I Thought I Wrote About This Before…
In fact, I’m sure that once upon a time, I wrote about building a dictionary of emotions and how to manipulate the feelings and so on for this blog. It must be one of the lost ones from when the blog broke, but maybe it’s in the unpublished horde of text documents.
In any case, let’s start from scratch.
Aspects Of Emotional Control
When you write marketing copy, one thing you’re trading in is the emotion of the reader. With good copywriting, you can and should be able to evoke different emotions in your reader as you take them through the different stages.
Most copywriters only go to the shallowest places with this.
- “Make them curious!”
- “Give them what they need!”
- Make them feel pain!”
And those things are OK, but like I said before, it’s the shallow-end of the pool and so you’re not going to get the best results, nor are you going to become a master of your craft, ever, by paddling around with the obvious things.
Nor are you going to get to the point I did.
I figured out, (and thought I wrote about,) the fact that there are a lot of emotions and emotional states to pull on if you think about the breadth and depth of human emotion. I remember the hardest job, emotionally, I ever did was write a campaign for a charitable organisation that dealth with loneliness. As a campaign, it was fantastic; huge engagement, people reached, communities built. But it was, on a personal level, the first time I ever directly connected my words as a freelance writer with the audience reading it on other side; the nature of it being intensely personal, people writing in to say they had lost people, had nobody to talk to, didn’t know how or why to carry on.
That, looking back, was the first time I ever questioned my own internal values.
On the positive side, it gave me a lot to think about; namely, as copywriters, marketers, writers we aren’t dealing with a set of wants and needs and potential conversion rates. Even when we are.
The Deepest Well On Earth
The Well of Human emotion is a very deep one. Our readers are deep, complex individuals; more than you can account for, more than they themselves understand.
I’m not saying that you must try to anticipate that, because it’s an impossible task. But if you scroll back up, the silly little, “pique their curiosity” and “give them what they want” seems laughably simplistic.
(It is.)
What you can take encouragement from though is that there’s liberation to be had when you start painting with the full spectrum of emotional range. You can speak to a person’s loneliness and give them community. You can spark their curiosity, trigger or help them overcome regret, attempt to tap into what causes excitement or contentment within them.
All of those things go far deeper and are far more subtle than people are used to.
You might ask, Why?
This Isn’t About Copywriting
The broad spectrum of human emotion is, in my opinion, being deliberately contracted. People are, thanks to a 24/7 diet of mathematically-precisioned ragebait news and media cycle, on the precipice of absolute anger at one end of the spectrum, and scroll-and-porn despondent nihilism on the other.
It’s imperative that you, and I, and everyone, start studying these things within ourselves. What emotions are you carrying around as default? How do you change channels and access others?
It’s possibly easier to treat this subject as a copywriting or pop-psychology exercise in which you write about other people, but with the goal of recognising these things within yourself first and foremost. Because when you do that, you gain an immense sense of control over yourself, become less subject to outside influence, and potentially have access to a lot more energy for yourself.
And as a byproduct, you recognise it in other people and can begin to play with that fabric should you choose to as well.