My, my, my what you can find when you're out surfing the search engines.
What follows is a fictionalized version of a snippet of forum dialogue that we discovered when researching the phrase "soft sell.
" NOTE: To protect the identities of those involved, we've translated the conversation into fiction but stayed true to the original intention that took place at the heavily hard sell forum site.
Jake posted this question at the mystery forum some time in 2008 "Hey, I'm interested in learning more about sales copy that might be called "soft sell.
" I'm curious about this.
Do you think it's effective when copy noticeably excludes or ignores the tricks of the trade that we've all learned from the hard driving persuasion experts? Sometimes I want to make sure that my readers don't feel like they're being "worked" or "pushed" to buy something.
" Mack responds: "That 'soft sell' crap-what a pathetic cop-out.
It's lame.
It's not going anywhere.
I mean, you don't want to cram your copy down your readers' throats, and come off like a real pig-you know, heartless and super greedy.
"But that 'soft sell' stuff-it's crappy copy.
It's all ooey gooey.
That's not selling! You can't sell peanuts at the ballpark by whispering and asking permission to approach.
You gotta yell and wave your arms around and make a scene and get people's attention.
"It's just universal that people will go for sales copy that taps into their basic stuff-you know all the fear of losing stuff, the guilt, the feeling of being left out-it all works-and it works on everyone-I mean everyone.
So that's why you gotta use it to sell people.
It's just so fundamental.
" What Is It The Hard Sell Marketers Don't Get? Sure, the hard driving persuasion tactics work-sometimes.
What Mack, in all his certainty, doesn't get is that hard sell only works for people who are easily triggered by fear, by threats to their basic identity and primitive personality.
So hard sell is like saying to someone, "I'm going to tap into every insecurity you have and make you quake.
Then I'm going to spin you in circles, promising that I've got the solution for your insecurity.
And pretty soon you don't even notice that you've lost your mind to my persuasion and you've grabbed your wallet and made your order.
And now you can celebrate with relief that you're no longer imprisoned in the emotional hell that my copy aroused.
" A bit over-dramatized? Perhaps.
But does it sound foreign to you? We expect not! Certainly the population susceptible to this approach is plenty large enough to make many hard sell marketers rich if not wealthy.
But what the hard sell folks don't get is that there is a vast population of people who are not going to get aroused by those kinds of baseline threat tactics.
Been there.
Done that.
Who needs it! So very quickly the more sophisticated, the more conscious buyer is gone.
Gone to go visit a site or a store where they can enjoy the comradery of mutual respect between the seller and themselves-gone to someplace where they can go through the process of buying, not as relief from fear, but as fun.
Also, what the hard sell folks don't get is that there are more and more of us-especially in the soft sell community-who want to enjoy a relationship connection when we engage in buying-or selling.
And then there's the spirituality of marketing and selling...
but that has to be for another post.