5 Highly Educating Techniques to Enhance Critical Thinking for Copywriters
What sort of person do you have in mind, when you hear the word ‘copywriter’?
Is it that guy or girl with hipster glasses sitting all day with a laptop, blogging while inhaling a half-burnt cigarette?
You’re right about two things: we do write, and we can spend all day on it. It’s in our blood. It just happens naturally. But there’s something bigger:
What we, copywriters, all have in common is, we tell a story.
Not the kind of story that your parents used to lullaby you to sleep, but the kind that changes people’s lives. Like these:
- Just do it. — Nike
- Think different. — Apple
- Don’t be evil. — Google
- There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard. — MasterCard
I could go on forever…
These aren’t just words merge together. Each one presents a story.
Back in the 1980’s, Nike went head-to-head with Reebok and was losing its market share for athletic footwear.
To win this, Nike didn’t say their sports shoes were better, they told a story.
A story about honoring great athletes. Run 20 laps a day? Just do it. Lose 15 kilos this month? Just do it.
It wasn’t always about sports, people began to rearticulate the story of ‘Just do it’ to their own lives.
Ask that girl out on a date? Just do it. Leave work earlier to spend more time with family? Just do it.
It was all downhill from there.
Whenever you see Nike up on billboards, you don’t imagine a shoe company anymore. You see a great motivation that pushes you beyond limit.
That’s how Nike, until today, won the rivalry.
Telling a story isn’t the only technique that can enrich your product. By all means, you can always sell yours cheaper than others — without even telling a story. But that wouldn’t last.
You tell a great story. The whole world will remember it, for decades. I’m not kidding. It’s been scientifically proven.
We are who we are today because of the stories we believe in. #TrueStory
It may sound easy, but this is actually the hardest challenge for copywriters.
Telling a great story requires in-depth quality and numerical researches, self and group brainstorms, talking to your users and identifying their lifelong issues, yada-yada-yada and come up with a simple solution.
In summary, it requires an extremely accurate critical thinking.
Here are the 5 techniques that I believe to be highly educating for copywriters to enhance critical thinking:
FOCUS ON THE BRAND
Before all the anti-smoking campaign began, only a certain part of the world believed that smoking kills.
But when it began, just like a game of domino it hit more and more people to believe that smoking was dangerous.
Where do you stand on this?
If you were a copywriter for a tobacco company, you better break that domino! It’s obvious you would need to convince the world that smoking wasn’t totally a bad thing, right? But how?
Forget the product.
No matter what, it kills.
Focus on the brand.
Just like Nike, Marlboro didn’t want their customers to see them as a tobacco company. They wanted to be seen as a red-blooded gentleman, a winner and a hard worker.
They referred themselves as ‘Marlboro Man’.
So guess what happened after this?
People, mostly men, dreamt of becoming that handsome-looking Marlboro Man. And what does that man do in every Marlboro ad? He smokes.
STATEMENT VS. QUESTION
To enhance critical thinking, you must get into the habit of asking questions.
Say, instead of believing that “Joe is the most talented copywriter”, ask these questions to yourself. Be doubtful.
How is Joe the most talented?
What makes Joe different than me?
Why does everyone think he’s the most talented?
Imagine if you hadn’t asked anything and immediately believed Joe was the most talented, the odds are, you might believe in something that may not actually be true.
Get this, if Ken Segall did not have the intention to ask questions about Apple, its position in the world, how it thinks and behaves if it were a human, and how it stands out from the crowd, he wouldn’t have come up with ‘Think different’.
In case you haven’t noticed, Apple’s mortal enemy IBM created ‘Think’. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
HIGH STANDARD OF BELIEF
One other thing all copywriters have in common is, we research. It’s compulsory. But what’s more important than the research is how we do it.
Good research isn’t only about getting into the internet — although it helps. Good research is about having a high standard of belief.
For example, in the 1960’s, Americans only buy big, muscle cars. It was almost impossible for the Volkswagen Beetle to enter the market, until Julian Koenig turned this whole thing around and wrote “Think small” for its ad campaign.
Everyone was mesmerized, especially Americans who used to think BIG. Think small was just another way of saying the same thing, only that it focused on minimalism and simplicity. Indicating that a Beetle was a smarter buy than a larger luxury car.
Koenig couldn’t have known this if, from the very first place, he believed that Americans only buy big, muscle cars.
In short, the higher you increase your standard of belief, the more curious you become, the deeper you research, the more you know, and the more influential the story.
REMEMBER YOUR ROLE
Picture these two copywriters: one who is highly dedicated to his role and the other who isn’t at all.
How differently would these two think?
A dedicated copywriter always remembers his role at all kinds of situations.
When on holiday, he’ll list down all the interesting things he sees that one day can be useful for his travel story.
He’ll read the morning papers and start asking himself why he likes or dislikes that specific article — even try to spot typos just for the fun of it.
He’ll go to a soccer match and bring his digital camera with him to record videos. Who knows, maybe when he gets home he might want to create a sports vlog out of it.
As a dedicated copywriter, you’ll unnoticeably formulate an ecosystem. You believe that everything in the world is connected to your role.
That’s what makes an incredible story: when you have the ability to connect the dots.
Undedicated copywriters, in contrary, won’t think this way. A holiday is just a holiday, a soccer match is nothing else but a match, so on and so on.
STAY HUNGRY. STAY FOOLISH.
Believe it or not, stupid people think more critically.
Think about it.
You actually know more by thinking and acting stupid (I don’t mean that stupid). It’s simple logic, stupid people ask more questions. They absorb more information.
And with more information, bigger chances are for them to write a great story comparing to those who know less.
The copywriter who wrote ‘Got milk?’ wouldn’t have made the tagline if he hadn’t stayed hungry and stayed foolish for finding out more about how much people hate having dry cereal.
If the copywriter who wrote the tagline for M&M’s felt as if he knew everything about chocolate, he wouldn’t be that observant and experiment to find out that it made your children’s hands dirty. Hence the tagline: chocolate that melts in your mouth, not in your hands.
I’m sure there are more than these five so-called ingredients of critical thinking, feel free to share it with me on the comments below and let’s get to know each other a lot more!
This article was originally published on my blog.
