The Un-Persuadables – the very real limits for persuasion in copywriting
Read this blog and I’ll buy you some Hula Hoops. Alternatively, if you don’t read this blog I’ll train a particularity aggressive crow to come round to your house and do horrific things to your toothbrush.
What we have here, in both cases, are rather underwhelming examples of persuasion. The first is an incentive you could easily acquire yourself for around 60p. The second is a threat entirely dependent on an unlikely set of circumstances centred around my successful manipulation of avian criminality.
Persuasion is, as we are frequently reminded, the axis around which any copywriting task is constructed. It is our fixed constant, our anchor of intent, our dirty, sweaty manifest destiny.
Except, of course, if it isn’t.
I’m increasingly becoming persuaded that persuasion in its most primary sense is perhaps too lofty an ambition for a copywriter. And while that theory may suggest an absence of ambition or conviction, I wonder if it’s not merely a realistic reflection of the commercial world.
This is, after all, the age of digital reassurance. No fact goes unchecked, no argument goes unargued. And, probably most pertinently, no transaction is fulfilled without a broad and thorough harvesting of information. Put more simply, you don’t buy stuff without reading about it first.
Our copy is an element of that researched, reasoned decision making process. But I struggle to see how we can expect or assume the path to conversion to be as simple as: ‘Notice our ad – Read our ad – Buy what’s in our ad as quickly as possible.’
In terms of persuasion, I prefer to see the role of copy as a trigger. Planting ideas, raising questions and beginning a conversation that may very well take an utterly different direction to what we had intended. And, if that’s the case, ‘tough’ and ‘fine’ in equal measure.
In this environment we must learn to think of our audience as rigorous and sceptical investigators rather than passive vessels into which we casually fling the latest ‘stuff’. A call to action in this market is always, in reality, more hopeful than categorical.
That’s not to say copy shouldn’t be trying to influence or urge. It’s just acknowledging that our role in this recipe for a purchase is to interest and excite, while very much recognising that the entire business won’t be concluded in the time it takes to get from our first word to our last.
To be honest, it’s the kind of approach you see a great deal of in great modern copywriting – an almost cavalier relationship with the business of shifting units. A simple substitution of reasons to buy for reasons to believe.
Perhaps the only real behaviour we need to change is how we, as writers and clients, talk about and understand persuasion in copywriting. While the ‘art of persuasion’ has always been a lazy, ill-used phrase, with our new understanding of the delicate role (and limitations) of persuasive language it actually feels strangely appropriate.
Congratulations though if you’ve got this far. I owe you some Hula Hoops.
Follow @Boultini on Twitter. Or he’ll set the crows on you.