’ told us, Sugarman is most famous for BluBlocker sunglasses. If you remember anything about that campaign, you probably remember a guy in a sombrero freestyle rapping about the product. 👇
Sugarman’s sunglasses were the first in a long line of DRTV successes that continue to this day under brand names such as HD Vision (IdeaVillage), Battle Vision (BulbHead) and TacGlasses (Emson).
So what did Sugarman know that made him so successful? Here are three of his psychological insights, beginning with the one I think about most often.
Insight #1: People buy on emotion and justify with logic.
Sugarman styled this as one of three emotional principles.
Principle: “You sell on emotion, but you justify a purchase with logic.”
Practically applied, this means your job as a marketer is to stir the emotions first and then have ready the logical justifications a prospect will need to talk himself or herself into buying.
Incidentally, the logic doesn’t have to be particularly sound. How many people have convinced themselves they will actually save money by making a purchase? How many times have we fallen for the claim that “it pays for itself!” That’s Sugarman’s insight at work. It’s a justification with logic, or what is sometimes called “post-rationalizing.”
Insight #2: Raising obvious objections defuses them.
I’m cheating here because I’m actually combining two of Sugarman’s 30 “psychological triggers” from my list.
Trigger #4: “If your product has a flaw that would deter most of your prospects from buying it, raise the objection right up front in your ad copy or selling approach.”
Trigger #5: “You must resolve the objection you’ve raised. Otherwise, you will leave the prospect with reinforcement of why he or she should not buy.”
If you watched or listened to my conversation with Brett, you know these twin triggers became part of my 10-point checklist for DR commercials (aka “T&T”).
Insight #3: Compelling content creates a ‘slippery slide.’
Sugarman used a particularly memorable metaphor to underscore one of his axioms of copywriting.
Axiom #6: “Your readers should be so compelled to read your copy that they cannot stop reading until they read all of it as if sliding down a slippery slope.”
Later, Sugarman turned the “slope” into a “slide” to strengthen the visualization of the concept.
“Picture a steep slide at a playground,” Sugarman wrote in Advertising Secrets of the Written Word. “Now picture somebody putting baby oil or grease along the entire length of the slide including the slide rails. Picture yourself now climbing up the ladder, sitting at the top of the slide and then letting gravity force you down the slide.
“As you start to slide down and build momentum, you try holding on to the sides to stop, but you can’t stop. You continue to slide down the slide despite all your efforts to prevent your descent. This is the way your copy must flow. Every element in an advertisement must cause that slippery slide effect.”
Sugarman was talking about print advertising, but there’s an obvious application to video advertising as well. The best DRTV producers I know watch cuts of their commercials again and again to see if there are any slow moments or clunkers that create ‘hitches in the giddy-up.’ Their goal is the same as Sugarman’s was: Keep prospects captivated until the CTA and the buying decision — i.e. the bottom of the slide.
And guess what? The principle applies beyond TV, too. I recently listened to about 10 hours of interviews with one of the most successful YouTubers in the world, Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson. One of the (very cool) YouTube tools he talked about is the ability to see where viewer retention drops off. This allows him to learn where his content is bogging down and losing people’s interest, so he can make more compelling content in the future and continue growing his absurdly huge audience (130 million subscribers as of January 2023).
When I heard this, you can bet I immediately went to my YouTube channel and used that tool to see what I could learn about keeping my slides well greased.
Chart Watch 🆓
Sorry, folks, but there is nothing happening on the charts that I haven’t written about before. To compensate, I’ll share a spot that would normally fall under “Recent Tests” but that also happens to be #44 on the DRMetrix this week.
King Kalm
Pitch: “The vet tested and vet approved solution to stress”
Brand/Marketer: King Kanine
This pitch is reminiscent of the one for Thunder Shirt, a 2012 hit. I suppose it was inevitable that there would eventually be CDB products for pets.
That said, am I the only one who thought of this movie moment while watching the spot?
Joking aside, I have to say I really liked the testimonials in this commercial. I know what it takes to get credible testimonials shot, and this production team clearly put in the effort.
Promising Products🔒
Your dog thinks he’s being petted, but he’s actually being groomed. That was the pitch that helped make Allstar’s True Touch a 2016 winner. This week, a trending pet product from social media caught my eye because it could benefit from the same sort of pitch.