Long Copy: A Consumer's Perspective

I’m going to tell you why long copy is here to stay, no mat­ter what Michel Fortin and John Reese tell you.

And when it comes to guys who keep their ear to the ground and their eyes on the num­bers (and test results), no one has my greater respect than those two guys.

Yes, atten­tion spans are dwin­dling. Yes, it’s becom­ing more and more an audio-​​visual world on the Web.

But let’s look at the whole ques­tion from a consumer’s point of view.

Con­sumers have no time — right? Con­sumers are impa­tient — right?

Con­sumers want to get to the bot­tom line and make their pur­chase and move on to watch the Simp­sons or have a beer or sneak off into the bed­room with their honey or grab the potato chips out of the cup­board so they can watch six hours of TV, right?

All stereo­types. Some may be true.

But I can’t believe I’m the only dis­cern­ing con­sumer in the world when it comes to cer­tain pur­chases, and in fact I have some pretty solid proof that I’m not.

Dis­cern­ing con­sumers need spe­cific information.

And spe­cific infor­ma­tion requires copy long enough to give it to con­sumers — all of it.

This week­end I had an expe­ri­ence as a con­sumer that drove the point home, big-​​time.

I’m a second-​​time buyer of video equip­ment. The first cam­era I bought was nice, but it was the size and weight of a brick and dif­fi­cult to stow away into a suitcase.

My needs for a new one were very spe­cific. It must:

1. Be small
2. Be light
3. Use mini-​​DV cassettes
4. Have a jack for an exter­nal microphone
5. Be able to mount on a tripod.

That sounds rea­son­able, but there don’t seem to be too many mod­els in pro­duc­tion today — at any price — that have all of those characteristics.

I finally found one (the Sony DCR-​​HC96) after sev­eral hours of jock­ey­ing back and forth between three Web sites and Google searches.

I ended up read­ing a 140-​​page man­ual online, sup­ple­mented by sev­eral dozen user com­ments on ama​zon​.com, to get the infor­ma­tion I needed.

Long copy? Web 2.0? You bet. The 140-​​page man­ual for this prod­uct is longer than any sales let­ter I’ve ever seen (even Michel’s for Traf­fic Secrets!). But I couldn’t have got­ten a key point I was look­ing for with­out read­ing a cou­ple of the more detailed Ama­zon comments.

Just in case you think I’m alone in my need for speci­ficity, I found sev­eral Ama­zon com­ments from own­ers who had spent 10 times the effort and time research­ing mini DV cam­corders, includ­ing sev­eral trips to stores.

One, who had pur­chased another model, admit­ted to hav­ing bro­ken down in tears when it didn’t per­form as promised.

What does this have to do with long copy?

Sim­ply this.

If Sony and its ven­dors had imag­i­na­tively antic­i­pated what I (and prob­a­bly sev­eral thou­sand other finicky con­sumers) were look­ing for and had arranged user-​​experience and feature/​benefit infor­ma­tion in an easy-​​to-​​access way (and no one ever said long copy has to be the typ­i­cal scroll down a sin­gle page that we’re all so used to in the info-​​marketing field)…

… Then Sony would be sell­ing a LOT more of this camera.

Now the chances of Sony or any other Global 1000-​​type cor­po­ra­tion even con­sid­er­ing the ques­tion are more remote than Don­ald Trump decid­ing to go for the shaved-​​head look.

OK, fine.

But for the rest of us who are writ­ing copy, think about this les­son very carefully.

Long copy is by no means dead, or an imped­i­ment to sales.

Brain-​​dumped sales pre­sen­ta­tions may have gone the way of the eight-​​track tape, but don’t kid your­self that peo­ple mak­ing pur­chase deci­sions don’t need and want the nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion (espe­cially expe­ri­enced buy­ers who are com­ing back for an improve­ment on what they already have) to go ahead and order.

Peo­ple do.

Give them what they want. You’ll get a higher response rate.

By the way — you might be won­der­ing why I went through all the mis­ery I described to get the info I needed to buy.

It was because I have a client, or a series of clients, so mas­sive and lucra­tive that it was worth the effort. Clients that dropped out of the sky totally unex­pect­edly. Who will need a setup exactly like the one I cob­bled together through all this detec­tive work.

Don’t count on your cus­tomer being as moti­vated as I was to find the infor­ma­tion that wasn’t read­ily avail­able. Nor­mally I wouldn’t have been.

Expend the extra effort and your mar­ket will spend the extra money.

I’m sure of it.

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