Does your customer have a desire for your offer?
[and why 97% of copywriting fails at this point]
I'll tell you a little story that almost drove the car manufacturer FORD into bankruptcy:
From 1954 to 1960, George Hay Brown was director of marketing research at Ford.
Despite his excellent work, he made a serious mistake.
For a year, he placed an ad in every other issue of Reader's Digest, selling "peace and security" to post-war people with the current Ford model.
Millions of dollars went into this campaign.
Into the minus.
By the end of the year, his belgium telegram screening research team found that people who had not seen the ad were more likely to buy a Ford than those who had seen the ad.
Say:
The multimillion-dollar advertisement scared away customers.
A disaster.
The people of the post-war period did not want security or peace - they wanted something else.
You will soon find out what they really wanted.
But first let us look at the mistake George Brown made.
Eugene Schwartz analyzed it in his legendary book “Breakthrough Advertising” :
Brown had tried to create a sense of solidarity among the people .
This is precisely the biggest sin in copywriting:
Trying to create a desire.
Schwartz puts it this way:
“Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product. This is the copywriter's task: not to create this mass desire - but to channel and direct it."