The Benefits Of A Good Chair

This is another arti­cle was writ­ten by one of my junior copy­writ­ers, Joe Valente. It’s makes an impor­tant point, so I reprinted it here. Take it away, Joe!

Spring is in the air again. I can tell by the way my grass is turn­ing yel­low with dan­de­lions, and my hayfever is act­ing up.

Coin­ci­dence? You decide …

As the air warms in my back­yard and the birds begin to once squab­ble at my wife’s bird feeder over the rem­nants of last year’s seeds, I’m at once over­come with the excite­ment of a brand new year — because spring always feels more like the begin­ning of a new year than New Years day, doesn’t it — and at the same time struck by an odd sense of deja-​​vu.

Spring is the great conun­drum, ladies and gen­tle­men. It’s the time when we try new things, while still rely­ing on the things we know work. It’s when we hedge our bets by incor­po­rat­ing what we do suc­cess­fully with what we’re will­ing to try.

And it’s a time when our com­fort in the things we know gives us the courage to try the things we don’t.

And it’s per­fectly nat­ural. Take my dog for instance. Amber will be 15 years old this fall, and she has relied on an old tat­tered Bom­bay chair for day­time rest for as far back as I can remem­ber. It’s in that chair that she’s acquired the nick­name, “Road­kill,” but that’s another story.

Any­way, that old tat­tered Bom­bay is her anchor, the cen­ter to her uni­verse, and the home base she needs to have the con­fi­dence to explore the rest of her world.

No mat­ter where she goes or what she gets into, that old Bom­bay is always there for her when she returns. It’s her safety net, it’s what she knows, and it’s what works for her.

I once removed that old chair, and the poor old girl wan­dered rest­lessly through the house for a full 48 hours with­out sleep before I relented, and decided that the ratty old thing — the chair, not the dog — was really not all that ugly after all.

So the Bom­bay returned to the fam­ily room, and the dog returned to nor­mal. But here’s the thing: with spring has come a whole new sense of dis­cov­ery in the old mutt.

Just yes­ter­day, I saw her ven­ture for the first time onto the ledge of our bay win­dow to catch a snooze in the sun. She’s never done that before. And after an hour or so of snor­ing bliss­fully in a posi­tion best described as “awk­ward,” she woke up, got back into her famil­iar chair, and promptly returned to doing her impres­sion of a well-​​oiled chainsaw.

The point here is that every­one feels a lit­tle more dar­ing in the spring. Every­one feels more will­ing — if not flat-​​out com­pelled — to try new things.

But you’re most com­fort­able respond­ing to this new­found curios­ity and courage when you have the unshake­able knowl­edge that you can always fall back on what has always worked.

And that knowl­edge is your safety net.

Your own per­sonal Bom­bay chair.

This month, in honor of this odd dichotomy of spring, my sug­ges­tion to you is to get a refresher on what makes great copy — and maybe just as impor­tantly, what doesn’t.

Scroll through some of Michel’s arti­cles lin­ger­ing in the archive. We’re sure you’ve prob­a­bly heard a lot of the ideas in them before.

But if you’re plan­ning any new cam­paigns — and you should be, shouldn’t you? — then now is the ideal time to review your web­sites, your mar­ket­ing, your sales copy, and your gen­eral strate­gies to make sure you’ve got the basics covered.

It’s also a per­fect time to review some of the tenets of good copy, so that you apply those tried and true ideas to your new explo­rations. Think of it as a spring clean­ing for your own per­sonal Bom­bay chair.

You may now join Amber in the sun on win­dow sill.

About the Author

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