Nature of Your Product

could also be called “What Are You Selling”

As a copywriter, it’s up to you to discover the product’s uniqueness. There are dozens. You must find the most potent of the litter and ramp the fuck out of it.

(story) I live in this great little town on the east coast. It’s super walkable. It was warm the other day, so I took my kids to get an ice cream cone at the ice cream shop down the street. . Ice cream is food. Food is sustenance. It’s required for us to… But I don’t buy my children ice cream for their health. To sustain and nourish their growing bodies. I buy them ice cream because I want them to be happy—and I want them to be happy with me.

What’s important here is that every product has its own unique nature. It’s emotional angle. The underlying emotional motivator that makes people want it. These desires already exist in the market. You have to find the right energy force to tap into and channel it.

This is what you’re selling. The product is a vessel for fulfilling that desire. It’s the tether between your product, brand, or service and the prospect.

How to you express the true advantages and emotions the product has to offer. (the way you express is the tone of the copy.)

What’s the nature of a toy? It’s a fun game. Highlight enjoyment.

What’s the nature of a blood-pressure unit? It’s a serious medical device. Be serious.

Another way to think about this is to ask what the people’s expectations of your product are.

I expect my Toyota to be reliable. I’d much rather by a beater Toyota than almost any other car for the reason. I don’t think it’ll give me any trouble. I have no real reason to believe that is true beyond any other car I can buy. But I don’t worry about my Toyota on the road.

Unless it’s some weird organic froyo shit, you don’t sell ice cream for its nutritional value.

The speecific way the product should be presented to the customer. This is what Eugene called the “key.” What is the nature of the product in the mind of your customer.

What are the emotions.

Every product has a unique personality. A unique nature or tone. Your job is to figure out what that is.

For people to buy, they have to first recognize a need. then, they will look for the solution that makes sense to their situation. What are they looking for in that situation? That is what you sell them.

A smoke alarm should A) work, B) be easy to install.

ACTION: Determine the main reasons people buy your product, both from an emotional and logical perspective. Draft your sales presentation as follows.

TCUDORP

The first job of an ad agency is to look at your product in every imaginable way: frontwards, backwards, sideways, upside down, inside out. Because somewhere, right there in the product itself, lies the drama that will sell it to people who want it.

There may be 10,000 ways to bring that inherent drama to the stage. And given a world in which “me-too” products multiply like mayflies, the drama may seem that much harder to find.

It is.

But every good product has it.

And every good agency finds it.

(Please note: the “t” in tcudorp is silent.)

As a copywriter, it’s up to you to discover this product’s uniqueness.