Vanilla

AI is here to help guide your work. Ideation. Organisation. It’s there to do the mundane but also to feed your creativity. You take an idea (thanks AI!) and bring it to life.

I’ve tried my absolute best with AI to create copy, emotive copy, that I’d be happy to present on a product page. It just doesn’t ‘get’ that emotive context. It’s good… but not great. It can help guide customers. It can create wonderful articles on ‘how to…’ or ‘best way to’ in seconds that would have taken a writer hours or days to perfect. There is a need for speed.

Something is missing though.

Human context.

So this is me on stage in Latvia talking to a 1,000+ marketers about the value of un-vanilla-ing copy. Human context? Imagine the night before creating a slide deck on a 14" screen that will then be pinged on to one of the biggest cinema screens I’ve seen in my life…

I learned this on the shop floor. The major benefit of owning both an ecommerce and high street operation was my time spent with customers. I sold premium guitars. £2000+ instruments that required a hell of a lot of justification for most. There was that time a lady came in with £5,000 to spend and bought ‘a guitar’ for her husband in 5 minutes... Anyway. For most, it was a game of umm-ing and argh-ing. Rarely was the purchase made by a professional. They were people like me. Guitar nuts. No reason why you’d own 5 guitars. These folks owned 20. I got it. GAS (Guitar Acquisition Syndrome) exists.

I knew that asking my customer who there first guitar hero was would start a conversation that often led to purchase. It would lead to them buying the guitar that epitomised the look and sound of their first true guitar hero. I could have asked them ‘who’s your favourite guitarist?’ Too vanilla. Asking them ‘who was your FIRST guitar hero?’ That was the emotional bullseye. The very reason they picked up guitar in the first place. I created connection.

I’ve carried these learnings through all my work with ecommerce brands. The luxury 300-year old cheese company (the company’s 300 years old, not the cheese)? Folks weren’t buying cheese, they were buying the memories of accompanying grandparents to the store on a Saturday morning. The smells… The conversations… The memories.

How did I know this? I asked their customers post-purchase the reason they bought. I shaped the question to get the response I was looking for. With those insights I changed the way the brand sold. From the homepage, ads, packaging to the product page. We ‘understood’ the human context.

Sure, it wasn’t the case for everyone. But ‘everyone’ understood. It opened up the human context. It made the brand more likeable. It made the brand more profitable.

Over the next couple of weeks I’m diving into the topic of ‘Emotive Selling’. Whether you’re selling your first product online or your 100,000th, I’m sharing insights I believe will help you build, grow and scale a thriving ecommerce business, one human emotion at a time.

Want ideas on emotive selling? I’m inviting one subscriber a day to share a product page and I’ll provide you a video with ideas on next steps. Drop me a line to schedule yours.