Use “stravinsky’s Secret” to Supercharge Your Marketing Copy
Use “stravinsky’s Secret” to Supercharge Your Marketing Copy
The two black men, clean-cut and well-spoken, casually stroll down an upscale California street.
Mostly-white yuppies step into and out of restaurants and clubs on this busy Saturday night. Well-dressed 30-somethings stroll about, window shopping.
Now, one white couple comes from the opposite direction, walking toward the black men. The camera zooms in, showing the white woman suddenly clutching her bag and the arm of her male companion just a little bit tighter as they approach and then pass the black men. The camera pans to the men.
“Look around!” says one of the men to the other. “You couldn’t find a whiter, safer, or better lit part of this city. But this white woman sees two black guys, who look like UCLA students, strolling down the sidewalk and her reaction is blind fear. I mean, look at us! Are we dressed like gangbangers? Do we look threatening? No. Fact, if anybody should be scared, it’s us: the only two black faces surrounded by a sea of over-caffeinated white people, patrolled by the trigger-happy LAPD.”
You may recognize this scene. It is at the beginning of the 2005 Academy Award-winning film Crash.
And it was at this exact point that I recall thinking, “Oh brother, here we go. Looks like I’d better get ready for a politically correct Hollywood preachfest.”
I had it all figured out. I knew where it was heading, and I was ready to tune it all out.
But that’s when something very interesting happened. Back to the black men talking…
“So, why aren’t we scared?” asks the first man.
And now, the big surprise when the other one replies…
“Because we have guns?”
And then the two men run into the street and violently carjack the white couple’s BMW SUV, throwing them to the ground and screeching away. Wow! I didn’t expect that! NOW, Crash most definitely had my attention. Not because I was glad to see the black men fall into stereotype, but because I’d been perfectly set up to anticipate just the opposite.
In films and books, it’s sometimes known as a ” deus ex machina”… You may think of it simply as a plot twist… But in copywriting, it’s defying what Michael Masterson has termed the “Categorical Imperative”.
When readers start knowing where the copy is going… when they can predict the next step in your story… they tend to dismiss it – tune it out, just as I was about to do with Crash . They might still be reading, but really, you’ve lost them.
You see, the mind tends to simplify its work by slipping incoming ideas into pre-existing slots (“categories”) it has already created. It does this so it can shift its attention to something else (anything else). And it will do this with promotional information as well as other experiences.
In order to circumvent this tendency of the mind, strong writing – and, in particular, good sales promotions – must avoid a straight-line, logical approach.
Instead, use “indirection.” Approach the reader in a way, or from a place, he doesn’t expect. And then, keep changing things up. The overall effect is to keep the reader from anticipating where the promotion is going and keep his mind from wandering.
In his engaging new book Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Rhodes Scholar Jonah Lehrer explains how Russian composer Igor Stravinsky used what I’ll call the musical equivalent of indirection to overcome the Categorical Imperative of his listeners.
It began in 1913 with Stravinsky’s audaciously shocking ballet music, “The Rite of Spring” (“Le Sacre du Printemps”). Instead of lulling his audience to sleep with predictable chords and rhythms, Stravinsky constantly changed time signatures and added unpredictable and off-beat accents.
Traditionalists at first rejected ” Rite” as a dissonant disaster, but most soon realized the genius behind it. American composer Aaron Copland has since characterized “The Rite of Spring” as the foremost orchestral achievement of the 20th century. It was further popularized through Walt Disney’s Fantasia.
With his background of having worked in the lab of Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel, Lehrer explains how the brain actually generates dopamine – the “pleasure” neurotransmitter – when presented with interesting, new information. Usually, dopamine release is triggered during enjoyable experiences, such as eating and having sex. It also gets “fooled” into being released with drugs such as cocaine, nicotine, and amphetamines. But Lehrer points out that not only enjoyable experiences but also new experiences and new stimuli trigger dopamine release. [Full disclosure: I too worked in Kandel’s Columbia University lab some years ago.]
“Stravinsky
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