Anchoring

Frame comparisons, control perceptions.

Maybe the product you’re writing about isn’t too bad – but the price is
outrageous.

Turns out, if you find a way to say a big number, it’ll make anything else your
reader hears sound small. The psychs call it ‘anchoring’.

Let’s say you’re selling, I don’t know, lawnmowers. First you talk about prestige
models costing upwards of £600. Then, when you reveal that your cheapo
knock-off costs ‘just’ £300, it actually sounds reasonable. Compared to a number
that, for all they know, you just made up.

While a high-end lawnmower can cost upwards of £600, the MerryMo comes in
at a trim £300.

Bigness bias
Talk big, and other stuff sounds small.
Imagine you’re getting legal advice on divorcing your dull-as-ditchwater
husband. The solicitor says it will cost £5000. Sounds a lot, right? Maybe you can
put up with watching Top Gear after all.
Now imagine you’re buying a new house – one your husband won’t be inhabiting
– for £200,000. The legal costs for this will also be £5000. But next to the £200k,
the amount sounds a lot more reasonable.

It’s still the same money. It took you the same time to earn and could buy exactly
the same goods or services elsewhere. But in the context of a much bigger
purchase, it looks small.

The average UK house sells for £200,000. What’s £5000 for the reassurance of
professional legal help?

Sunk costs
Make them chase their ‘good’ investment.
A sunk cost is money that’s been spent and can’t be recovered. People tend to
‘honour’ their sunk costs even when it would make more sense to forget them
and move on, because in their minds that would be ‘wasting’ the money they
spent before.

The classic example is buying a theatre ticket in advance, then falling ill on the
day of the performance. Many people will ‘protect their investment’ by going to
the show even if it makes them feel worse, to avoid ‘wasting’ the cost of the
ticket. In reality, the money is gone no matter what they do, and they’d be
happier staying home.
Let’s say you’re selling a tile paint that lets people change the colour of their
bathroom without retiling. Deep down, both you and the reader know that it
would be better to rip off the tiles and start again. But that would be ‘wasting’
the old tiles:

If you’ve invested in high-quality tiles, give them a new lease of life with Tile-o-
Paint, the cheaper alternative to retiling.

Now, instead of throwing good money after bad, they’re making a canny
purchase that lets them have their cake and eat it. And their sunk costs have
kept your sale very much afloat.

‘That’s why’
Causality builds credibility.
If the copywriter’s brain is a box of tools, ‘that’s why’ is the adjustable spanner.
There’s almost nowhere you can’t drop it in for instant credibility.

First, soften them up with some grovelling empathy:

We know how hard it is to get kids ready in the morning…

Then hit them with the arbitrary segue into the product:

…That’s why we’ve created new Oaticlag, with plenty of rich oaty goodness to set
them up for a fantastic day.

See how easy that was? And it doesn’t even matter whether the product really is
the answer or not – ‘that’s why’ puts it in the box seat regardless.

‘Up to’
Undefined numbers equal zero promises.
Nothing gives your copy some much-needed substance quite like cold, hard
data. If you can measure it, it must be real. But what if your stats are writing a
cheque the product just can’t cash?

In this situation, ‘up to’ is your friend, letting you make a big-sounding claim
without actually saying anything at all. For example:
Weedo reduces perennial weeds by up to 75%
‘Up to 75%’ means ‘Between 0% and 75%’. So you’re not really promising
anything – just gesturing vaguely in the direction of an unquantified benefit. But
it sounds fantastic.

‘Up to’ plays on overconfidence, or irrational optimism. Tell people their results
will be in a range and they immediately assume their results will be near the top.
It’s human nature.

‘Help to’ and ‘can’

Partial claims sound completely real.
Making concrete claims is always a tough one, particularly if the product’s
rubbish. Don’t worry, though – there’s a way to dramatically downgrade the
benefits you’re claiming at almost no rhetorical cost.

Check out the difference between:

Hair-o reduces hair loss

and

Hair-o helps to reduce hair loss

To the inattentive ear, they sound almost the same, but there’s a world of
difference in meaning. In the first line, Hair-o takes all the credit. But in the
second, its contribution could be tiny. Sure, it’s ‘helping’ – but its ‘help’ could be
as helpful as the help that a three-year-old offers with the washing up.

Now check out ‘can’:

Hair-o can reduce hair loss

Now Hair-o’s doing even less than before – maybe even nothing. All you’re
saying is that it can reduce hair loss. The circumstances where it can might be
vanishingly unlikely, perhaps requiring the customer to do dozens of additional
things. Doesn’t matter – it still can do what you’re saying. (Even if it probably
won’t.)
Reactance
People won’t be told. (Except they will.)
If you’ve ever tried to get a small child ready to leave the house, you already
know about reactance: the tendency to do the opposite of what we’re told, even
when it would benefit us.

Politicians know all about reactance. As long as they can portray their policies as
a rebellion against somebody – Brussels bureaucrats, East Coast liberals – they
can turn a vote for them into a ‘protest’. Hey, voter, ‘they’ don’t want you to do
such-and-such. Are you going to let them push you around? Take back control!

If you can set up a situation where your reader expresses reactance by buying
into your message, you’re on to a winner. For example:

You might not believe this, but Wireco broadband could be five times faster than
your current service.

This goads the reader into ‘proving you wrong’ by swallowing your claim. You
dared them not to believe it, and they only went ahead and believed it anyway.
Those tiresome online ads about a tooth-whitening treatment that ‘dentists
don’t want you to know about’ pull the same trick.

You can also try a soft-pedal approach:

The benefits of Waxo are crystal clear. But of course, the final decision is yours.

‘What do you mean?’ you reader thinks. ‘Why wouldn’t I buy it? Do you think I’m
stupid?’

Of course not. But hey, you did walk right into my reactance trap.

Embedded commands
Tell them without telling them.
Ever felt like just straight-out telling the reader what to do? Well, now you can –
provided you can come up with a moderately contrived sentence. And I
just know that you can.
An embedded command is a sentence within a sentence, usually formed as an
imperative. For example:

You can visit our showroom any time between 9am and 5pm.

Making the parent sentence relaxed and permissive takes the sting out of being
pushed around. Turns out you really can pee on people’s shoes and tell ’em it’s
raining. Now, imagine how surprised you’ll be when you make me a cup of tea.

Authority
White coats shift shampoo.
Persuading someone to buy one-on-one can be a struggle. But with an
authoritative ally backing you up, the fight becomes gratifyingly unfair.

Ideally, the audience will have heard of the authority you cite. But it doesn’t
really matter either way. As long as they have an official-sounding title or
qualification, it’ll probably be enough.

Top orthodontists recommend Dent-o-Paste.

Shallow? Cheap? No doubt. But it works, because people are cognitive misers –
give them some prima facie signifiers to work with and they probably won’t
bother to question them. That’s the secret of confidence tricksters and cynical
copywriters down the ages – and now it’s yours.

The endowment effect

People overvalue what they own.
If you’ve ever helped someone move house, you’ve seen the endowment effect
in action. They’re packing up boxes of useless old junk they should really throw
away. But to them, it’s stuff they’ve paid good money for; it might come in handy
one day. So they lug it all over to their new house, where it will sit in the loft,
untouched, for decades on end, until they die and their kids dump the
lot without a second thought.

Naturally, this presents opportunities for the manipulative copywriter.

Moving home? Short of space? Don’t throw out those treasured possessions.
Store them securely at Big Shed until you can enjoy them again.

The endowment effect means people will pay more to retain a thing they own
than to get an identical thing owned by someone else – even if they’ve only
owned it for a few minutes, or there’s no rational reason for them to want it.
That’s because giving up something they have feels like a loss, and people hate
losing almost as much as they hate thinking rationally.
Time-limited trials, test-drives and free-to-play videogames all play on the
endowment effect. Once people are hooked, they feel that the product, car or
game is already theirs, even if they haven’t paid for it. And then they will pay to
hang on to it.
To trigger the endowment effect, make liberal use of ‘your’ to emphasise
possession, while laying it on extra thick about the terrible danger of losing out
on something wonderful:

We hope you enjoyed your free trial of Lawnmower World. To make sure you
continue to receive your copy every month, fill out the form below and send it to
us by 30 September. Remember, if you don’t act, your subscription will end this
month.

The Forer effect

People make general statements personal.
Psychologist Bertram Forer gave a group of students what they thought was a
personal profile, but was in fact a list of 13 statements that were the same for all
of them. They still marked it 4.26 out of 5 for accuracy, on average.

It worked because the statements were so vague that anyone could identify with
them. For example:

You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.

You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.

At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right
decision or done the right thing.

Forer’s most universal statements began ‘At times…’ That’s because people don’t
have personality types, but personality states.
So if you’re hoping to build empathy with the reader, it’s far more effective to key
into something they’ve probably thought or felt at some point, rather than trying
to cram them into a persona:
From time to time, you probably wonder if you’re really saving enough for
retirement. Use our simple annuity calculator to see what income you can
expect.
I guess we’ve all wanted to write something that engaging at one time or
another.

The double bind

All roads lead to a sale.
A double bind presents as a choice between two alternatives, but in reality both
paths lead to the same destination. For example:

You can order online, or drop into our store to browse and buy a selection of
our sofas.

Here, the reader has two choices, but both entail ultimately making a purchase.
The idea is to present alternatives at one level of behaviour (choose how to
purchase) that amount to the same thing at a higher level (make a purchase).
The option not to buy is excluded by implication.

Distinction bias
Make the alternative sound worse.
Use distinction bias by juxtaposing your product with an alternative option and
emphasising some distinction between them.

The alternative doesn’t have to be a competing product, or even exist in the real
world. It just has to offer less value than whatever you’re selling.

You choose the basis of comparison to suit your agenda. For example:

The EconoHeat offers four different ways to programme your heating – most
controllers have just three.

Readers should really be asking themselves how many heating-programming

methods is enough, or whether the number is relevant at all. But if you frame
their decision as a choice between two alternatives, one of which seems worse,
they’ll choose the ‘better’ one every time.