What Copy Cosmetics Communicate

There’s a debate going on my dis­cus­sion board about “clean design” vs. “clunky design” with your copy, and how it can or can­not affect response rates.

I’m talk­ing about odd lay­outs, incon­sis­tent type­styles, empha­sis using for­mat­ting (like under­lin­ing, high­light­ing, bold­ing, etc), “junk­ing up” copy, and so on.

For exam­ple, on a tele­sem­i­nar I was giv­ing last week, some­one asked “I see so much copy with poor design and bad gram­mar with spelling mis­takes — is it inten­tional or just plain bad copywriting?”

Which reminds me…

There’s the story of the Five Bell Pub. One day, a passerby noticed on the out­door sign where nor­mally five bells were hang­ing that there hap­pened to be only four bells.

So he enters the tav­ern and asks the bar­tender, “Mate, don’t you know you have only four bells hang­ing out­side your Five Bell Pub?” “Ah yes, I know,” said the bar­keep. “It’s been like that for ages, but I’ve been so busy that I never had the time to fix the sign.”

He then adds, “While you’re here, what kind of ale would you like?”

There are two morals to this story. One is that peo­ple will always have an incli­na­tion to cor­rect oth­ers. Call it pom­pos­ity, or call it cour­tesy. It doesn’t mat­ter. You can never please all the peo­ple all the time, unless you were to write a saleslet­ter for each and every sin­gle indi­vid­ual in your market.

The other is that some mis­takes are inten­tional. Some copy­writ­ers will pur­posely add typos to involve and engage the reader, and draw atten­tion to a key point. But as one board mem­ber elo­quently put it, “You got to know the rules before you break them.”

There is a dif­fer­ence, how­ever, between strate­gi­cally placed yet occa­sional spelling mis­takes to gen­er­ate curios­ity and busi­ness, ver­sus a lack­adaisi­cal atti­tude toward gram­mar that will only reflect on the qual­ity of your busi­ness overall.

That said, I’m not per­fect and I do have errors. Typos or oth­er­wise. And they are not inten­tional. And when they are pointed out, I always fix them, thank the per­son and even reward them.

But there’s a dif­fer­ence between peo­ple who point out a sim­ple typo ver­sus the Gram­mar Gestapo who will hang you for trea­son if your copy doesn’t meet Har­vard stan­dards. There’s a dif­fer­ence between gram­mar and style; between being con­ver­sa­tional or infor­mal, and being igno­rant or, worse yet, illiterate.

Here’s an inter­est­ing arti­cle on my blog about VAL or “Venue Appro­pri­ate Language.”

But to me, the issue really boils down to one impor­tant truth: cred­i­bil­ity. (Or the lack thereof.)

As tech­nol­ogy evolves, peo­ple are becom­ing more and more sophis­ti­cated. Our jobs as copy­writ­ers are becom­ing increas­ingly more impor­tant if not tougher. But before I expound, I’d like to clar­ify a few things.

Sure, believ­abil­ity, cred­i­bil­ity, trust­wor­thi­ness, proof, cre­den­tial­iza­tion and so on have always been cru­cial and fun­da­men­tal com­po­nents of copy.

When peo­ple say, “How do you write copy for an audi­ence that has become more jaded, cyn­i­cal, skep­ti­cal, cau­tious, blah blah blah,” I kind of laugh because I don’t think they are “more.”

They have always “been.”

It’s the increased avail­abil­ity of infor­ma­tion nowa­days that has caused a growth in all types of mar­kets and marketers.

More and more con­sumers are becom­ing jaded in some mar­kets (like, say, Inter­net mar­ket­ing), just as much as more and more peo­ple who are naive (in one way or another) are enter­ing other mar­kets — as well as more and more mar­keters are becom­ing sneaky, crafty, cre­ative, and insid­i­ous in try­ing to scam people.

Proof in copy­writ­ing is such an essen­tial com­po­nent, but some­times it’s left to be desired by some rookie writ­ers. Thank­fully, some copy­writ­ers are start­ing to get it. (Although we still have a way to go yet.) And while our jobs will be a chal­lenge to come up with dif­fer­ent ways to prove our case, there are some basic things we can do to com­mu­ni­cate it, even if subtly.

And that includes the mes­sage you com­mu­ni­cate as well as the mes­sage you imply. “Impli­ca­tion is more pow­er­ful than spec­i­fi­ca­tion,” a men­tor once told me. And the image you project, the qual­ity of your copy and the pack­ag­ing of your prod­uct (which includes the design of your saleslet­ter or web­site) imply credibility.

To the issue of “good design” ver­sus “good response,” to me that’s some­what of a non-​​issue because we are debat­ing the wrong things. Why? Because good design has spo­ken and will always speak vol­umes of the qual­ity of the prod­uct and ser­vice you deliver.

Peo­ple will have ten­dency to judge your busi­ness by the qual­ity of your appear­ance. And that has never changed. When peo­ple say “don’t judge a book by its cover,” the fact that such a say­ing exists means that we do. Regard­less of how unfair it is or how much we want to change how the world thinks.

It’s just human nature, pure and simple.

Here’s my thinking.

Clunky, shoddy or clut­tered design has a place in copy­writ­ing. Mar­keters will pro­fess that the “value is in the con­tent,” and that “why pay for the pack­ag­ing and the glit­ter and the fluff?”

There will always be a need to be more per­sonal, less con­trived and more cre­ative with your copy — such as the use of cos­met­ics to ramp up your response.

In my split-​​tests, I have found that for­mat­ting to add empha­sis, like under­lin­ing, high­light­ing, ital­i­ciz­ing, etc, do increase response. But the rule here is “use spar­ingly, judi­ciously and strategically.”

Tests show that used mod­er­ately to empha­size key words and key points, for­mat­ting increases response. It also helps skimmers.

Offline and online is dif­fer­ent in this regard. Online, peo­ple skim. A lot more than offline. So you need “speed bumps” to stop peo­ple from scanning.

Use for­mat­ting to cre­ate eye grav­ity. But if you overdo it, then you muddy your mes­sage in a sea of high­lights, bolds, under­lines, what­ever. You cause the rest of the mes­sage to blend together, appear­ing like one big blur, and los­ing the effect you wanted to cre­ate with high­light­ing in the first place, which is to draw atten­tion to a key­word or phrase.

Just as much as you need to write to be scanned and not to be read, you want peo­ple to scan so they can stop to read key ele­ments in your copy in order to get them to start read­ing — not empha­size so much that you invite them to keep on scan­ning. That’s why overuse can kill your response. Add too much, and it will become counterproductive.

Over­all design, how­ever, is a bit dif­fer­ent. When I say “clunk­i­ness will always have a place,” it’s because in a world stuffed with fancy design, high­fa­lutin’ cor­po­rate­s­peak, branding-​​oriented ads and shiny pack­ag­ing, peo­ple have become jaded, but for dif­fer­ent reasons.

Big name copy­writ­ers say, “Fancy design doesn’t sell, only good copy does.” I totally agree. But it shouldn’t be a sub­sti­tute for good design, a pro­fes­sional image and a clean message.

True, such things are some­times used only to be rep­re­sent­ing a prod­uct or ser­vice that was later found to be sub­stan­dard (and there­fore leav­ing peo­ple with a bad taste in their mouths). That’s why clunky design, at one point, became quite pop­u­lar because it spoke vol­umes in a world jaded with fancy design work.

But they didn’t buy from clunky design because it was clunky. They bought because it was dif­fer­ent. And it implied another form of meta-​​message.

Ah, yes. The meta-​​message. The mes­sage that’s implied. The mes­sage beyond the mes­sage. Just like body lan­guage and non-​​verbal com­mu­ni­ca­tion can influ­ence oth­ers when you speak, meta-​​messages in your copy are extremely pow­er­ful, too.

There was a show on Date­line NBC where they “tested” the audi­ence after cre­at­ing a com­pletely fake “skin-​​moisturizing pill,” com­plete with clin­i­cal tri­als, sci­en­tific data, client tes­ti­mo­ni­als, and fancy, glit­tery pack­ag­ing. (Of course, the point of the show is that it was a scam. The whole thing was made up by Dateline’s pro­duc­ers. And the pill? Choco­late powder.)

Inter­est­ing show. But this proves some­thing else. You can pack­age a fake prod­uct, shoot a professional-​​looking infomer­cial, fat­ten it up with hype, and back it up with madeup credentials.

When “clunk­i­ness” appeared on the scene (more because of Dan Kennedy than any other mar­keter, in my esti­ma­tion), peo­ple bought because it was dif­fer­ent, and not nec­es­sar­ily because it was clunky. The clunk­i­ness com­mu­ni­cated a meta-​​message based on the aware­ness level of the market.

What “meta-​​message” you ask? It was this:

“If they spent less money and time on the design, then that means they spent more time and atten­tion on the content.”

That may have been true, but those days are gone. Well not entirely, but let’s just say their “hey­days” are gone. When some­thing is overused and abused, it loses its impact over time. It loses it’s unique­ness and “dif­fer­ence.” And that is the point I’m try­ing to make, here.

(Take the case of red head­lines. When they were new, nobody was using them. So they attracted atten­tion, forced peo­ple to read, and caused response rates to shoot up. Now, they’re so overused that every bloody saleslet­ter with a red head­line looks like, of all things, a saleslet­ter! So response rates are slowly going back down. That’s why I’m start­ing to see bet­ter results with black, and blue, head­lines. Just like before.)

Back to the issue of clunky design.

What I call a “UPA” (i.e., an uncon­scious par­al­leled assump­tion, that is they uncon­sciously assume there’s a par­al­lel between one part and its whole) in this case is that poor design equals poor qual­ity prod­uct, ser­vice, cus­tomer ser­vice, etc.

Peo­ple uncon­sciously assume that, if the design is shoddy (or the copy is poor), then the prod­uct, cus­tomer ser­vice or com­pany behind it must be just as shoddy.

That has always been the case, because it’s sim­ply human nature. Peo­ple want good design, pro­fes­sional qual­ity, a sound image, great pack­ag­ing, etc. Just as good cov­ers or good pack­ag­ing do sell books. (Which is why Date­line made such a good case with their fake mois­tur­iz­ing pill.) Great pack­ag­ing does sell prod­ucts. And great (and great-​​looking) copy does sell more.

Espe­cially in the long-​​term.

Because cred­i­bil­ity is the ulti­mate goal. Oth­er­wise, with bad design, their think­ing is, “If they can’t take care of their design (their web­site, their writ­ing, their image, etc), how in the world are they going to take care of ME?”

That’s why, espe­cially to con­sumers, good design com­mu­ni­cates cred­i­bil­ity. And while it may have fallen out of favor for a lit­tle while, mostly because of the teach­ings of some top mar­keters, it’s com­ing back.

And I would add, “With a vengeance.”

Peo­ple are more edu­cated and informed than ever before. It won’t stop scam­mers from lying, cheat­ing and abus­ing con­sumers. But at the same time, it won’t stop the need to project a more cred­i­ble, pro­fes­sional image.

That said, it will put more onus on the copy­writer and busi­ness owner to find new and cre­ative ways to com­mu­ni­cate that cred­i­bil­ity, even if it’s indi­rectly, through “meta-​​messages.” And yes, it starts with your design, your copy and your image.

As war may seem to rage on between both camps, there’s a reluc­tant mid­dle, in my esti­ma­tion, that will become more and more prevalent.

The happy medium, between clunky copy and fancy design, is the use of great copy that’s per­sonal, tar­geted and con­ver­sa­tional (and not third-​​person, con­trived gob­bledy­gook like copy you get from Mad Avenue ad agen­cies), cou­pled with pro­fes­sional design that’s clean, builds trust and increases credibility.

Bot­tom line? Focus on your copy. Then focus on your image. And finally, keep any attempt at being clunky as mod­est as possible.

About the Author

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