“Cashvertising” by Drew Eric Whitman

Before we dive into “Cashvertising”…

Drew Eric Whitman is a longtime advertising and marketing specialist.

He utilizes psychology to break down the key components of why a consumer will buy one product over another.

Backed by extensive research and presented in an easily digestible format, Cashvertising is a marketer’s or seller’s potential roadmap in complicated and complex industries.

These are tried and true practices to grow, expand and optimize advertising copy.

Cashvertising will help you by using the psychology of a consumer to help you reach your customers’ “buttons” and compel them to buy.

“Cashvertising” In a Nutshell

After you’ve launched and your business is up and running, you’re working on the expansion phase.

Many marketers and advertisers find themselves at a loss for why most of their advertising efforts are not returning the results they were hoping for.

There isn’t an easy and simple fix: the issue is that many sellers are not advertising their product well.

Think Before You Advertise

Whitman tells us that well thought out and executed advertising can do wonders for your business’ bottom line. Effective ad copy needs to be persuasive, understand what the consumer wants and needs and then attempt to address those critical points.

Cashvertising, or “How to Use More Than 100 Secrets of Ad-Agency Psychology to Make BIG Money Selling Anything to Anyone”, is focused on the principles of teaching sellers how to convince consumers to spend their hard-earned money.

Advertisers need to focus on the creation of their ad copy on being either intelligent or creative, which will help motivate people to purchase something they may not need (but now want).

The Most Common Misconception Is…

Large and small companies alike should not publish mediocre ad copy and then turn around and expect that millions of people will want to buy their product. Even major brands push terrible ad copy!

The product needs to have advertising copy that is scintillating (look it up). Words laden with adjectives and descriptors that describe what’s being sold and appeal to the other senses.

There’s research behind this one. Ryan Elder and Aradhna Krishna found that food ads appealing to several senses made people rate the food as tastier than ads that only talked about taste. The effect weakened when people were mentally busy, so the reader has to actually take the copy in (Elder and Krishna, 2010).

Don’t shy away from the good stuff (if it’s good).

More Copy is Often Better

Rather than try to condense your message down, try instead to be more visual and engaging with your advertising copy. You’re creating a movie in the consumer’s mind and it needs to be a blockbuster, not an indie flick.

Length helps, with a catch. Richard Petty and John Cacioppo found that when readers didn’t care much about a topic, more arguments persuaded them more, even weak ones. When the topic mattered to them, the quality of the arguments counted for more than the number, so every extra point in long copy needs to be a strong one (Petty and Cacioppo, 1984).

Whitman also lays out the “Life-Force 8” (LF8), eight desires of human need (listed further down).

To be successful in your business’ marketing endeavors, the advertising copy needs to utilize descriptors of the “Life-Force 8” to address components of human need (or what they crave and/or what they desire).

Finally, when writing ad copy Whitman suggests utilizing imagery and relatable examples in order to paint an irresistible picture in the reader’s mind.  You are looking to drive people to buy, but the manner in which you say it matters.

Go online and understand the feelings and needs and actions of your target audience. Create content that the consumer actually wants and the rest will follow.

Bullet Point Value

Whitman lays out primary “Foundational Principles of Consumer Psychology”, which are some guidelines that need to be addressed in your advertising copy to be successful.

Here are most of them, plus his “mental movie” technique from later in the book. The ones I left out are inoculation theory, message organization, examples vs. statistics, message sidedness, repetition and redundancy, rhetorical questions and heuristics.

• Your ad copy needs to create a mental movie in the consumer’s mind. They need to be able to imagine themselves actually using or taking part of your product or service. This has been tested on real buyers. Homeowners who were asked to imagine themselves using cable TV were more likely to subscribe when asked weeks later, and the extra information in the scenario didn’t explain the difference (Gregory, Cialdini and Carpenter, 1982).
• The copy needs to invoke the fear factor, by giving a scenario that lays out a problem and in which your product becomes the solution to the fear. The solution part matters more than the scare. In a 1965 study, scarier tetanus booklets made students say they’d get a shot, but fear didn’t change who actually went. Students given a specific plan (a campus map, the clinic’s hours and a prompt to pick a time) got the shot at about 28%, against 3% for students without one (Leventhal, Singer and Jones, 1965).
• When crafting your brand, make your product part of the image your customer wants to have of themselves, which will help you to influence consumer behavior with “ego morphing.” Jennifer Escalas and James Bettman found that people fold brands into their sense of self when groups they belong to, or want to belong to, use them. For people trying to improve how they see themselves, brands used by the group they aspired to mattered most (Escalas and Bettman, 2003).
• Try to utilize already established, trusted institutions and people in order to create “Transfer Credibility”, in which your company’s credibility is grown off the established trust of an existing, credible company. Carl Hovland and Walter Weiss showed this in 1951. The same material changed more minds when it was credited to a trusted source than to a doubtful one, though the gap faded over the following weeks as people forgot where they’d read it (Hovland and Weiss, 1951).
• When establishing your marketing plan, lean into the “bandwagon effect” by showing how many people already choose your product, and by linking it to a group or association your target customer already identifies with, like Facebook groups or online communities or even in-person communities. At its simplest, the bandwagon effect is about popularity. In an online music market with 14,341 participants, letting people see how often each song had been downloaded made popular songs more popular and made the hits harder to predict (Salganik, Dodds and Watts, 2006).
• Keep in mind the perceived future returns a customer will receive with a “means-end chain” system when convincing a customer to buy your product. Will your customer believe this product will be the means to an end in relation to the problem in the market you are addressing?
• As a marketer, try to create advertisements that follow “persuasion step by step” through the product stage process, which goes through five stages taken from a model of how people change their habits (Prochaska, DiClemente and Norcross, 1992): precontemplation (they don’t know you exist), contemplation (they know about you), preparation (they’re planning to buy), action (they buy) and maintenance (your product is part of their everyday life).
• Sellers should attempt to reinforce deep-seated ideals and beliefs that customers already have, and support or strengthen the idea of supporting your product by establishing the relationship between their existing beliefs and your service.
• The “Elaboration Likelihood Model” will help you to influence the attitude of the consumer, which is part of the contemplation stage, and is the stage you need to be converting people who passively know your product to those who are willing and able to buy. Either take the “central route” or the “peripheral route” process in your process while persuading the consumer to buy. The classic test used a magazine ad. When readers had a reason to care about the product, the strength of the arguments decided their attitude. When they didn’t, it mattered more whether the endorsers were famous athletes or ordinary people (Petty, Cacioppo and Schumann, 1983).
• There are many “weapons of influence” when it comes to persuading someone to buy, and your job as a marketer or advertising agent is to activate and act on one or more of those persuasion categories (Robert Cialdini named six: reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority and scarcity). Dennis Regan tested reciprocation in 1971. People who got an unexpected Coke from a fellow participant later bought more of his raffle tickets, and the favor worked through a sense of obligation more than through liking him (Regan, 1971).
• You need to establish credibility, and provide “Evidence” in the form of testimonials, scientific facts, etc. that show what you are offering is legitimate and worth spending the time and/or money on. If someone does not believe the product will work, they will not buy it, and so credibility becomes a very important part of your advertising. Earlier reviews called the research on evidence inconsistent. John Reinard went back over fifty years of studies and found its persuasive effect more consistent than that, especially for testimony and quoted sources (Reinard, 1988).

The Life-Force 8

1. More life (extension); enjoyment of their lives; and to survive
2. Food and drink, and the enjoyment thereof
3. Removal or the nonexistence of pain, fear, and danger
4. Close, intimate relations (companionship, both of physical and sexual nature)
5. Living conditions that are comfortable and address their other needs (food, safety, comforts, etc.)
6.  To live the “American Dream” and be successful, and more successful than their neighbors or peers
7. Loved ones or people they care deeply about, and the safety, protection and care of them
8. Approval from their peers, in societal or colloquial fashion

Putting It into Your Copy

Are you ready to get moving?

Start off with making your advertising copy longer, more descriptive and more engaging. Does your advertising copy invoke a basic need/crave/want in the consumer’s life?

If not, rewrite it and add more adjectives and imagery. Remember: you’re painting a picture in the mind of the reader that will be compelling enough that the consumer will want to buy your product.

While you’re crafting your new advertising content, remember to never forget the “Life-Force 8” and attempt to address and/or include them in any advertising copy that you write.

Try to include them in any piece of marketing or advertising that you undertake, from content marketing like blogging to advertising copy in newspapers or online to radio and beyond.

There are several techniques in “Cashvertising” that will help you understand how to compel your audience and create effective ads.

Try using at least one of them in each advertisement that you create, experimenting as you go and running A/B tests to see which works best for your market.

Remember, how you say your message matters as much as what you say. Your ads should be clear, straightforward and have a defined (compelling) message.

After all, you’re asking someone to part ways with their hard-earned money for your product, so show them why your service is worth it.

Sources

1. Elder, R. S., & Krishna, A. (2010). The effects of advertising copy on sensory thoughts and perceived taste. Journal of Consumer Research, 36(5), 748–756. doi.org/10.1086/605327
2. Escalas, J. E., & Bettman, J. R. (2003). You are what they eat: The influence of reference groups on consumers’ connections to brands. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 13(3), 339–348. doi.org/10.1207/S15327663JCP1303_14
3. Gregory, W. L., Cialdini, R. B., & Carpenter, K. M. (1982). Self-relevant scenarios as mediators of likelihood estimates and compliance: Does imagining make it so? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43(1), 89–99. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.43.1.89
4. Hovland, C. I., & Weiss, W. (1951). The influence of source credibility on communication effectiveness. Public Opinion Quarterly, 15(4), 635–650. doi.org/10.1086/266350
5. Leventhal, H., Singer, R., & Jones, S. (1965). Effects of fear and specificity of recommendation upon attitudes and behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2(1), 20–29. doi.org/10.1037/h0022089
6. Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1984). The effects of involvement on responses to argument quantity and quality: Central and peripheral routes to persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46(1), 69–81. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.46.1.69
7. Petty, R. E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Schumann, D. (1983). Central and peripheral routes to advertising effectiveness: The moderating role of involvement. Journal of Consumer Research, 10(2), 135–146. doi.org/10.1086/208954
8. Prochaska, J. O., DiClemente, C. C., & Norcross, J. C. (1992). In search of how people change: Applications to addictive behaviors. American Psychologist, 47(9), 1102–1114. doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.47.9.1102
9. Regan, D. T. (1971). Effects of a favor and liking on compliance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 7(6), 627–639. doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(71)90025-4
10. Reinard, J. C. (1988). The empirical study of the persuasive effects of evidence: The status after fifty years of research. Human Communication Research, 15(1), 3–59. doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1988.tb00170.x
11. Salganik, M. J., Dodds, P. S., & Watts, D. J. (2006). Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market. Science, 311(5762), 854–856. doi.org/10.1126/science.1121066