Copywriting Master Class: The Truth About Why We Buy

Most marketing experts and copywriters will insist that we buy for one of two reasons:
1. Potential Gain (Better known as Greed)
2. To Avoid A loss (Better known as Fear)
They are like the foundation reasons. Yes, you can reduce many purchases down to being motivated by these two root causes but the real reasons we buy are actually far more complicated than that. Unfortunately for some, but for the smart marketer and an astute copywriter, it is a chance to change the game.
This misconception stems a lot from our lack of understanding about human emotion. Combine this with the success of some marketers, making sales is based on appealing to people’s fear and greed.
Don’t get me wrong. Those emotions are very powerful motivating factors and through the 2,000,000 years of human history they have helped keep us alive.
Almost always there other emotions that can be involved in making a sale and because emotions are so powerful, surely the more you get involved in making the sale, the more likely a prospect is to buy.
Beyond fear and greed you can incorporate vanity, for example, “just imagine all the people looking at you enviously as you show off your new luxury car… ” There is an element of greed in this. But mainly it is about stimulating a buyers desire to be the centre of attention and to know that they are the envy of everyone else.
Another example, selling using the emotion of hope. Take the headline, “My wife is making $1500 a week using my simple system for trading the stock market and she has never traded before.” For anyone who has ever tried and failed to make money trading stocks this headline not only stimulates (a little) greed but it also offers hope.
For the prospect, this appeal represents a new chance that they might be able to achieve their dreams of getting the lifestyle they want using this stock market system. Yes, there is greed at the money making level but there is one step deeper – it is offering them hope that they can do it too, despite them failing at it before.
If you think about fund raising marketing, it often relies on guilt and compassion in order to get you to make a donation (another type of sale). If you send us $50 then we can feed and rehabilitate 15 injured birds this month.
It is a powerful appeal. Reading it you feel like you are obligated to help do so much with so little. You feel guilty that the $50 in your pocket can help do so much and you want to help because humans by and large are compassionate creatures. I mean, you’d have to have a heart of stone to not want to help those injured birds.
By evolving to write copy that targets much more complex emotions than just greed and fear means that you’ll be able to reach your clients in a much deeper way. More of them will buy from you and at the same time they will have forged a deeper emotional bond with you, which means that over time they will be more loyal and more likely to buy from you again.