Well, last week we met email copywriter and author John Bejakovic…

…and discussed parenting and persuasion.

You can read up on all that here:

WWN59 : Write like your readers are four.

Today we continue our masterful masterclass in marketing mastery, right where we left off, with John talking about getting people to do some really crazy stuff with marketing manipulation.

A brief disclaimer before we begin.

I’ve fairly heavily edited this transcript, because let’s be honest…

…reading a conversation sucks.

Pasting transcripts in can work if they’re short, or the speaker is naturally eloquent (unlike me) but boy howdy does it hurt mine head to read if otherwise.

So what I’ve done here is attempt to marry the material of the transcript with the style and energy of the Write Way you know and love.

Call it an amplified transcript.

(So much for this being less work than a standard issue of the Write Way…)

If you want the full, unfiltered, unedited conversation with all the questions included?

Well, there’s a chance to get that down at the end of this email.

But without further ado, let’s talk…

…Scumbaggery-free sales!

James Carran, continuing on from last week:

This is maybe a good point to jump to the other question from Cabin Crewmember Codename Seattle which was:

How do you know when you're persuading ethically?

It’s a great question, because your book is called:

10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters

And some of those careers you cover in the book are reputable ones, like magicians.

Others are disreputable, even criminal…

…like politicians.

And you mentioned that these powers of persuasion can be used ethically, but how would you draw the line of, okay, this is ethical use of these skills and this isn’t?

John Bejakovic:

Maybe it's easier for me to narrow it down specifically to marketing, which is something I know.

Direct response marketing is the copywriting part of that book. So how do you know if you're persuading people rightly, is it ethical marketing etc.?

The first thing is: am I selling something that I ultimately think is a good product? Does it deliver on the promises that it's making? Can it legitimately help people? Will it actually help people?

Because I think there's a big difference between could this help people and is this likely to help people…

i.e. have I done everything to make this into a good product, will people get value out of it. And this is very relevant to kind of the world that you and I are in, partly, which is that world of selling courses and information products and so on.

One thing that I've learned, which is a very bitter pill to swallow, is you can make a really great course…

…and people will buy it…

…and people will love it…

…and people might still never actually apply it or get the value that the course promises.

So on the one hand, the answer is, “you kind of know”, because it's clear to you if you're selling something that is beneficial to the other person.

On the other hand, it's a very grey area because if you're selling courses to people, then some people are…

…you know, this is maybe getting off track

James:

Getting off track is fine.

John:

This is a personal issue for me.

I know that there are people who buy courses because it gets them excited, because they like collecting courses and reading interesting information, and because it gives them this jolt of ‘this is going to be the next thing for me, and this is going to get me out of that hole’.

Ultimately, that's why why a large number of people who are buying courses online are buying courses.

This is something that you realize when you realize that the people who are buying your courses now were buying other people's courses 5 years ago, and five years in the future they'll be buying somebody else's courses…

…and they have not put anything into practice.

And so, the question becomes, is that ethical?

I don't know.

I guess you could convince yourself both ways. Are these people getting some value out of this in the sense of excitement, entertainment, some sort of value? Maybe.

Are they ultimately going to get the promise that you're making of, transform your life, become a writer, make money, quit your job, whatever it's going to be? Probably not.

And then the question is, well, is this really the business you want to be in? Is this an ethical business?

That's why I'm saying, it's really kind of a grey area. If five out of 100 customers get amazing results, but 95 don't because they simply never put anything into practice, then is that an ethical thing?

Going back to the original question, the simple answer is:

“You kind of know.”

You kind of know if you're doing right, and you know if you feel good about what you're doing, and I think, ultimately, that's kind of the only measure you can really go by.

The other thing is that can change in time.

You can start out by saying “I know that I'm selling something that can be life-transforming to the right person, and I've done everything in my power to make that worthwhile, and that's why I want to persuade as many people as possible to get it”

…and then you do that…

…and then maybe you realize that even so, the people who are buying that aren't really trasnforming their lives, with no fault of your own.

And maybe you're okay with that because, again, some number of cases it works, but maybe you're not. Maybe you get soured on it.

I'm not churning out courses, and that's part of the reason why. I know there will be people who are eager to buy them, but I've been soured a little bit on that, so that's my answer.

James:

This may be because I'm looking out the window and seeing my garden that I really need to work on, but it's almost like a hardware store. Maybe they sell 100 drills like the one I have back here, and of those 100 drills that people buy in order to build their deck or whatever…

…Maybe 10 decks actually get built.

I know I bought a lot of tools thinking, "Oh, I'm going to build bookcases, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this, I bought all the tools for it."

And then I just never actually done it, which is the equivalent of the course collector.

But I think it can be harder because there's a tangible thing with a tool. You know, “I have given you the drill” but it can sometimes feel a bit less tangible with a course.

John:

I think that's part of it, but I think the other part is that drills are typically not sold with 40-page video sales letters, right?

James:

Yeah, true.

John:

With the kind of stuff that I tend to sell or that I've helped clients sell, there is a huge amount of persuasion and psychology and influence going on.

Whereas with a drill, you go on Amazon and maybe they do something.

Maybe they play with the price a bit. Maybe they talk about the special mechanism of the drill. Maybe they juice up the design of it to catch your eye…

…but they're not going to tell you a story that opens up with your daughter padding up to you as you're sitting there, and saying,

"Daddy, why don't we have a deck?".

They’re not working into the fatherly guilt, and reaching into the fundamental drive and forward-seeing man that you are by building a deck, and everything that it's going to mean for your family, and for the happiness of your children, and the value of your house that you're going to leave for them…

…and so, there is more manipulation going on there, and with that, I think that you or me, as the sellers, I think we take on more responsibility.

So, yeah, if somebody's selling a hammer or a drill, and people buy that, and then they don't use it, fine.

A drill also costs, whatever, 30 euro or pounds…

(Editor’s note, if only…)

…but if you're selling a course for hundreds of dollars that's promising people they can make tens of thousands of dollars, and you're also really digging in psychologically?

Then I think it gets into more of a grey area.

James:

When I studied ethics in my accountancy training, one of the first things you cover is teleological and deontological ethics, which are the two branches of ethics.

One would say the end justifies the means, and what matters is the telos, what you're actually doing the thing for. The other argues that it's the process that matters, it's what you're doing.

But I think the tricky part with persuasion and marketing is that it’s both.

You could have an ethical process to persuade something of someone that is going to do them harm, and that would be wrong…

…But you could also have something that would definitely do them good, and you could go to extremes and still manipulate them in a way that is wrong.

If you point a gun into someone's head and make them run on a treadmill, maybe it’s doing them good in terms of losing weight, but you're doing it the wrong way.

John:

I agree.

There’s this idea that, and I think I mentioned it in the book somewhere, there was this famous hypnotist, Émile Coué, and he said

“all hypnosis is self-hypnosis”

I think there is a large degree of truth to that.

All the disciplines that I talk about in this book, ultimately it's not going to happen against your will. In some way, people are going to do it for reasons of their own. They are doing it because they want to.

Could they have gone down an entirely different path? Probably, yes.

So I don't really have a clear answer to that.

I don't think that's a peculiar thing about this book though. I think it's a general question of, what if you're talking to somebody else, and you can see that their life would be better if they would follow your advice?

If you completely take out the conmen and the persuasion and the influence techniques out of that, but if they want something different for their life, is the thing that you know clearly that would be better for them, is that clearly better, or is it not?

And I don't think anybody has an answer to that. I think that's again, kind of your own instinctive decision of saying, “I'm going to respect somebody else's choice, even if it is clearly harmful to them or suboptimal from any objective perspective, that's their choice, and that's ultimately what they should do…”

…or maybe you're the kind of person who says, "No, there are absolutes in life." And if you choose to be a poor, unhealthy drug addict, there's no way that that's better than me yelling at you and getting you into shape and getting you off of drugs and whatever that is, right?

So, I think those are, like, really fundamental questions that I can't answer, and I don't think, I think that's, ultimately, kind of a personal choice for everybody else to answer.

James:

Yeah, there are no hard and fast rules.

I do think what you said at the start is key, about the fact that you will know. It's listening to that part of your conscience saying, hold on, this is a little bit manipulative, and dialing it back.

Which often makes it more persuasive.

Ben Settle talks about this, that qualifying your points makes it more persuasive. I think it ties into the question thing with Reagan from last week as well.

You're effectively saying "No, yeah, I get it."

You're calling out the skeleton, making it dance, which you talk about in the book as well. You’re saying, look, there's flaws with this, and that's okay. Or “this will only work if you put the work in”, that actually makes it more persuasive because people can tell when you're putting pie in the sky.

I think that’s helpful to remember, because if your product is good? Then the less manipulative, the less unethical your marketing is, the better it will work. If you're selling rubbish, you have to really sell.

John:

Within the copywriting world, there's this idea of stages of sophistication.

Basically, the idea is that there are different markets, and there's how much advertising a certain market has been exposed to.

So “how to make money online” is an extremely sophisticated market, whereas “how to have better handwriting” is a not very sophisticated market.

(Not in the sense of the people who are inside, but in terms of how much advertising people have seen and how jaded and skeptical they are, and how sophisticated the marketing itself has to be in order to convince them.)

That idea of stages of sophistication is specific to individual markets, but, as an entire population, over the past 150 years of direct marketing, and then mass marketing, and now, again, internet marketing, I think we've all become much, much more sophisticated as consumers of marketing, and we've gotten much more jaded.

One of the themes running through the book is the idea of trust, and things that you can do to communicate trust. One of the big things is, like you said, being forthright about shortcomings, which are inevitably going to pop up. And even if they don't, people have bought stuff before, right?

We're not a bunch of island monkeys who have just been living on coconuts and have never seen any kind of industrial product before. People know that whenever they buy something, it's almost never as good as the thing that they were hoping for. It's simply the nature of psychology.

If you communicate that upfront, then people are much, much more likely to trust you because they say, okay if this guy is willing to admit to certain flaws or even bring up a big objectionable point, then that makes me trust the other things that he says much more.

…Well, we really drilled down into that one.

Heh.

Heh.

Hey, Dads gotta dad.

But it’s all we have time for now.

Next week we’ll continue with some of John’s tips for writing a book like the 10 Commandments of various folks, how he wove it all together, copywriting techniques that are most useful for non-copywriters like many of us, and how John find an endless supply of interesting anecdotes and facts.

All this and more…

…next week.

But if you can’t wait, or you want the full conversation including the parts I won’t reprint here, or you just like listening to our dulcet tones, or you really like the words “like”, “You know” and “just” which we both use with alarming frequency as we talk…

…and you want the full bonus call recording completely free?

Buy a copy of John’s book, and hit reply with proof of purchase.

I’ll send you the link post-haste.

Here’s the link to buy the book.

And in case you didn’t do it last week…

…here’s the link to sign up for John’s emails.

Meanwhile, may you use every pipe and info product you buy,

James Carran, Craftsman Writer

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