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COPYWRITER'S ROUNDTABLE #866 October 15, 2019
Why It Pays To Make It Personal
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"I love to take a photograph So mama, don't take my Kodachrome away."
- Paul Simon
We recently gave my mother a new digital photo frame for the kitchen.
An interesting item, this frame.
Out of the box, it's more or less worthless. It only gains value as you add photos.
And that value is always personal and specific, based on the content you choose to add.
On a recent visit, I went up to the third floor where my mother keeps a half-dozen large bins of family letters, pictures, and other bits of history, and I started scanning them into my phone.
(In case you ask, I use the Scanner Pro app because it lets me auto-size the images.)
The process went quickly. I was able to capture a few hundred old snapshots in a couple of hours.
And not just clips of us as kids on Christmas or at the beach.
There were pictures in the boxes of my father in a stroller or my mother in her mother's arms...
Pictures of my grandmother as a typist in the legal office where she met my grandfather...
Blurry, aged snapshots of great grandparents, not long after they stepped off the boat from Ireland.
Via the miracle of the "cloud," I cleaned a few of them up on my computer and bundled them off to the frame downstairs.
Ever since then, every conversation in the kitchen is punctuated with frequent, "Oh wow, look at that..." along with follow-up commentary about who's in the shot, what was happening, and -- usually -- a related story or two to follow.
Many of the pictures, by the way, are posed. Some are delightfully not, revealing happy accidents, funny faces, or the height of a real moment.
Even the posed shots expose flaws. Someone who blinked. Someone who wasn't well. My great grandmother, clutching her hands together because she was afraid the camera would capture her the tremors from her encroaching Parkinson's disease.
What I've noticed, though, after hours of scanning in these hundreds of photos, is that it's the quirks, flaws, and unexpected bits that give them real, extra charm.
Why is that?
Because that's where our humanity resides.
I couldn't help thinking about that when, during the same family visit, my mother mentioned how a friend of hers ran a business assisting financial planners with marketing services to their clients.
"Shirley," said my mother, "says she has this whole survey where she asks the financial planners to talk about their hobbies, their families, places they travel to, and all kinds of things that seem like they've got nothing to do with being a good financial planner... it seems like a waste of time."
Still, I told her, think about that advisor from Fidelity you were telling me about. What is it you always say, I ask her.
"Right," she said, "He's done very well with my accounts. That's why I like him."
But, I said, what you talk about when his name comes up is what? His family, his kids, and how he's such a "nice guy."
Point being, both to her and you, is that we unconsciously, instantly latch on to the humanity of those who enter our lives.
And that those bonds we form, based on shared humanity, often enhance, exceed, or even erase -- when necessary -- the other considerations that could either shape or derail a relationship.
Like the instant ties we feel to the people in long lost or forgotten photographs.
From a marketing standpoint, that's why sharing a few humanizing details, even ones that seem unrelated to whatever your offering, can be persuasive.
I remember how, back in the '90s, one of our competitors ran a sidebar in a promotion for one of their financial editors.
The headline on the sidebar was "Confessions of a New England Cheapskate." And it talked about how the editor still drove a modest car, lived in a sensible home, and spent a lot of time with his family.
None of this, really, had much to do with his ability to pick stocks. Except that he might argue he's good at looking for bargains.
But two decades later, what do I remember about the guy? The photo of him with his family. And the little details about his daily life and interests.
The bottom line?
Next time you sit down with a client, after you've talked about the ideal customer, the product, and the offer, get personal. Because it persuades and sells as nothing else can.
Copyright 2019 by John Forde
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