Can a copywriter persuade without manipulating?
I’ve been teaching for the past seven weeks and have not had time to update this site. I’m done lecturing this week and hope begin adding content to “Engage Your Audience.”
One thing on my mind: can a copywriter persuade without manipulating? I see a difference, where persuasion uses reason and rhetorical tools and manipulation uses…well, I’m researching that. But my initial answer leads me to look critically at the way “brand” builds a pre-conscious image. My final freelance writing class at Northwestern College explores this potential ethical quicksand from the perspective of a commitment to how God reveals Himself in the Bible.
In the meantime, check out this commercial for Carlton Natural Blonde Beer. I can’t stop watching it. Is it persuasion? Is it manipulation? Is it pure self-mocking creative fun?
My favorite line: “Man friends with machine.”
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What MPR can tell Marketers about Talking with a Target Audience
It’s hard to wrap our minds around new ways of doing things—especially when the new ways require clear thinking along unexplored routes. Yesterday in conversation with a marketer we discussed the difficulty in getting his niche business known. There is no “road map,” he said, no established market for the custom work his firm does. Clients eventually come to them from all over the world. And for these clients, my friend’s firm is a group of miracle-working artisans who combine art and science to solve manufacturing problems.
The problem is getting word of the miracle-working artisans to just the right people. At just the right time. Exactly when they are having the manufacturing problem that requires a miracle.
Which reminds me of an experiment going on over at Minnesota Public Radio. It’s called Radio Heartland and host Dale Connelly uses his Trial Balloon blog to hear and respond to exactly what his audience is looking for—which happens to be something more than the eclectic range of music that plays 24 hours a day through the new station.
Dale Connelly’s show, and the continuous-running station that derives from it, are actually a remix of The Morning Show that Connelly and “Jim Ed Poole” ran for 25 years. A show that built a wide following despite being on the verge of removal from the radio dial a number of times—at least that’s how the lore goes. The remix includes a highly interactive element.
First, the Music
The genius of Radio Heartland is two-fold. First, there’s the music, which Connelly alternately describes as “Americana” or “roots,” but neither of which title allows for a playlist that runs from Tom Waits to Sammy Davis Jr. to the Drive-By Truckers to the Kinks to the Café Accordion Orchestra. Any summary of the music is woefully incomplete. Like the previous Morning Show, Radio Heartland also gives play time and promotes local music. Connelly changes up the music as he hears from his audience.
Second, the Conversation
I asked about the role of the conversation in running Radio Heartland. “I think of the blog contributors as my co-hosts,” said Connelly. “And I try to work their ideas and music suggestions into the fabric of the show every day.” Reading through the blog it quickly becomes clear that much more than music is on topic. Goats, goat cheese, a virtual Radio Heartland Community band (“The Goatles”?) and lots of conversation that is only tangentially related to goats.
But music is really the focus. In particular, how the music works through the ups and downs of a day. What the music reminds of and how it works in the lives of listeners. Listeners freely respond with comments, praise, poems and prose. Much of the comments are in direct response to Connelly’s lively and funny writing and regular blog updates. It is clear the listeners feel heard.
Then the Loyalty
“Word of mouth is our major promotional tool for new listeners right now,” says Connelly. But the blog helps, especially when people “tune in” to hear/see how their comments and suggestions work out. One of the hallmarks of the Morning Show was great listener loyalty—which Connelly felt would be threatened—which ultimately led him and produce Mike Pengra to set up the HD and Web-Only station.
What can Marketers learn from Radio Heartland?
- That engaging in dialogue as a precursor to conversation can actually help potential customers find you. Is this just another version of “If you build it, they will come?” Possibly. But given the low cost of entry into dialogue and the potential for building word-of-mouth interest, when is the time to launch? Putting specifics out for discussion invites response. And when those interested see their suggestions incorporated—all the better. Sporadic readers move to loyal readers.
- Loyalty builds one conversation at a time. So does community, for that matter.
- Loyalty may start with “Search.” We’ll always ask our questions to people in the know. We’ll rarely turn to a drawer full of brochures for answers. Just make sure your interest pops up in the search.
- There may be a conversational space your firm can own. It may have nothing to do with goats (one can hope). But it will take the shape that flows from a dialogue that seeks and responds to dialogue partners. But dialogue possibilities will not always be as wide-open as they are now.
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To Fear What You Might Hear
Lars Bastholm, recently co-chief creative officer at ad agency AKQA moved to oversee digital creative for Ogilvy North America. In a Q&A posted on AdAge, he talked about wanting a larger platform for messaging:
“You’ve heard me pontificate about what I call social storytelling, where you have a much more open-ended dialogue with consumers. It’s not about pushing a message but inviting people in and it requires you monitor the conversation more thoroughly and to be more responsive.”
There will always be one-way message development. Assembling these messages remains valuable to an organization and serves to hone communication. The mistake is to think tomorrow’s audiences will simply absorb those one-way messages. Tomorrow’s effective message-makers will include points of contact that invite the target audience into conversation.
After sending out messages through a growing number of channels, “monitoring the conversation more thoroughly and being more responsive” is the next movement of corporate conversations. But monitoring and responding are movements many of us are not prepared for, or at least inadequately prepared for. Those activities require a kind of deep listening followed by creative synthesis to piece together anecdotes into a sensible patchwork that accurately portrays our brand’s successes and flaws. It’s a whole-brain activity.
It’s much easier to deliver a monologue than it is to remain engaged in conversation—it’s also far less satisfying for all participants. Maybe we hang back from dialogue because we fear what we might hear.
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Today is “Bring Your Self to Work” Day
Many communicators I know have some art in progress on the side. One paints with oils. Another writes science fiction. Another makes masks. Copywriters who sketch and art directors who write. It is a human thing, this urge to make sense of the world. Certainly it is an integrating impulse—when we take steps to portray the world as we understand it, in whatever medium we choose, the very effort has the effect of enlarging our vision. Even if no one ever sees the painting or reads the novel or puts on the mask, we have still accomplished something. We’ve understood more—maybe we’ve become more human—plus we’ve contributed to culture. We’ve left some integrating artifact behind.
But those acts of creation are not content to idle as we go off to work. They don’t sit quietly on the easel while we earn our bread. They pursue us and our work. Those acts of creation whisper vivid colors and paint sounds as we type. They interrupt with scenes of conflict and resolution projected momentarily over the spreadsheet before us. Our acts of creation hint at a rich interior life that refuses to live in compartments, refuses to walk the same path again and again, and thinks it can make specific sense of a world of input. It is part of bringing our whole self to our work.
What does your art say to your work?
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A Telephone Is Not A Commitment To Communicate
The other day a friend painted a picture of marketing and sales at his company: it looks like a telephone. His firm had not spent on outward-facing communications for a couple years. Instead, they picked up the phone and called people. This company targets a very tight niche of companies needing specialized fabrication services.
We talked about the state of their communication, and how brochures and the usual assortment of tools seemed like a waste of money—given that his industry has very few players and most are well-known to each other. I wondered aloud whether he could position his employees as expert problem solvers—which exactly is what they are—as walking, talking brochures. Is it possible that the very thing they do on the telephone could have a broader reach and work for them all the time? This is the promise of entering into dialogue.
But before moving that direction, set aside tactics for a moment. Before freeing employees to be public experts, any company—and especially my friend’s company—must make an extraordinary commitment. They must commit to communicate. If my friend’s company uses today’s conversational tools like he previously used advertising or brochures—tossing one-way benefit messages out in the marketplace every once in a while—he will fail. Instead, he and his company need to cultivate an attitude of sharing what they know in a way that draws out interest and conversation. And that is an on-going commitment. That’s how experts become experts.
Interestingly, putting experts into conversation is also a route to increased employee satisfaction. Good employees love to use their expertise to help real people solve real problems.
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Hair-Shirt Meet AIG
We need a prophet of old to come and set AIG on the straight and narrow. AIG who must pay out millions in bonuses because their “hands are tied” by binding agreements.
We have redeemed you, O AIG.
We have provided bailout monies,
because we pity your groveling
and hope to reign in the damage from your reckless ways.
We have pulled your donkey back from the flame,
To carry a burden another day.
But this.
Your bonuses smell of loathsome stool
From saggy trousers of insurers gone wild
Whose excesses are piled
For all to sniff and consider corporate contempt.
Your demand for plenty
From the hands of those who want.
Extinguishing trust.
Let public pain
Visit the craving maw of your greedy accounts.
Put away your business as usual
With the spotlight on you
And 170 billion public reasons to turn from your ways.
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Grow Your Craft of Conversation
In the coming age where conversation fuels our business, we’ll need to sharpen the usual tools in a different way. As a copywriter, I help my clients hone their messages, kill jargon, simplify, and answer “Who cares?” But helping my clients engage in conversation with their customers demands something more. Good conversation is about sharing useful information, information that goes beyond primary and secondary marketing messages. Conversation is markedly different from the old formulas that required key selling points to be repeated over and overin the presence of an audience that is assumed stupid or hard of hearing or both. Of course, officially we say we’re just trying to “break through the clutter.” But unofficially, do we think less of our audiences when we dumb things down? The dialogical world assumes clutter breaking up like spring ice as customers locate their real interest.
But conversation may well be a lost art, given all the years we’ve spent crafting our one-way messages. I was reminded of this when reading about the healing power of conversation in Edward Wimberly’s “African American Pastoral Care and Counseling: The Politics of Oppression and Empowerment.” Wimberly writes about how oppressed peoples (in particular) get recruited into stories that powerfully shape their world—leaving them powerless. In fact, we all get recruited into stories that shape our world, for good or ill. But the power of conversation is in reshaping how we engage with the world. The best conversations have, among other things, elements of truth-telling and deep listening.
How does this relate to marketing conversations in the dialogical world? It means we’ll need to grow in our ability to listen. We’ll need to grow beyond techniques for active listening (the “Uh-huh” and “I see” we mutter from behind the newspaper when our spouse talks). It means listening because the person across from me has value, because as whole people they are truly interesting, and because their life experience—not just their experience with my product—has a bearing on your route through this world.
That’s why growing in our ability to converse may actually help us grow more human.
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Our Strange World: Bankers Give Money Back
Yesterday’s StarTribune included an article about TCF returning TARP funding (“TCF rejects rescue money,” 3/3/2009, p. D1). Chris Serres quoted TCF chief executive Bill Cooper as saying it was a no-win situation. If they don’t accept TARP money, people would think they couldn’t get it and they were in trouble. If they did receive TARP money, Cooper said, “you’re stigmatized as evil people stealing from taxpayers.” An article in today’s StarTribune reports on two more banks receiving TARP funding.
Turns out TCF didn’t need it and would write a check for the $361.2 million.
Is it possible we’ve turned some corner in this country where the big money-makers are starting to worry about their appearance to the working folks? TCF has always seemed like a bank for anybody—perhaps the PR department thought they could win points with their target audience by returning money they didn’t need. Did they feel just stigmatized—or maybe even a bit guilty? Or did they just tire of the public peeking into their expensive meetings. Whatever the motive, giving money back seems like a positive sign. Kudos to TCF and Bill Cooper.
It’s a tribute to the power of opinion that $360 million (and change) is being returned by a bank that didn’t need it in the first place. This act seems to elevate the actions that could result from public knowledge: people might bank elsewhere. And dialogue among the working folk could begin an exodus from a stigmatized TCF.
It could happen.
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Let’s Start with “Manipulation-Free Zones”
My friend is a corporate philosopher who lives out his work life in a tall glass tower thinking about, among other things, how to adapt his corporate culture to create more honest dialogue. My primary concern with dialogue in this blog has been how to engage customers honestly. But yesterday’s conversation with this friend I realized that honest dialogue (and if not honest, is it really dialogue?) requires truth-telling. And truth-telling starts inside corporations, even inside individuals. As Mrs. Kirkistan put it, “It seems sort of obvious, doesn’t it, that people should tell the truth?”
Indeed.
But what is obvious to us on a personal level gets twisted in a corporate setting, and processed and stuffed into an animal bladder and offered as a truth-sausage at the other end. Such manipulations are standard procedure for any organization to present their product or service in the best light. That’s where the one-way messages have always come from, the ones that fall flat with potential clients because they stink of the processing plant and are exactly similar to all the other one-way message that land on their mental doorstep hundreds of times each day. My friend suggested I read the Cluetrain Manifesto, which I’ve ordered. The cluetrain website offers to dig much deeper into the notion of conversation between companies and customers, and also promises that customers will—and are already—finding the relevant information they need to make a decision. And they are finding it independently of (and likely contrary to) the one-way messages thrown at them. The website is dated at 1999, so these are not new thoughts, but seem to be gathering force in 2009.
Which brings me to another conversation with an FDA-regulated firm wanting to engage in dialogue but knowing the limits of what their regulators and lawyers would allow to be said in the corporate space. As we kicked around the idea of blogging and just how much truth-telling (in the raw, personal form the blogosphere rewards) could really happen, we stumbled on the peer-review model and wondered if more truth-telling must necessarily happen outside the corporate site, where dialogue could be engaged with experts offering unfiltered opinions. Naturally, such a web site must offer hearty benefits to any dialoguer. I hereby declare these site “Manipulation-Free Zones,” though I recognize that manipulation is part of the human condition. It is the rare human who does not present himself/herself and his/her interests in the best light. But can we aim high?
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conversation is an engine 