An Honest Copywriter?

Honest is when people keep buying from you.

Doesn't take that much talent to get someone to buy something once.

That's a tough one, Kevin. The hottest converting sales pages often rely on hype or misrepresentation of some sort or other. Unfortunately, the technique is still the big seller. While you can write an honest page for yourself and settle for the lower return and the more long term advantages, clients want results RIGHT NOW.

Not even going to attempt an answer to the problem -- it's the very reason I don't write anything promotional - just reports, ebooks, and articles. I just don't want to deal with the attitudes that insist on fast sell and hype. I don't mind juggling a little language here and again - and if everyone stuck to that a whole new leveled market would emerge. But I just can't stomach some of the techniques that marketers seem to take to be "must do" any more. I just write my products and stay out of the way of the excrement emanating from the air conditioner.

One of the things I have noted over the years is the difference in copy writing techniques between countries. Whether this has anything to do with our different laws is most likely. Consumer protection is taken very seriously here in Australia.

My personal opinion? I seriously don't like copy writing. I find the need to twist and turn people's misery and needs degrading and disrespectful. I also feel that finding someone's greed need distasteful.

If a product or service is good and helpful, please just tell me about it and what it actually does. Over-promising and under-delivering will save you on the refunds that way!

Good copywriters don't lie, we dramatize.

yes you're right

I actually hate being called a copywriter because so many people associate it with being dishonest. I simply call myself a writer and I believe in honesty at all times. Sure, it might cost me money but I don;'t have a guilty conscience about anything I do and I live happily with that notion.

Properly done, copywriting isn't about lying or misleading people.

It's about presenting a product in the best possible light and showing your prospect a powerful benefit that compels them to act.

-John

There's a more basic question you must answer first.

As a copywriter, you will be asked to write sales copy that persuades people to buy.

And to be effective, you must use techniques that agitate emotions in the prospect and alter his state of mind.

Are you prepared to do that?

Alex

Hype is often the penalty for having an unremarkable product or service.

Might as well fault the inventor for falling in love with their own product, essentially lying to themselves about market potential. Or dressing up their own ego as a ventriliquist dummy they call "the market" or "the customer." Where never is heard a discouraging word. And the skies are not cloudy, if management says they aren't.

Scratch a marketing lie and you'll find a whole raft of lies told by a deluded business management or inventor. Lies told well before the marketing guy or copywriting gal enters the picture. Build a better moustrap and the world will beat a path to your door? That's a lie.

All Marketers Are Liars has a different perspective.

And the saying is you can't cheat an honest man. Consumers want to lie to themselves, and in a lot of markets they are looking for an accomplice to make those lies seem true. Big house you can't afford anyone? Keeping up with the Joneses?

They aren't upside down on their mortgage, they are upside down on telling themselves what they can and can't afford. They are upside down on truth. They just found banks willing to aid and abet.

Why not have true marketers develop products the market actually wants? Why not have a copywriter write the ideal sales piece first? Get inside the mind of the customer, and let that guide your development. Then lift the business out of the muck of self-congratulatory self-admiration of mediocrity and build something that matches the copy?

With copy as the blueprint, the problem is solved. Lies gone. But that's not what clients do with copywriters, now is it? That is not what copywriting clients are buying, now is it?

I was just reading about HP (Hewlett flipping Packard) liquidating their tablet after 49 days of competition against Apple.

Now there is a bitch slap of truth. Learn from something like that -- which HP will not be doing -- and this problem largely goes away. Have companies start hiring market analysts to do post mortems in order to improve? Why? Nothing is wrong in corporate wonderland.

Now shut up and Make People Buy Our Stuff.

Read All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin.

It is not an anti marketing book.

A psychological study found the ONLY difference between entrepreneurs (the entrepreneur type) and anybody else was a reality warping egocentric delusion.

Essentially, they view their own decisions as less risky. Probably not the definitive study, but interesting.

When you can pass a lie detector test and actually believe what you're telling yourself, it's hard to use the word dishonest.


P.S. I develop marketing and copy that puts whoever isn't hiring me out of business. I kill small businesses, one way (by out competing them) or another (by growing their small business so it's not so small).

That's my job. Not copy. Not ads. Not coddling small businesses by catering to their comfort zone or drinking their koolaid.

I think this is a well-considered and important topic. My opinion is that it is always not only possible but necessary to stick to the truth in writing. The reason for this is that there is an authenticity that comes through in good writing. Without this authenticity, the writing is not good anyway.

Honesty should be about telling people the advantages without lying to them or stretching the truth.This explains why it's important to choose a good product or service.Just make them see why they need it,that it provides a good solution to their problems.

I think that copywriters are and should be as honest as any other person (at any other job), because like every other job in the world, if it's done right and professionally and truthfully, it is done in the best way possible for everyone's interests.
Truth sells, and that is obvious especially in advertising. People can spot a lie a mile away.
When I write articles about a product, for examples, then sure - I can say things that are not true and give magical qualities to the product (Apple...?), but I believe it is better to make the truth sound good instead of making a lie sound even better. It usually defeats the purpose.