Freud on the Rebound

This is another arti­cle writ­ten by one of my asso­ciate copy­writ­ers, Joe Valente, as an intro­duc­tion to one of mine — which I linked on this blog entry fur­ther down. But Joe’s arti­cle is so good, I decided to reprint it here.

Essen­tially, it’s about appeal­ing to dif­fer­ent buyer per­son­al­i­ties with your copy. Some peo­ple are dri­ver types. Oth­ers are more ana­lyt­i­cal. Some are expres­sive and col­or­ful. Oth­ers pre­fer the warm-​​fuzzy type of copy. Either way, your copy should chiefly appeal to the pre­dom­i­nant per­son­al­ity of your market.

So before I go any fur­ther, you bet­ter read this arti­cle. (There are also many great lessons about copy­writ­ing used — and some hid­den in the arti­cle itself. About sto­ry­telling, about the power of metaphor, and about human behav­ior. I sug­gest you read it, then read it again. Look for them. It’s that pow­er­ful.) Take it away, Joe!

So I’m clear­ing out some space on my shelves to make a lit­tle room for hid­ing presents (or as my wife, Heather, likes to call it, “Thin­ning out the col­lec­tion of crap”) when my mind starts to wander.

Now, this is not an unusual thing, because I’m a sen­ti­men­tal­ist (a.k.a. “pack­rat”). So, as I sort through the boxes and bags, I drift, I remem­ber the good times, I think about stuff, and I gen­er­ally get a bit of a rosy haze going.

Ah, the good times we had…

I’m shaken from my bliss by the crash. It seems the box I had been bal­anc­ing pre­car­i­ously on my knee while reach­ing for some sort of mounted singing rub­ber fish (where the heck did that come from? And can I regift it?) has for­saken its resis­tance to the grav­i­ta­tional pull of my floor, and has instead decided to meet the chal­lenge head-​​on.

It was a noble idea, but the box loses.

Star­tled from my day­dream, I look down to dis­cover that finally, and bit dis­turbingly, some of my uni­ver­sity text books have hit the top of the delete pile. Mean­ing, of course, that I need to find a rea­son to save them from this almost Stal­in­ist purge. And fast.

I bend down and start pick­ing them up, flip­ping through them as I do…

Here, a well-​​worn copy of Psy­chol­ogy Today (well, maybe not today, exactly, but it was au courant a scant 25 years ago)…

There a less-​​used copy of Today’s Isms (a polit­i­cal dia­tribe no less weighty — not to men­tion out of date — than its psy­chol­ogy contemporary)…

And finally an excep­tion­ally well-​​preserved 3^rd Edi­tion Abnor­mal Psychology.

Ah, at last, a book that is com­pletely rel­e­vant today. I mean, have you been to the malls? Man, if that’s not aber­rant behav­ior, I just don’t know what is. I’d love to tell you about the night­mares I’ve been hav­ing lately in which the over­head speak­ers just keep dron­ing “An asso­ciate to Aisle 3 please, asso­ciate to Aisle 3…”

Okay, Joe, shake it off…

Any­way, thumb­ing through these tomes, I come across a sec­tion on Freud’s Id, Ego, and Super­ego. And it occurs to me that a few issues back, I gave you the Pop Psy­chol­ogy 101 ver­sion of Freud’s theory.

Did you miss it? I’ll recap…

Freud said that the human being has but one steer­ing wheel. Unfor­tu­nately, there are 3 crazed mani­acs all clutch­ing at each other to wres­tle con­trol of it for their very own. They are (in order of appearance):

• The Id, who sim­ply says “I want it,” when he sees some­thing that gets him excited.
• The Ego, who, being more prac­ti­cal, says “But you can’t get to it,” when the excit­ing thing is out of reach.
• And then the Super­ego, who says “And besides, it wouldn’t be nice to just take it.”

Now, I real­ize I used a gen­der­al­iza­tion there, and that wasn’t inten­tional. But think­ing about it, I always kind of thought the Id was the clas­sic impul­sive male, the Ego, his more level-​​headed girl­friend, and the Super­ego — well, the jury is still out on that one.

Although I can’t help but pic­ture Sis­ter Mary Louise from my kinder­garten year. Don’t ask why. You know, my knuck­les hurt even typ­ing that name.

Again, don’t ask why.

And any­way, none of that is all that impor­tant. What is impor­tant is this: The Id, the Ego, and the Super­ego, they all have very spe­cific moti­va­tions and hot but­tons. And they all pretty much hate each other.

So it should come as no sur­prise that they also tend to be shocked or offended at what each of the oth­ers find attractive.

An inter­est­ing love tri­an­gle, no? Now there’s a made-​​for-​​TV movie!

Look, I’m not a Freudian by any stretch, and his vision of 3 sep­a­rate heads fight­ing over the steer­ing wheel just makes me think of the final scene in Stephen King’s The Tom­my­knock­ers (if you’ve read it, you know exactly what I mean; If you haven’t, go bor­row it from the library, and never look at D-​​cell bat­ter­ies the same way again!) But it’s inter­est­ing to me all the same.

I mean, think about it. What gets the Id going? Shiny things! Get his heart pump­ing, and he reaches for his wal­let. Get the adren­a­line flow­ing and he’s reach­ing for the bonuses. Get the sweat pour­ing, and he’s buy­ing the deluxe, 22-​​part, members-​​only, super-​​duper-​​never-​​to-​​be-​​repeated Dia­mond Package!

In other words, dear friends and faith­ful read­ers, for the Id, the hard sale sells!

What do the oth­ers think of that? Let’s ask, shall we?

• Ego: “Well, that’s all well and good, but do we really need it? And what’ll it do for me? Will it even fit in my garage?”
• Super­ego: “How crude and morally repug­nant that you should speak to me that way. Now don’t ever call here again.”

Hmmm.

Well, I did men­tion that they weren’t each other’s best friends, didn’t I?

So what makes the Ego reach for the Visa (or the Mas­ter Card when the Visa’s maxed out)? Just the facts, ma’am. Ego doesn’t want to hear hype and hyper­bole. Ego wants to know the prac­ti­cal truth. Show ego a fun­da­men­tally impor­tant piece to her future plans and she gets inter­ested. An excel­lent poten­tial return with min­i­mal risk, and she’ll buy you din­ner. A good cost-​​benefit analy­sis, and you’ll be stay­ing for breakfast.

And the others?

• Id: “Screw that, where are the shiny things?”
• Super­ego: “Get­ting warmer, but will it help me sleep at night?”

As an aside, is any­one else out there won­der­ing just where the heck these ideas come from? If you fig­ure it out, let me know…

And finally, how do you get after the Superego?

Dust off the halo, sprout some wings and sing like an angel. Help­ing the envi­ron­ment? Okay, here’s a quar­ter. Help­ing the poor and under­priv­i­leged? There’s an extra dol­lar. Sav­ing mankind from him­self (and that ghastly Id char­ac­ter) and… Well, will you take a check?

The oth­ers, of course, have a dif­fer­ent take:

• Id: “No! NO! NO! SHINY THINGS!!!”
• Ego: “Yeah, yeah. But will it slice, dice, and juli­enne in just a frac­tion of the time?”

Yes, it’s a weird lit­tle world that I live in.

But I’m kind of head­ing into a point here, and that point is this:

You gotta know who you’re talk­ing to if you want your copy to sell.

Seems sim­ple, but we all too often com­pletely miss it, because we are dis­tracted by this other inter­est­ing fact: If you hit your tar­get audi­ence square in the chin, scor­ing a first-​​round knock­out, at least one group who is not your tar­get audi­ence will despise you for it.

Or, more pre­cisely, they will hate the way you’ve done your job.

Because no one really hates writ­ers. We’re the good guys, right?

Any­way, in this arti­cle, Mike talks quite a bit about the tar­get audi­ence dynamic, and shows you why it’s not only good, but may actu­ally be some­thing to shoot for, to get hate mail about your copy.

Because chances are, if some­one hates it enough to write a let­ter, there are a thou­sand oth­ers who love it enough to write a check.

Hey! Looks like maybe those books are going to sur­vive another purge after all! Now I guess I’d bet­ter go through Heather’s stuff if I’m gonna find more room for presents…

About the Author

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