I won’t begin to write radio commercial copy for a client until I understand:
1. What they sell.
2. How what they sell helps people; how it adds to the consumer’s life.
3. Why their customers are willing to spend money for the product or service.
4. Why their customers choose them and not a competitor.
5. What stops people who would benefit from and who can afford the product or service from purchasing it.
My “secret” isn’t that I ask those questions. It’s that when I don’t understand one or more of the answers, I keep asking until I do understand.
Sometimes that requires a lot of asking.
When I was in school, I never could understand why most kids never raised their hands to ask a question. Often I’d be the only student with a question.
Was I really the only one in the class who didn’t understand something? Was everybody else that much smarter than I?
Early on I theorized that if I didn’t understand something (and if it wasn’t Geography or Science), there must be others who “didn’t get it” either. But for reasons I never could fathom, they were embarrassed to admit it.
I, however, would keep asking either until I understood or until the teacher threw me out.
Too many copywriters (who, in the U.S., often are radio station account executives) would rather write a radio campaign without understanding what the heck the client actually does and why what they do is important to their customers than to admit, “I don’t understand.”
I’m not embarrassed to say to a client, “I don’t understand what you’re selling. Please explain this to me.”
But I would be embarrassed if I wrote a radio advertising campaign that communicated nothing because I understood nothing.
Ironic Bonus
Often after having forced a client to keep explaining the product or service, stripping away all the jargon and using language that even I could understand, I’ll be told:
“Wow, Dan, you’re pretty clever. You made me really think about what it is we do here. You got me thinking about it from the customer’s perspective. You’re one sly fellow, using that ‘Socratic method’ on me.”
As though I knew the answers all along and was just trying to get the other person to verbalize it.
Nope, I just kept asking what I call “naive” questions…because Selling Is Educating. And I can’t educate someone else about something I don’t understand myself.
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I’m the copywriter for our 5-station cluster, and am often called in to “brainstorm” with clients. It’s amazing to me that in many cases, no one has ever asked them these kind of questions before, and they’re unprepared to answer. What’s not amazing to me is that they’ve usually run advertising before and it “didn’t work”.
Wonder why?? 🙂
Flash of the obvious! Thank you for the sweet reminder, Dan. It’s never been about me or my business… it’s about those we are entrusted to serve. How will their lives be blessed, enriched, best served by exchanging their time and money for what we provide them? That helps me get refocused on what it is we actually do here… and how I can communicate that in simple, compelling radio copy. Thank you again, Dan, for your message of business common sense & integrity. Jim Hall
This is common sense, but how many people regularly do it? Not as much as they should. I’ve read 2 eBooks about this very topic in the past 3 days. Your post here is yet another reminder that this a beneficial activity for a plethora of reasons. Thank you.