A Soft Sell Must See
As a Soft Sell marketer you’ve got to see this video. It’s a treat and also a foundational grasp on what we’re all about.
Soft Sell = Right Brain = Soft Sell – with some left brain to hold it all together and connect it to daily reality.
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229
Because It’s All in the Connection and the Connectedness
Judith & Jim
March 18th, 2008 at 11:59 am
As a marketer selling brain-based learning and thus interested in what other marketers have to say about the brain, I clicked on Ted to hear a famous neuroanatomist describe her stroke. Unfortunately, my satellite dish wasn’t as interested as I am and choked on both the video and the transcript.
So based on the comments I read on Ted and your brief description above, I’m going way out on a limb to comment on something I’ve neither heard nor read. But here goes!
I would suggest that soft-sell marketing isn’t as much a mostly right brain function–it it were we’d all write copy in poetic metaphors and only those who understand such would buy from us–but from the mid-part of the brain, the limbic brain. We understand, reason, learn, figure out, see the big picture (right brain) and the details (left brain) from the frontal lobes of the neocortex which we call left and right brain.
But it’s the mid-part of the brain, the emotional center where we actually buy. So grab a prospect in the emotional center of the brain and you’ve made a sale. Then the right and left brain jump in to rationalize the sale–”fits my budget,” “my calendar,” “my big picture,” etc.
As for the marketer writing the sales copy–well, that’s a whole lot of left-brain stuff!
MaryJo
March 18th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
This is a very powerful video demonstrating how you shape your world by the thoughts you give power to by recreating the images and giving them expression in the words you choose to use
March 19th, 2008 at 12:04 am
MaryJo,
I accept that in my excitement this morning in sending out the post that included the video link, I wasn’t as thorough as I might otherwise have been when I wrote — Soft Sell = Right Brain = Soft Sell.
I can see how you reached your concern for “copy in poetic metaphors.” I did refer to the left brain by including, almost parenthetically, “with some left brain to hold it all together and connect it to daily reality.” A limp addition, I confess.
But now to your point.
I view your “limbic brain/grab ‘em emotionally and you’ve made a sale” point of view as a self-serving, exclusive strategy, because it doesn’t seem to include the well-being of the potential customer.
Granted, the sales industry has traditionally considered it axiomatic that “we buy emotionally and justify logically.” And I admit I have made major purchases in my life, a condo in Santa Monica, for one, where I was the embodiment of that principle. I have even taught that principle in the copywriting course my wife, Judith, and I taught that you were in.
But as I have thought about Soft Sell and what soft selling means, I think that old axiom is partial at best. I believe, although I cannot prove, that it is a product of the left brain, a side of the head that has dominated not only sales and marketing but western civilization as well since at least Plato and Aristotle and with a vengeance during the modern period – leaving the right brain in a second place/second class status.
In the video, brain scientist, Jill Bolte Taylor, characterized the right brain as the seat of that experience which does not perceive separateness. It’s all about connectedness. Of being at-one-with. Neither she, nor I, deny the need for and the power and the beauty of the left brain. But the left brain generates the experience of standing apart, being individual, of being centered in the self.
It is my experience that the Soft Sell marketer is by constitution someone who dwells predominantly in the right brain. “Dwells” may not be an accurate term but I trust you get my meaning.
However, in our overly left-brain-weighted culture, marketing/sales strategies and techniques for the right-brain marketer are non-existent, because there hasn’t been a need for them. However, times are changing. Even left brain copy writers like John Carlton teach that “story” is central to persuasive sales copy. And “story” is all about engaging the right brain with some left brain to hold it all together.
Again, I’ve enjoyed our lively exchange.
http://www.softtopiccopywritingsecrets.com
March 19th, 2008 at 12:09 am
Philip,
It’s all in the giving of power to, isn’t it? That’s what worlds are made of. And as Barack Obama has repeatedly said . . . Words Matter.
http://www.softtopiccopywritingsecrets.com