Part 5 of my e-book entitled, "It's all in the head (and it's not what you are thinking!)

It’s all in the head (and it’s not what you are thinking!) – Part 5

Triggers that helped my crank up my copy:

4) Headlines can emote too:

This is how it started with me and I hope will work for you as well: Write what you feel and feel for what you write. 

This, in short, is the magical formula that all of my work carries. Examine each headline and you will find some emotion, sometimes a little bit of me or rather what excites or intrigues me (and here’s the thing) as a consumer. And so I think to myself, if I could feel that way, then what’s to say the other consumers won’t?

In all my work, I work not as a copywriter selling but as a consumer were I to buy. For aren’t we all, in fact, just that, consumers?

Then shouldn’t it be easy writing as one? Sure, and that’s why I’ve written this book, to show you how.

So what is it I feel and how do I put it on paper?

I feel an emotion when I have the product in my hand and respond to it with my heart. Got it?

 Allow me to elaborate:

When I think of the product, some emotion filters through my head into my heart. It tells me something.

Let’s take for instance, the ‘brand’ AIDS. What was I thinking when I saw something about it in, say, the news? I thought it’s dangerous because anybody could get infected with AIDS if they had used a used syringe. The enormity of getting infected and not only because you had multiple partners put a fear in my mind.

I was afraid. That is the feeling my heart received when I thought of the brand.

You could acquire it even if you had done a good deed, like donating blood.

 The fear? 

What if the syringe had been used before? Did I check to see? Even one mistake could have me done in.

Fear... How I hate that word and yet it’s amazing to see how a consumer might respond to that one emotion.

And so I wrote as a consumer with no other thought except the one ruling emotion, that even a single moment of weakness could have done me in and you too... 

The urgency of the dreaded disease spreading with one false step... that urgency of the imminence of death bade me write:

A Hit or a Miss? Eventually, the Game catches up with you.

That wasn’t my fear. It was my empathy towards a consumer who might have, in a moment of weakness...

What else did the dreaded disease invoke in me?  

Well, the most obvious one was that of the tendency of society to treat such people with callousness. The callousness with which a patient is treated even by the good doctor and his entourage of eminent surgeons, as also men and women of social standing leave alone his own near and dear ones. And I thought: if a cult community that killed a man because of his color was bad, so too was the social fabric of society that sentenced a man with the dreaded disease to shame and ignominy.

The emotion driving me here was horror at the utter callousness on the part of society.

It was a prayer, a reminder to society to have more compassion for these men and women, and a lot of the times even children, for they needed our support; that they were dying, and to be a source of comfort as they went through long and harrowing months of suffering and shame, before succumbing to imminent death.

And so, it was the horror at the callousness of a KKK-like society, from which was born a thought ripped off from a popular English sentiment:

The Klux is dead; long live the Klux

The picture in the ad was supposed to have shown a man crucified like Christ but burnt to death at the stakes much like the “witches” were in an era long gone by. And watching him die were eminent men and women dressed in the attire of the KKK.

There could be more emotions to do with this social evil. Perhaps you could write in and let me know?

As there was more than one emotion for this ‘brand’, I thought it merited a campaign. And so this ‘brand’ gave birth to a campaign.

**

If you see the entire body of my work, you will find that in most of my ads, emotions rule.

There is another ad in which I draw the consumer to engage with fear. This is yet another ad on social issues only this time it’s about infanticide.

 In India, infanticide is rampant in states like Tamil Nadu and Haryana as also the rest of the country. It‘s as much a dreaded social evil amongst the poor, as the wealthy. Oft it has been observed that the mother is compelled to kill her child provoked to do so by her husband and in-laws.

The emotion that compelled me to write - yes I use the word “compelled” because I felt emotionally involved, was the feeling of absolute horror.  And here is what I had to say. 

The picture shows a mother nursing her girl child in her arms and the words read:

“Hush, Baby, it’s only your mother”

If you haven’t heard of the practice then it’s possible that these words would perhaps not move you.  What I have not said is the fact that the woman is threatened sometimes to take such a drastic step, where the life-giver becomes a life-taker.

So much for the dark emotions. 

Moving now on to something on a lighter vein...

 Read about it in tomorrow's post...