Method
How we work, and why.
It has become very cheap to produce a page of text, a picture, or a whole website. It has not become any cheaper to work out what a company should say, or to get a stranger to believe it. Those were always the difficult parts of the job, and now they are most of it.
Readers have responded to all that volume. Plenty of people now pay for newsletters, buy printed books, and go to small events, partly to get away from feeds that recommend the same things to everyone. A company that sounds like itself, and says something specific, is easier to notice than it was ten years ago.
So we work the way good advertising people worked long before the internet. We talk to customers, choose a position, write it down plainly, and test it. The twelve principles below are how we hold ourselves to that.
Twelve working principles
- 1.
Understand the product before you sell it.
We start with the product itself: how it is made, who uses it, and what it does for them. When something isn’t selling, the usual cause is that nobody has understood it well enough yet.
- 2.
Ask people instead of tracking them.
We learn by talking to people who have agreed to talk to us. Ten good interviews usually teach more than a dashboard full of anonymous clicks.
- 3.
People buy partly to show who they are.
A purchase also tells other people something about the buyer: that they are competent, or have taste, or belong to a group. We write for that person as well as for the need.
- 4.
Be recognizable first.
Buyers rarely notice how you differ from your competitors. They do notice a color, a phrase, or a voice they have seen before. We help you choose a few of these and use them for years.
- 5.
Be known for one thing.
Positioning means choosing what you want to be known for and giving up the rest. If a competitor already holds that place, saying it louder won’t take it from them.
- 6.
Be specific.
People remember names, numbers, and details, and they believe customers’ own words. General claims are forgotten almost at once.
- 7.
Write every recommendation down as a bet.
Each recommendation says what we expect to happen, how confident we are, and what would change our minds. Afterwards we judge the decision separately from how it turned out.
- 8.
Persuade in the open.
We study how persuasion works, and we only use techniques that would still work if the customer knew we were using them.
- 9.
Make things people choose to read.
We would rather build a mailing list people signed up for than a feed that needs a post every day. Readers who chose you pay closer attention, and they stay longer.
- 10.
Small details change what people do.
The order of a page, the default on a form, or one line of wording can change a decision. Fixes like these cost less than a bigger budget, and they often work better.
- 11.
Choose fewer things.
Your team’s time is limited, and your customers have less of theirs to give you. We help you pick a few things and do them properly.
- 12.
Revise until it is plain.
Most of our time goes into revision. We rewrite until a stranger could read the page once and understand it.