by guest blogger Jeff Sexton

“…money is an insulator. It shields us from problems, and perhaps that’s good. But it shields us from challenges as well. Money is the glove that keeps us from feeling the texture and ripples of life.”
Roy H. Williams in his Monday Morning Memo of 19 September, 2005

Money can indeed deaden our sensitivity.  As can power, position, privilege, health, etc. So what’s a successful copywriter to do?

When your livelihood hangs upon maintaining an acute sense of the “texture and ripples” affecting the inner lives of your audience, writing with a gloved hand just won’t work. And that begs the question:  what increases sensitivity?

What can bestow the magic of touch-feel?

Answer: a wound.

A wound is a puncture of our outer layer; something has broken through the skin, letting the outside in – the very opposite of the glove’s “protection.”

Wherever we have senses, we also have just this kind of uncovered and unprotected portal to the outside world.  Take our eyes, for instance: when open, our eyes are uncovered by skin, allowing them to suffer from – in other words, be sensitive to – every nuance of light and color.  Cover your eyes with the skin of your eyelids and you will no longer suffer the outside world’s imposition on your imagination.  You’ll become temporarily blind and capable of filling the darkness with whatever your imagination would choose.

And so it is on the psychological level: you have to puncture the protective layer of your intellect and ego defenses if you would become sensitive to what moves another human being to do what she does. Otherwise, you’ll remain blind and capable of interpreting the facts and filling in the gaps with whatever your imagination wants.

How do you do this?

With two do-able-but-daunting steps:

Step 1:  Put an authentic face on your audience.

Just as journalists struggle to get past the statistics to “put a face” on a story or tragedy, so you too must relate to an individual rather than a “customer base.”  Individuals have lives bigger than their interaction with you.  Individuals have context to their needs and desires.  Most importantly, an individual has a self-image that has nothing to do with the likely stereotypes that you might otherwise be tempted to pigeonhole her with.

Show me what your customer admires and aspires to – and how her work-a-day world can conflict with and frustrate those visions – and you’ll find it easy to write copy that will touch her where she lives and breathes.

Step 2:  Stop being Objective

Think of those individuals you’ve revealed your secrets to, picture the last scary secret or utter truth that you’ve shared with another person.  Now hold that image while I ask you a question:  Was that other person an “objective” listener with no vested interest in you or your happiness?  Or were they someone deeply committed to you as closest of friends, lovers, or family?

Do you honestly expect your customers or audience to be any different?

Somewhere along the line, businesses mixed up “objective” with “real,” and strove with all their might to make market research be as “objective” as possible, preferring statistically verifiable Likert-scaled surveys to authentic, open-ended questions, and painfully artificial focus groups to real conversations amongst friends.

Might I suggest we all just stop that nonsense?

The real questions that will determine the worth of your research have nothing to do with chi-square calculations or demographics.  The real questions are what the customer will ask herself when confronted with your questions:

1.    What has this person sacrificed or committed-to in order to be here today?
2.    Can I trust this person with the truth?
3.    If I try to come off as more “pulled-together” than I am, will they believe me?

All three questions are interdependent.  If you sacrifice a full day or several days of your life to shadow a customer in some immersive research, you will have very likely: a) proven a commitment, b) gained some trust, and c) seen enough to sniff out a façade.

If you’re wondering how all of this is any different than the old advice to “Listen to” and “Care about” your customer, the answer is that it’s not.  The goal isn’t to say something new, but to help you more fully realize the truth behind those clichés.  To help you see where and when you might have been falling away from the heart of that advice, and give you ways to get back to following it more fully.

I hope it helps.

Jeff Sexton is a Wizard of Ads partner and copywriter extraordinaire. His blog, Jeff Sexton Writes, offers copywriting wisdom from a unique perspective, along with tips and techniques that will make you a better writer.