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The Monday Morning Memo

Art. Brand. Cultural Icon.

July 28, 2008

| Download
https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/2aacb333-2bf5-4477-9cf4-04fd360bad1a/MMM080728-ArtBrandIcon.mp3


It's as easy as A.B.C.

You’re attracted to art
1. when it stands for something you believe in,
2. when it shows you a reflection of your own core values, or
3. gives you a glimpse of your inner face.

You're drawn to a brand for precisely the same reasons.

A cultural icon is a contemporary archetype, mass-appeal public art, the symbol of a worldview. Cultural icons embody the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. They reveal the mind of the time.

Learn to read the choices of your customers and you'll be able to better serve them.

The cars your customers drive reflect choices they have made. Their clothing and accessories reflect additional choices. What do these choices tell you? They decorate their homes and offices with choices that virtually shout their innermost thoughts and feelings. Are you paying attention to any of this?

“Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters.” – Maggie Tufu, The Engines of God, page 398

A well-served customer is not easily stolen.

Bill Bernbach once said, “Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being.”

We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are.

“I am irresistible, I say, as I put on my designer fragrance. I am a merchant banker, I say, as I climb out of my BMW. I am a juvenile lout, I say, as I down a glass of extra strong lager. I am handsome, I say, as I don my Levi's jeans.” – John Kay

Do you want to write persuasive ads, speeches and sermons? Use words and phrases that reflect your customer's core values. Connect to his or her worldview.

A knowledge of trends among your customers in
art
(music, hairstyle, clothing, jewelry, etc.)
brands
(cars, bikes, computers, magazines, etc.) and
heroes (the cultural icons they admire)
will be the only clues you need.

Your business has only 3 or 4 customers living at thousands of different addresses. Your marketing should be crafted to reflect the preferences of each of them.

The concepts I've shared today will help you better understand
persona-based ad writing,
an important element in Persuasion Architecture®, the marketing technique perfected by New York Times bestselling authors Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg.

Captain Jeff Sexton is a master of persona-based ad writing. He'll be one of your instructors when you come to Austin to learn how to Write for Radio and the Internet.

That class, August 26-27, is just 4 weeks away. Are you coming?

Business isn't going to get better until you get better at attracting it.

Come.

Aroo.

Roy H. Williams

6-Word Stories

“For sale:
baby shoes,
never worn.”
– a famous 6-word story commonly attributed to Ernest Hemingway but it’s not likely he really wrote it.

“With bloody hands, I say good-bye.”
– a 6-word story by Frank Miller        

“Longed for him. Got him. Shit.”
– a 6-word story by Margaret Atwood    

“machine. Unexpectedly, I'd invented a time”
– a 6-word story by Alan Moore        
     
“Tick-tock tick-tock tick-tick.”
– a 6-word story by Neal Stephenson

Come to the Wild Fiction Workshop August 6-7.
We'll publish you.
(And your story gets to be longer than 6 words.)

Don't forget the rabbit hole.


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Random Quote:

“To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you from the cradle to the grave and beyond which it would be easy, fatally easy, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whisky, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.”

- Christopher Isherwood, from "Los Angeles," Exhumations, (1966)

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