You can’t make this stuff up. The VP, I mean Vice President of Marketing at GM, I mean General Motors, has asked all employees to stop calling Chevy by that casual name and refer to it by the formal “Chevrolet” henceforth. The request presumably extends to the brand’s new agency, Goodby Silverstein, but hopefully did not originate with them.

“We’d ask that whether you’re talking to a dealer, reviewing dealer advertising, or speaking with friends and family, that you communicate our brand as Chevrolet moving forward,” read a memo which was also signed by the Chevrolet Vice President for Sales and Service. “When you look at the most recognized brands throughout the world, such as Coke [they mean “Coca-Cola” of course] or Apple for instance, one of the things they all focus on is the consistency of their branding. Why is this consistency so important? The more consistent a brand becomes, the more prominent and recognizable it is with the consumer.”

Of course, you can also make a brand recognizable through generations of casual use until it becomes part of the national vocabulary as well as the title of several Facebook fan pages and the auto dealership of its chief NASCAR representative, Jeff Gordon Chevy. And presumably Don McLean will be asked to return to Café Lena here in Saratoga, where he originally penned “American Pie”, and revise its most memorable line to “drove my Chevrolet to the [whatever Chevrolet rhymes with] but the [whatever] was dry”.

The New York Times article which broke this story reports that there now is a “cuss jar” at Chevrolet headquarters and employees must deposit a coin every time they use the forbidden word. Once it’s full the proceeds will be used for a “team building activity”. Times reporter Richard S. Chang suggests that activity will probably not be a Mexican dinner at Chevy’s.

Thanks to Carol Maxwell to bringing this to my attention. And thank you America for making possible this badvertising epiphany. Your tax dollars at work.

You know the economy is improving when the incidence of bad advertising and clueless products starts to rise. In tough times, every single product and marketing manager has to justify its existence. But today there’s a place for talent like the creative committee that came up with this slogan for Perkins: Our people deliver more.

Get it? It’s a delivery company. But when some copywriter (not a great one, but at least with a pulse) came up with the slogan “our people deliver” the committee was not comfortable. “Any delivery company can make that claim,” the CEO or CFO perhaps pointed out. “I’ve got it,” yelled a board member. “Let’s add a ‘more’ after the catchphrase and turn it into a USP.” Well he didn’t exactly say that because he doesn’t know what a catchphrase or USP is. But see what he did? Took a workable slogan and turned it into a generic statement.

Want some cleaning supplies with that sirloin?

This is a company with quite a tin ear for marketing.  Take a look at the Perkins home page pictured here. Does anybody else feel a little queasy with the juxtaposiition of the juicy steak and the guy with his foot on the bumper of the car linked by the recycling logo that makes it look like one is turning into the other? Turns out Perkins is both a foodservice delivery company AND a janitorial/sanitation/laundry company. I can see that the same hapless copywriter pointing out that these are rather dissimilar services that maybe shouldn’t be shown side by side on the page, and I see CEO barking “why the hell not?”

Lucky for this misplaced copywriter, a job will soon be opening up at one of the recognizable brands in America: Lysol. They are now advertising the “No Touch Hand Soap System” because—did you know—germs can get on the handle of the soap pump? Wait a minute, I thought that was why you have soap. Do people not know to use the soap after they dispense it into their hands? I think Lysol is underestimating its audience (even the people who are watching “All My Children” which is where I saw it advertised) and indeed, this product is already being remaindered at Overstock.com. The product is on its way out and the product manager may not be far behind.

Happy days are here again.

The Unique Selling Proposition is the attribute that makes your product or service different from any other, at least in the way you describe it. The USP can be a powerful weapon once you know your product and you know the audience’s needs or desires: now you have the opportunity to present the sole solution that gives them exactly what you want.

Every now and then you come across a product that truly is unique… durian, anybody? But often the USP is a matter of a clever marketer identifying a product attribute that’s unique and then blowing that up until it becomes an identity for the brand. Example: M&Ms melt in your mouth… not in your hands. The Mars company found during WWII that sailors in the South Pacific preferred them to Hershey Bars because they didn’t melt in the sun, and turned that into a brand identity.

Jerry Della Femina, who had a successful agency in Los Angeles when I was getting my start in the business, used to run a great long copy ad in the local Adweek about the “Capo D’Astra Bar”. Seems he was a cub copywriter hired to a backwater piano account and went to learn about the client’s product at their remote upstate NY factory.  The client kept saying “all pianos are pretty much the same” till Della Femina crawled under the piano and noticed a heavy band of metal across the bottom.

“Oh, that’s the capo d’astra bar, and I guess it is unique” the client said and it reminded him of the time that they’d had to knock out the wall at Carnegie Hall to install their pianos by crane, because the capo d’astra bar made them too heavy to go up the elevator. Carnegie Hall?? “Oh, didn’t I tell you, all the pianos at Carnegie Hall are our brand.” And thus was born the campaign for Steinway, the official piano of Carnegie Hall, with a resourceful copywriter digging deep to find a USP.

In a competitive market, especially for parity products (example: credit cards), finding a USP can be challenging. Sometimes it’s good enough to claim the high ground with a benefit statement so clearly stated that any competitor who says “wait a minute, we have that too” will look foolish. (You never heard Reese’s Pieces say “we don’t melt either.”) Also, remember that your competition is not restricted to competitors; it also includes doing nothing or doing without. A powerful USP will be good enough to overcome that inertia.

With this post we’re back to my series based on the “Copywriting that Gets Results” class I teach for the Direct Marketing Association. Visit the Copywriting 101 category to see them all.

Colleague Carol Worthington Levy just wrote a great piece in the LENSER newsletter on the benefits of sending creative employees to conferences such as the DMA’s annual event. I’m a big fan of this and in fact I send my entire creative department, i.e. myself, to an average half-dozen trade shows per year.

But as Carol points out, most creatives don’t go to conferences because the management won’t let them. The suits are afraid of being caught short-handed while the lead designer or writer is out of the office, or maybe they’re just tight fisted. As a result, the few creative events the Direct Marketing Association has tried to put on have languished.

Here are four good reasons copywriters (and designers) should get to go to trade shows:

1. To see how the competition is advertising. In the petri dish of the exhibit hall you can quickly get a cross-section of images and messages your competitors are using to market… and better yet, you can see how the audience reacts by gauging the floor traffic.

2. To see your audience in the wild. I don’t know about you, but when I write I frequently have an imaginary picture of my prospect in my mind. It makes the copywriting task more focused. So what could be better than actually seeing real prospects to add detail to that visualization?

3. To see what hot buttons work for your audience. Hang back when a product demo is going… observe the phrases the demo person is using and how the recipient of the demo reacts. This is a great way to find out what is truly important about a complex product so you can use it effectively in your own selling.

4. To learn something new. I am generally pretty disappointed in the educational sessions at conferences (other than SXSW, and even that had some clinkers this year). But if you look at learning as a nice bonus instead of the focus, you’re OK. You’ll always learn SOMETHING new.

If you’re a laborer in the creative trenches, please pass the above list and Carol’s article along to your management. I’m doing a session at the DMA this October in San Francisco, and I’d rather not be alone in the room.

As a copywriter, I get goosebumps from promos like the “Amish Miracle Fireplace” full page ad which has been running of late. This is the Ronco/Popiel school of long form copy I pored over when I was learning my trade. (In fact, I once interviewed at the Ronco offices in North Hollywood. I recall they had the various examples of their direct marketing prowess… the Veg-o-Matic, Pocket Fisherman and more… lined up on a shelf like Teddy Roosevelt’s African hunting trophies). As a cub copywriter I felt these ads were more audacious than deceptive… they were so entertaining in their own right that no one should feel cheated if they didn’t get their money’s worth.

Ad for Amish Miracle Fireplace, from consumeraffairs.com

The Amish Miracle Fireplace copywriter would have old Sam Popiel sitting up in his grave and saluting. The miracle is the heater being promoted in the ad, which puts out a high level of radiant heat for such a tiny object and will be yours FREE as long as you buy a wooden box/mantle to house it, which is the part made by the Amish. A little sleuthing gets to how the marketer makes money: At $300 plus shipping, the price of the box is much more than the apparent value of the “free” heater. But still. So many marketing touchpoints here: thrift, American tradition, pride of ownership in something that makes your hope more cozy, who wouldn’t want one at the bargain price of free?

Unfortunately, the folks at consumeraffairs.com have burst our bubble. Their article is a miraculous bit of digging, and along the way they respond to such consumer queries as “I thought Amish people didn’t use electricity” and “I thought Amish people didn’t allow themselves to be photographed.” They also tell us why such endorsements as UL-approved and the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval are essentially meaningless. And they point out that a device that produces the same level of electric heat (while sending your utility bill through the roof, by the way) can be bought at Target for $20.

The vice president of the company that makes the heater is interviewed in the article, and he is delightfully unrepentant. The “miracle”, he explains, is actually the imitation flames that are displayed on the front screen of the heater.  “These heaters are being called a miracle because they have what’s being called the ‘Fireless Flame’ patented technology that gives you the peaceful flicker of a real fire but without any flames, fumes, smells, ashes or mess. The patented ‘Fireless Flame’ looks so real it amazes everybody,” says David Baker, of Heat Surge in Canton, OH. I happened to have spent a weekend in Canton last fall and I wish I had had the presence of mind to check out this miracle for myself.

A friend and colleague made me fret this morning. He visited my blog and happened to read one of my posts about Toyota where I talked about “my recent issues” with a link to another article. He naturally assumed these “issues” were related to my own branding or marketing problems, since that’s what he reads me for, and was surprised to find an article about an automotive company.

I brought this on myself, more or less intentionally, by taking what is mostly a marketing blog and turning it occasionally into a bully pulpit for my rants on other “issues”. Though I have to say that the original Prius battery failure post has become the second-most read post ever on Otisregrets. And that my food posts draw a small but loyal readership who come for nothing but the food. So I guess I will be keeping it up.

The name of this blog is a bigger problem. “Otis Regrets” has been around a long time, since 2004 when it began as a venue where students in my copywriting class could exchange ideas outside of class. The thought of making it SEO-friendly was far from my mind… what was a search engine anyway? But I’ve since become painfully aware that “Otis Regrets” is buried by queries for “Miss Otis Regrets” and you’re not likely to stumble upon this blog by name unless you’re also looking for Otis Maxwell.

So here’s the lesson or moral for today. When you put up your website, transferring a meatspace or bricks-and-mortar personal or business brand to the web, you hopefully heeded the advice to provide useful content, not puffery. But it may not have occurred to you that your very brand needed a new look. The web was just one conduit by which people are going to look for you and identify you. Now we’ve got Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, maybe Yelp, and all the Namez, Plaxos, etc etc that are going to link to these larger communities and referral services.

Think, as an example, about how your Facebook identity might show up in the newsfeed of someone who is a friend of your own friend or fan, but so far has no idea who you are.  The brand needs to do some heavy lifting here. The new reader (who is a valuable referral because you’re connected through a friend) has to get an immediate positive idea of who you are and what you do. Traditional branding, even a traditional elevator pitch, takes too long.

The quality of your content… the news or activity that was quoted… has to do its part. But what about the brand itself? If it isn’t pulling its weight in terms of building instant appropriate comprehension, maybe it’s time for a change. I know I am thinking about this for my own brand, how about you?

I hardly ever use this blog to promote my own services, so please indulge me. I want to make an analogy to Southwest Airlines, whose CEO David Kelly explained he gained market share in a dreadful economy by doing nothing. Other airlines started charging for checked bags, Southwest didn’t. “Bags Fly Free” was news.

The commercial side of Otisregrets can be found in the tabs at the top of the page. Though I’m a copywriter, I came out of a Master of Fine Arts program at UCLA Film School. I can’t help thinking in terms of stage management. How will the recipient interact with the elements of the direct mail package? What will the reader see “above the fold” on a web page that keeps them reading?

From the beginning, each of my copywriting deliverables has come with guidance on how to execute it graphically. Sometimes this means detailed design commentary within the copy deck; sometimes it’s working with an in-place designer; every now and then I do an old-school “copywriter’s rough”.

I don’t see other writers doing this as much these days, when we all are re-inventing ourselves to stay viable. Maybe it’s my own “Bags Fly Free” story. Check it out.

In my town lives a master carpenter named Chris. He donates his time to serve on the town historical preservation board, and he donated his time last fall to supervise a bunch of Saturday amateurs who volunteered to help rebuild a dilapidated but beloved local building. It was in this context that Chris provided a sweet example of a carpenter’s jig.

A jig is a made up structure which holds your work in place while you are performing a carpenter’s task such as sawing, drilling or glueing. A jig is handy if you are doing a number of repetitious operations (for example, drilling a row of holes at exactly the same position in a cabinet so you can hang a perfectly level shelf) but can also be used for a one-time operation if you don’t trust your ability to control an unpredictable process when wood meets a powerful force.

Making a jig is one delineator between a carpenter who cares about their work and a hobbyist tacking boards together. It’s the physical embodiment of laying the groundwork which a good marketer is going to do as well: define your problem, determine how you are going to approach it, then be clear in your mind about your plan of attack so you don’t get distracted and veer off course during the executional phase. Good copywriters do this without even thinking about it; less-good copywriters just hammer away.

But back to Chris’ jig. The job given to me and a couple of other guys was to hang siding along a 20 foot run. As he described the project Chris asked me, “do you want a jig?” That was music to my ears. Each row of siding needs to be perfectly level and it needs to overlap the previous row at exactly the same measure from the bottom. Trying to eyeball this with a long floppy board would create something ugly. So Chris made a jig. He took a 10” length of 2×4, ripped it down the middle to the 6” mark, then turned it 90 degrees and made a crosscut that met the first one to create a piece that looked like an L if you held it sideways. And then he made another jig exactly the same as the first one. If each guy takes a jig and fits in the shelf of the L under the previous row of siding, then rests the next piece on the top of the L, the work is in perfect position to nail into place.

Now it may occur to you there would be an easier way to do exactly the same thing. Just get two pieces of wood (you could even use scraps from the siding) then fasten them together offset at 6” to produce the two shelves you need to hold the work. But Chris did it the hard way because it gives him pleasure to make something that works well. Not a bad role model for copywriters.

It is hard to avoid sexual analogies with the “close” but I will try. This is the part where the sale wraps up and the salesperson gets the act of commitment—a satisfying reward for handling the previous steps in a methodical and unhurried manner. The copywriting counterpart should be just as satisfying because this is where you get your reader to respond to your call to action; if you have a good and smart client, the higher percentage of people who respond, the more you will get paid.

Because it is so important and satisfying, salespeople like to linger a bit on the close and add a bit of art to it. There is lots of ink on best/proven/classic closing techniques. A good salesperson will first make a trial close in which they soften up the prospect to get them to agree to a small point before proceeding to the actual sale. (Example: “Sounds like the hatchback is a better fit for your family’s needs, am I right?”) Then they might use the assumptive close in which they act as if the sale has already been consummated and query on a subsequent point (“Will you be using a credit card for this?”) or the alternative close which also makes an assumption and gives the reader a subsequent choice (“Now, do you want that in red or black?”)

Roy Chitwood, whom I’ve quoted throughout this series, offers The Guaranteed Close: “If we can (reprise something the prospect said was important) then can you think of any reason we shouldn’t (consummate the agreement)?” E.g. “If we can get those red slipcovers you liked, can you think of any reason we shouldn’t get the paperwork started?” The beauty part is that the salesperson gets the sale by making the prospect say “no”.

Good direct response copywriters will close the sale in a manner that’s quite different but leads to the same outcome. They will sprinkle their emails, web pages or letters with repeated brief calls to action because you never know when you’ve provided the right amount of sell for some readers to make a commitment. Then, for those who have stuck with you all the way to the end (this applies mainly to classic long-form direct mail letters), reward them with a wind-up in which you:

• Spell out in detail all the benefits that are waiting for the prospect, accompanied by a description of the response options available (today it’s usually click the link or call).
• Couple this with your guarantee that proves there is absolutely no reason NOT to say yes.
• Include a limited time offer if you have one, or penalty for NOT responding. (Only 25 attendees can be accommodated to insure personal attention to each student! This guide is available in very limited quantities and when they’re gone, they’re gone!)

Then you’re done… as is this 7-part series, in which we have mused upon how good copywriting follows many of the same formulas as face to face selling. If you’ve joined us late, please go back and start from the beginning. Thanks for reading!

The general public has an image of “pushy salespeople” who cajole or badger them into buying something they don’t want or need. But good salespeople don’t actually do this. Instead, after they have presented the benefits of their product or service they will tease out any objections in the prospect’s mind and then respond to those before closing the sale.

Objections, also known as FUD (fears, uncertainties and doubts), are perceived reasons not to make a purchase that is otherwise attractive. By making an objection, the prospect is giving the salesperson a clue about something important to them. And by completely and correctly answering the objection, the salesperson can actually increase the prospect’s commitment level.

For example, if the prospect says it’s too expensive the salesperson can point out how it will actually save money, how not having it is costing them money, how the price is likely to be higher tomorrow.  If they say they want to shop around the salesperson will ask what they’re looking for from the competition and then prove how this product solves the problem in the best possible way.

So how does a copywriter answer objections, when you don’t have the reader in front of you to gauge their reaction to your written sales pitch? One answer is research—which can come from talking to a sales rep or product manager, reading up on the industry you’re selling to, or ideally from information in a good creative brief. You’re looking for big objections—the top one or two reasons buyers don’t buy—because that’s all you have time to respond to in your copy without getting off track.

A good example is the control direct mail I wrote for Geneva, a merger and acquisition consultant which wants to get business owners to attend a free seminar on how to evaluate their business. (The letter from this package is available on my website.) The #1 objection that business owners put forward was that they couldn’t admit to themselves (or to their employees) that they would consider selling the business. So we created a lift note that said just that with a pull quote on the outside: “I’m not about to sell my business… not after all the work I put into it!” And inside they read the story of a peer who felt the same way, but got a fabulous offer for more than he thought the business could possibly be worth. Objection answered.

Also, if you’re selling via direct response, certain objections come with the territory since customers can’t touch and feel the product. Will it work as advertised? What if it’s delivered and I don’t like it when I see it? And the answer is to paint very clear word pictures of how great it will be to use the product so the reader starts to visualize themselves doing just that, successfully, and becomes invested in your pitch. Couple this with a strong, clearly stated no-risk guarantee and you’re on your way.

Next time: we’ll conclude this series with thoughts on “The Guaranteed Close”.