Authenticity For Other People’s Products
Yesterday I wrote about the need to create an authentic message when selling a product.
Now, it’s understandable that you might read that article and think, “But Jamie, I’m just working as a freelancer and I’ll write whatever somebody pays me to write about. How can that be authentic?”
I’ll answer that question today.
Here are a couple of articles to get you up to speed on the other stuff I’ve written on this subject:
- How to Sell Products You Don’t Own
- How To Sell Products You Don’t Own (Reader Question)
So, assuming you’ve read those, you’re up to speed on why there’s nothing wrong with selling someone else’s product.
At this point, the question changes from a “Can I sell someone else’s product?” to a “How do I sell someone else’s product?” in terms of doing it authentically.
Authenticity Isn’t A Half-Measure
A key undercurrent from yesterday’s post is that you can’t sell in half-measures.
That means, whether you like it or not, when you’re in selling mode, you sell. No “maybes” allowed.
If you’re trying to sell someone else’s service, then you can’t say, “Yeah… my friend has this window-cleaning business and he’s pretty ok at cleaning windows so yeah you should probably hire him.”
That won’t cut it, and your friend will probably hate you as much as your cat does.
So the first step is to go full throttle with your selling, no matter what you’re selling or who you’re selling it to. It’s a matter of good practice that every single adjective your copy uses screams “AWESOME” and everything you sell is obviously the best thing to sell.
(Side note: This works in daily life too. If you’re in a conversation with someone and your day is “ok” and “not much” has happened in your life, then you’ll be perceived as less interesting than someone who had “an amazing day!!! In front of the sofa” or “Oh I’ve been so busy with life!”)
(Side note II: Notice how Trump always refers to things in the extreme? That’s deliberate. ISIS are the worst enemies ever, Obama was the worst President ever and Trump hires only the best people and eats at the best restaurants.)
I Don’t Know If It’s The Best
When you’re building a narrative for your sales letter, there’s the idea of a “Big Idea.” It’s some massive overarching different between the product you’re promoting and everything else.
Find that, and you’ll have your angle.
For instance, in Ogilvy’s famous Rolls Royce campaign, the whole thing was built around how quiet the engine was.
Now, very few people buy a car because it has a quiet engine. Absolutely everything about the Rolls Royce could have been totally rubbish, and you’d still be able to run that campaign.
It happens that the car wasn’t rubbish and the quiet engine was indicative of superb craftsmanship, but the fact is that the quiet engine as a selling point isn’t a big deal.
Except it was because of how it was framed.
Now, you might not be promoting the best product in the world. But your product is different, or the company you’re working with is different. There’s going to be something different about the company or the product, and that will differentiate it from its competitors.
Find that, and it’s your first step to an authentic message.
Research and You Aren’t You
When you’re a writer for hire, there’s a key attitude you have to accept – and here’s where a lot of writers and would-be writers go wrong.
Your identity doesn’t matter one bit.
You aren’t getting paid for your politics, curious hobbies or your amazing wit. Save that for your own projects.
You’re getting paid for the words on a page and your ability to string them into something your reader wants to read.
Your reader is what matters here, and not you.
You might be commissioned to write an article selling old people on the idea of donating to a donkey rescue charity. Now, you might hate donkeys, hate old people and have a phobia of charitable donations. That doesn’t matter.
“But Jamie…” you say, “How can I be authentic and sell authentically if I don’t care about donkeys or whatever I’m selling?”
Great question.
The point is, when you write for a project like this you don’t exist.
Authenticity comes from understanding the reader and crafting an authentic narrative.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say Stephen King has never met an interdimensional spider-clown that harvests fear and represents all the evil in the world.
By the logic of the question above, that’d mean he couldn’t write authentically about the subject.
Except Stephen King’s experiences don’t really matter – and neither does his attitude. I can’t imagine for one minute Stephen King is scared of clowns (and if he is, well, he’s made the bed to lie in.)
Stephen King creates an authentic message by authentically writing about finding something utterly terrifying in the mundane. That’s all his books are. Over and over again.
The Shining is about a family that stay in a terrible hotel.
Cell is about what’d happen if our mobile phones collectively decided to kill us.
Dreamcatcher was obviously thought up when King had problems going to the toilet (I’d give that book a miss, to be honest) and Insomnia is essentially a book about getting lost.
If you can create an authentic feeling – and you can, providing you can write words – then you can sell a product authentically.
The key isn’t to think of yourself as a priest on a pulpit giving a sermon on the benefits of a product. The key is to think of yourself as a mirror to what your reader wants to read.
Outro
It’s perfectly possible to create an authentic narrative without direct experience. Direct experience can’t hinder the cause and will also make your work better in nearly every case, but nothing is impossible.
The key is to take yourself out of the equation and think about the most important of things: what does the reader think and need?
This is the key to authenticity in your message.
If you do this enough times, then you’ll find you’re successful enough to work in areas you believe in.
However, if you do it often enough, you’ll find that what you believe and what you can empathise with gets naturally wider anyway.