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The Monday Morning Memo

Speaking to the Unconscious Mind

January 13, 2020

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https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/096f10ca-c178-4b5d-b9a3-af1718265447/MMM20200113-SpeakingToUnconsciousMind.mp3

My most successful ads in 2019 were the ones where I refrained from using logic, but chose instead to speak to the unconscious mind.

Advertise your product to the conscious mind of a customer and you will likely be met with doubt, disinterest, and suspicion. But the unconscious mind greets you with none of these.

Speaking to the unconscious is not nearly so complicated as it sounds.

Here’s a recent example. A big jewelry store asked for an ad that would trigger interest in their custom-design department. The instructions I was given were typical of the instructions received by most ad writers: “Custom Designed Jewelry – Our jeweler can make just about anything from custom engagement rings, wedding bands, pendants, etc. – Let us know if you need more information about our services.”

These were the thoughts that ran through my head:

  1. Custom-designed jewelry is the answer to a question that few people are asking. Consequently, it is not a felt need.
  2. But plenty of people would love to a have a distinctive, one-of-a-kind, “signature” piece of jewelry.
  3. If I speak directly to the issue by describing how “our talented designers can design distinctive, one-of-a-kind, signature pieces of jewelry for any special occasion… custom engagement rings, wedding bands, pendants, whatever you like,” people are just going to groan and roll their eyes because they will be seeing nothing in their mind, and experiencing no associative memories.
  4. Therefore, I’m going to have to come at this from an unusual angle and attempt to trigger positive, associative memories in the unconscious. (An associative memory is a memory that is linked to another memory.) If I am successful, these associative memories will inspire the curiosity of the customer to begin considering possible options.

Here is the 30-second script that sprang from those musings:

ROY:  Watermelon green and red,
SARAH:  Honey gold,
ROY:   Tart lemon yellow.
SARAH:  Apricot orange.
ROY:  Blueberry blue.
SARAH:  Mulberry purple.
ROY:  And the pink of a perfect peach.
SARAH:  All the colors of nature can be found in gemstones.
ROY:   Choose a twinkling tint
SARAH:   or a shimmering shade
ROY:  as your own, signature color
SARAH:  to sparkle forever in your one-of-a-kind
ROY:   custom-designed
SARAH:   jewelry.
ROY:  All the colors of wildflowers
SARAH: glimmering and shimmering in the morning sun, are yours…
ROY: at NAME OF STORE, LOCATION
© Roy H. Williams, 2020

People who hear that ad will ask themselves, “What would my signature color be?” And without intending to, they will begin imagining a custom-designed piece of jewelry.

Few of these people, if any, will consciously consider that each of the colors named in the ad has a flavor, or that the yellow mentioned was “tart,” or that it followed “honey.” Honey and lemon is a famously soothing combination.

Likewise, few will notice the mesmerizing rhythm of the two voices finishing each other’s sentences. This is known among writers as “meter,” and it is how the written and spoken language becomes musical.

Colors, flavors, and music speak to the unconscious mind and trigger rich, positive associations.

How does one resist a field of wildflowers glimmering and shimmering in the morning sun?

“What do fruits and wildflowers have to do with selling custom jewelry?” you ask.

“Everything,” I answer.

Everything.

Roy H. Williams

PS – If you enjoyed today’s memo, you definitely want to see page two of the rabbit hole. Just click the image of me at the top of this page and you’re in. – Indy Beagle

It’s often an employee you trust the most who turns out to be untrustworthy. Employee fraud and embezzlement cost American companies $50 billion annually, much of it stolen from small business owners. This week, three experts on employee theft – an investigator, a litigation attorney, and a prosecutor – join roving reporter Rotbart for a panel discussion on how to prevent, detect, and respond to dishonest employees. The discussion begins the moment you arrive at MondayMorningRadio.com

 

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Random Quote:

“The… event occurred around the first serious choice I made as a photographer to concentrate on a limited subject. The subject was always light, but I wanted to explore a single form, which turned out to be the flow of water in creeks and rivers near my home. I photographed in every season, when the water was high in February and March, when it was low in August, when it was transparent in July, when it was an opaque jade in December. In 1980 I began to photograph moving water in moonlight, exposures of twenty-five or thirty minutes. These images suffered from reciprocity failure – the color balance in them collapsed – but they also recorded something extraordinary, a pattern of flow we cannot actually see. They revealed the organizing principle logicians would one day call a strange attractor.

The streaming of water around a rock is one of the most complex motions of which human beings are aware. The change from a laminar, more or less uniform flow to turbulent flow around a single rock is so abstruse a transition mathematically that even the most sophisticated Cray computer cannot make it through to a satisfactory description.

Aesthetically, of course, no such difficulty exists. The eye dotes on the shift, delights in the scintillating sheeting, the roll-off of light around a rock, like hair responding to the stroke of a brush. Sometimes I photographed the flow of water in sunshine at 1/2000 of a second and then later I’d photograph the same rock in moonlight. Putting the photos side by side, I could see something hidden beneath the dazzle of the high-speed image that compared with our renderings of the Milky Way from space: the random pin-dot infernos of our own and every other sun form a spiraling, geometrical shape motionless to our eyes. In the moonlit photographs, the stray streaks from errant water splashes were eliminated (in light that weak, they occur too quickly to be recorded); what was etched on the film instead were orderly, fundamental lines of flow, created by particle after illuminated particle of gleaming water, as if each were a tracer bullet. (Years later, reading Chaos, James Gleick’s lucid report on chaos theory, I would sit bolt upright in my chair. What I’d photographed was the deep pattern in turbulence, the clothing, as it were, of the strange attractor.)
“

- Barry Lopez, "Learning to See," chapter 13 in About This Life

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