On Joan Didion and Marketing Writing

This headline sounds like blasphemy. How do I dare conflate #JoanDidion’s creative penning genius with a mundane business task like writing a customer story?

It sounds out-of-place in our high-tech world. I can easily imagine some people commenting, “Do me a favor, will you? Why do I, a high-tech marketer, need to know about Joan Didion and her writing? Don’t waste my time!”

But you see, Didion’s radical writing style and brave treatment of difficult topics created a vast following. It permeated the writings of essayists, journalists, critics – first in the US and then everywhere else. And not for no reason.

Just like the way new ideas in haute couture fashion fast trickle down to the cheapest department store, Didion’s incredibly stylistic approach trickled down to all forms of writing: from essays to school textbooks, press releases, product descriptions.

A prime example is her stepping back technique: referencing the big picture – in the case of high-tech, the target market, where it is going, what its challenges are. Another example is her empathy technique – in high-tech it means referencing the customer’s experience, what goes on in their mind, what bugs them, what their pain is. ?

I wish more of her techniques would trickle down to our side of the pond. There’s so much genius in all of it.

Take the understated sentence. One that lets go of hyperbolic adjectives (world-leading, revolutionary, cutting edge), and delivers the topic at hand simply, gracefully, and directly e.g., your unique selling proposition, in a circumspect and elegant way.

We all know exclamation marks are superfluous, provincial, and tiring to the readers. Exclamation marks counterintuitively numb the reader to the very thing you are trying to convey. ?

Didion knew the power of the understated sentence. So should we. She subscribed to the school of thought that believes the reader is an intelligent being. So should we. It creates better marketing writing and better outcomes.?