Some peo­ple don’t mind hard-​​hitting copy, while oth­ers pre­fer newsy copy. Some peo­ple pre­fer long copy to get as much infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble, oth­ers pre­fer short, brief, to-​​the-​​point copy. Some like drama, sto­ries, and tes­ti­mo­ni­als; oth­ers data, sta­tis­tics, and facts.

Does it all mat­ter? Absolutely.

What makes one style of copy more favor­able than another? Why does one per­son buy from one type of copy and not from another? It really comes down to the buy­ing behav­ior of your mar­ket. And in fact, there are four major per­son­al­ity types.

Before I tell you what they are, remem­ber that the style you choose will not appeal to every­one. It never will. Roy Williams, author of The Wiz­ard of Ads, once noted, “Even some of the best ads miss the mark with at least half of their tar­get audience.”

You may have heard me say this before, but it’s impor­tant. Don’t be all things to all peo­ple. If you do, you have no choice but to paint your copy with broad brush­strokes in order to appeal to every­one. Instead, give your copy per­son­al­ity. Even if it offends some.

Oth­er­wise, ads crafted so as not to offend any­one will be coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. They may even back­fire. And more impor­tantly, they might be more offen­sive than you think.

Read the rest of this post or share it »

Peo­ple have dif­fer­ent buyer per­son­al­ity styles. In fact, accord­ing to behav­ioral sci­ence, there are four: dri­vers, ana­lyt­i­cals, ami­ables and expres­sives. Some­times, they are labeled dif­fer­ently, but they are nev­er­the­less the same.

For exam­ple, Dr. Tony Alessan­dra, in his best-​​selling book “The Plat­inum Rule,” calls them “thinkers,” “social­iz­ers,” “direc­tors” and “relaters.”

But regard­less of the labels used, this means that dif­fer­ent peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate, relate and buy dif­fer­ently, based on their pre­dom­i­nant per­son­al­ity style. Dri­vers pre­fer end-​​results. Ana­lyt­i­cals are per­suaded by facts. Expres­sives are moved by feel­ings. And ami­ables seek out relationships.

I’ve writ­ten about this on my blog and in sev­eral arti­cles. But my sug­ges­tion, at the time, was to cre­ate a saleslet­ter for each per­son­al­ity style, if and when your tar­get mar­ket is com­prised of more than one pre­dom­i­nant personality.

Read the rest of this post or share it »