It’s Not About the Copywriter: The Inductive and Deductive Logic Behind Psychographics

Do you remember the first rock concert you went to? Mine was in 1981. I went to see Jackson Browne, who at the time was a popular rock artist – you might even have called him a “rock star” back then.

Being young and at my first concert, I thought that it was going to be all Jackson Browne, doing all his songs I liked from the radio. I was already sold on that. What I wasn’t anticipating were the opening acts that the audience had to endure before Mr. Browne came on stage.

“Ya Ain’t Got It, Kid. Ya Ain’t Got It.”

I understand now that opening acts at a concert are a way for bands that haven’t “made it” yet to showcase their talent to a captive audience, hoping to persuade people to become fans and buy their music.

Unfortunately, the opening gigs at the 1981 concert were not persuasive that way. The first was some Native American drummers who made me stop wondering why reservations are located in remote areas. The second act was a lesbian couple whose music was so tedious that the audience grew restless, prompting one of them to stop a couple of times to tell everyone to shut up. The third act was a paranoid guy who wasn’t even a musician, he just ranted about how “THEY are out THERE, and WE must get THEM before THEY get US!” ...or something like that.

They did achieve one thing: we were all really happy to see Jackson Brown afterward.

Browne gave a pretty good concert after the opening acts got the hook and the net. I don’t think any of them made a new fan that night. And that relates to this article, and why it’s so important to understand the importance of the seemingly cold logic of psychographics in prospect selling.

What’s a “Rock Star” Copywriter, Anyway?

When I began copywriting, I landed gigs from online job boards. These can be helpful when a new writer is building up a portfolio, but many job board clients have fanciful notions of what a copywriter is supposed to do for them, to achieve great sales results with writing alone.

It was similar to when I was a business lawyer before becoming a writer. Sometimes clients would think my job was to make whatever they wanted to do “legal,” no matter what it was. In a similar way, some budget-minded copywriting clients believe the job of the copywriter is to make people swoon for their product or service regardless of its actual appeal.

On the Internet, this mindset frequently reveals itself when the copywriting client says it’s looking for a “Rock Star.”

To be clear, the best rock concert musicians are great salespeople. Concert tours make them lots of money. The trouble is that they only sell themselves at these venues, and they sell to repeat customers, not new ones.

Freelance copywriters can be the same way for your business. Bringing one in to wow people into becoming customers, based literary appeals instead of principles of persuasion, probably won’t have the desired effect on sales.

An example comes from a web copywriting training event I attended in 2017. One of the presenters was a man who is supposedly a “rock star” with sales emails. The more sensational, outlandish, or even salacious a subject line was, the better he thought of it. But he left me wondering, how effective a subject line based on a double entendre “50 Shades of Grey” reference would be with a sales manager for a manufacturer of PPE gowns or the director of a hospital’s telehealth department? Would they really be dazzled by such an approach?

What Does Logic Have to do With Psychographics?

Copywriting that relies on creative language more than carefully considered persuasion might be entertaining, but it doesn’t sell as well as targeted demographics applied with a combination of deductive and inductive logic.

If we are searching for customer core psychographic triggers, using deductive logic – drawing specific conclusions from general statements or observations – is the starting point to building our ideal sales prospect profile. By taking information from demographics, surveys, sales force impressions and other feedback we build the mosaic picture of the individual we want to appeal to. Then, we can apply inductive logic to the profile we created with deductive logic to draw general psychographic conclusions from the composite.

For example, if we return to the Wall Street Journal sales letter I used as an example in my last article, the copywriter who wrote it pieced together a composite picture of the kind of person who subscribes to that newspaper: male, 30s or 40s, college educated, business managerial professional, married with children, and so on. From that personalized customer icon, the next step was to inductively discover from that single abstract customer what his “itch he can’t scratch” is: dissatisfaction with lack of advancement, worry about being left behind his professional peers, and concern about what other people might think if he doesn’t live up to his own expectations for himself.

This research produced a two-page letter that generated a billion dollars of subscription revenue. It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t catchy, or clever, or witty, or funny, or sassy, or thrilling. The copywriter who wrote it may have been a “rock star” writer, but you’d never know it from reading the letter. Because the author understood that calling attention to the writing style wasn’t the purpose of the piece, it was getting inside the head of the ideal prospect in a way that drove him to take action.

You Don’t Have to be Glamorous, Just Effective

Harrison Ford described his own encounter with the “rock star” mentality early in his acting career. A talent agent was unimpressed with Ford’s acting abilities. He told Ford, “You’re never going to make it in this business. The first time Tony Curtis was ever in a movie, he delivered a bag of groceries. You took one look at that guy and you said, THAT’S a movie star.”

To which Ford replied, “I thought you were supposed to think he’s a grocery delivery boy.”

The talent agent remained unimpressed. “Ya ain’t got it, kid, ya ain’t got it,” was what Ford remembered him saying. But Ford did have it right, as his Hollywood acting career proved. He understood that great acting isn’t about making people think about what a great actor you are; it’s to get them to suspend their sense of disbelief so they’ll see you as authentic in the role you play.

For copywriters, it’s the same. Effective copywriting – copywriting that converts – isn’t about being a “rock star” and impressing people with what a great writer you are. It’s about getting the prospect to see himself or herself in the writing that you do. It’s about studying those prospects, identifying with them, knowing what is important to them, what keeps them awake at night and what gets them out of bed the next morning. It’s about taking all of that and encapsulating it into a single, ideal prospect profile, then appealing with precision to the core emotions that lead to taking immediate action.

It isn’t glamorous. It takes time, patience, and attention to detail in using deductive and inductive logic to build a compelling psychographic profile. And even when you do that, you don’t seek credit for it in your writing because it only takes away from the purpose of the piece – to sell to others, not to sell yourself.

Clients who look for rock star copywriters remind me of that talent agent Harrison Ford ran into. And Ford’s reaction reminds me of the values, attitudes and beliefs a copywriter needs to have to be a background heavy lifter for the client’s bottom line instead of drawing stylistic attention to himself.