Episode 479: Copywriting With Todd Jones – Creating Demand.

---

---

Show Summary

Rob Cairns talks to Todd Jones about creating demand.

Show Highlights:

1. What is demand?

2. How to include demand in copywriting.

3. How VHS made a demand.

4. The best product does not always win.

Show Notes

Hey Everybody, Rob Cairns here. And today I’m here with Mr. Todd Jones, and we’re gonna do Todd’s Copywriting segment. How are you, Todd?

I’m doing pretty good, better than last week, so we’re rocking and rolling now.

That’s a good thing is it? Is it gloomy and overcast in Arkansas like the rest of the continent, or is it?

Not at the moment. We actually have a momentary we have some decent, you know, blue sky right now the weather has dropped a little bit. I don’t think we’re going to get 60s today, next week it’s going to drop big time. We’re going to have 30s in the morning and 50s and. To the high. So we’re finally cut. Falls finally going to arrive in Arkansas next week. For some people, it may be winter, but it’s really more of a fall top weather. But anyway so. We’ll we’ll have our. Share of rain between now and Wednesday, I think. Again, so we we had nothing in October and and in November it’s we’ve gotten hit like every you know 2 * a week you know.

Today. Tons. Today we thought we’d talked about demand and how. Demand and copywriting. So where did you want to start with that?

Well, so I was thinking about this and it kind of came up in it. And I’m gonna tell a story in just a minute, which will kind of illustrate what I’m thinking about. But if you and I tend to spend plenty of time on LinkedIn and there’s a job title that has come up in recent years. Called demand generation or something like that. And and I thought about this actually, maybe even earlier this year like this is kind of a hot take. You don’t, really. You don’t really generate demand, you you just don’t. I mean, I’ve thought about this. So you don’t. This is my hot take for the year. I guess you don’t generate demand. Can you do some things that maybe increase demand? Maybe. Really what you’re doing is increasing awareness. Of the problem. Or you’re increasing awareness. Of your business, but you don’t really increase demand. Demand is either there or it’s not. That’s the way I look at that. It’s kind of a hot take. I realize that some people may just.

MHM.

Agree with me. Usually it’s people in the tech and B2B world that would have disagree with that. They they build up these job titles around creating demand and so forth. So I’m gonna tell you a story in just a minute. But to illustrate something, I know you have a jewelry store owner this time of year.

I was. I was there. I was there yesterday. Yeah.

This time of year, I would imagine demand is up just a little bit as people are getting ready for the holiday shopping. People will buy nice presents for this and give it to others in most cases, and they will usually go one of the things they will do is they’ve been really anybody sells almost anything this time of year. Demand is up, right? Because we had the whole, we call it Black Friday it’s. But it’s because everybody knows that. Businesses typically will get out of the red and into the black during this time of year as people are shopping for the holidays in the year gifts, that kind of thing. But he also, you know, the man will come and go during the year for. Him I’m sure. Right. You have Valentine’s Day, so there’s a higher peak of demand this spring will typically Mother’s Day. Yes, exactly. Now you can’t really plan when somebody’s going to get.

Mother’s Day.

Day.

Engaged. And you know, like there’s there’s no engagement time of the year. Right. Right. You know, like, OK, between may and July, people were getting. And that may happen. People are gonna get shopped for weddings, that kind of stuff. So to. Make it kind. Of fluctuates in in a business like that. But most businesses either have the demand or you don’t. That’s my opinion. So where copywriting comes into it is it facilitates the demand that’s already there. I don’t think you can increase if if somebody’s not interested and talk about taking a product to market. Right. And you, you you tested that, you know, I was around the startup world long enough the the to learn about MBP which does. That mean Most Valuable Player or a professional wrestler that exists in AW, it means minimum viable product. So what the tech contributors and occupiers generally do is they would come up with a minimum viable product and they take to market to see how it, how it works. If it works it, that means people are buying and that means. There’s a demand for it. A lot of times we come up with a product. That we think should have a demand, but nobody wants it. Nobody buys it. It happens all the time. Then you have.

My but, but let’s stop there. But sometimes that’s due to marketing. So as well. Yeah. And I’ll give, I’ll give you an example of that. Let’s go into the old VHS tapes. What are those? The younger generation would say, and there were two formats. There was the VHS consortium and then there was the Sony Beta Max format. But what I would argue is having had both those machines in my younger day.

Uh-huh.

The Sony Beta Max format was way superior from the picture quality then from the VHS. Everybody knew that there was two things that didn’t vent up. The demand on the Sony side. One Sony didn’t market the product very well. Who? Besides marketing, it was more expensive, so when you factor in the price and the marketing, the lack of the demand was. There.

Yeah. And it goes back to my friend Liam on LinkedIn basically reminded me of the four P’s of marketing principles that people tend to forget about and and this time of of this era of marketing, people tend to.

Mm-hmm.

Forget about it, but. Product price, place and promotion. And you do have to have it all to come together, right? So I know that story very well. The Beta Max didn’t take off. Maybe they’re with enough players out there, maybe cost a little bit more expensive. They they lost out on pricing.

Was more so one of the knocks on Sony as a corporation and to this day I refuse to buy a Sony product. Excuse me and I’ve had several. Had a. I had a Sony VCR. That was miles ahead of its time in the days of VCR, and this was actually a VHS VCR. Where it had jacks on the front of it. No. When you plugged in a camcorder, another device, you didn’t have to go behind the cabinet and run the cables you just plugged in. The front. The only problem? The only problem with this VCR was it was great when it worked. But God, if something broke, that’s the fixing. It was like buying a new one. And so that was one of the knocks with Sony was their products was more expensive. Now they were forced to market in many things. They were the first one with affordable CD, the rent. They were the first ones to market with the portable lock rent. Remember those the big? Yeah, I had a I had a big yellow. Sports watches. But in the last. I would say 10 or 12 years. Sony has not been in an innovator. The PlayStation and video game is not an innovator. Microsoft and Nintendo are miles ahead of them in the TV industry. Sorry. They’re not an innovator. Companies like Vizio and TCL 22 tier companies are now innovators, and they, I think, have lost their. Innovation touch firstly.

So let me use that right there. The fact that they didn’t innovate, they stopped innovating as a segue to my next example, which is really kind of the opposite of what I was talking about. So not my hot take is not an exclusive like this is the only their there are exceptions to the rule. I’m going to use it. I don’t really have too many for their products. Apple right. OK. When they came up with the iPhone, there was nothing like. That on the. Market Apple has made a career in the last 30 years of creating and producing and putting something out that didn’t exist and that people didn’t know they want until they saw. It. So and they used the old. There’s the old analogy. Like if if Henry Ford would have said. Ask some customer what they wanted. They would ask for a faster horse instead. He made the Model T. Sure. That’s kind of the the the thing that Apple went. So it’s not to say that you can’t put something out that the client doesn’t know they want and then they. But there was the man once they saw how it went, need a good job about marketing and advertising had some really good commercials back in the day. So I’m not saying it’s not, it’s impossible, but. When it comes to you, I think we we can underestimate demand way too much. Sometimes we just think well, you know, I’m going to put out superior product. Well, you know that doesn’t all you need more than that and then. But I think sometimes when people get a taste of the product then they like, OK, there’s another story. I just thought out of my head.

Hang on, hang on a SEC. Todd, I want to go back to Apple for a SEC. Because what apples done? Interesting enough. They’re not usually the first to market. So give you an example of that, the. IPod do people realize that creative labs, which is an old sound card company, was the first to market with the MP3 player, not the iPod with the Apple Watch, they realized that Fitbit was first the market with the Smart Watch. Did they realize that in the tablet name, Apple was not the first?

Oh yeah.

Market. But the iPad is the most popular tablet out there. Even I, a Windows user, have an iPad. So what I would argue is what Apple does really well is they create they no they market, but they create raising fans. I know people that every time a new iPhone comes with every year go and upgrade their iPhone.

MHM.

Mark.

And sell their old one. It’s it’s absurd and everything.

They have created super fans, they have created super fans house to my friend Brittany Hodak, who wrote a book called Super Fans how they recommend you get it for your Christmas list.

No question.

Yes.

This year. But she would talk about that kind of thing. But now I think about the what’s the Tumblr that got real hot last year about this time, Stanley, the Stanley state, the Stanley Cup. OK, how did it get hot? It nobody could have predicted this. Rob, the story goes that somebody had the car caught on fire.

Yes.

And it burnt and it was hauled to the the, you know, the to the place we take cars and they burn it out, burn it out. They went back to see if they could retrieve anything. And there in the middle. And their console was a Stanley mug. Still standing, and I still in the standing mug, that story got viral on social media and it created it a man. So you can’t go out and just generate the man. I don’t think. But demand can be created in certain with certain, you know, certain things. Now, copywriting helps facilitate that. But I wanted to tell you another story. This is where I began to think about this a little bit closer. I have a friend lives in Southeast Missouri. About a year ago, I was up there visiting, he told me his he has a friend who’s a VP at a bank in the area and he told this story about this guy who sold dirt and made millions of dollars. OK, actually hundreds of millions of dollars. So what happened was this guy who, who was kind of a patriarch of the family. Passed away. Left this land to his kids. His kids were like trying to decide what to. Do with this. And and one of the sons wanted to. Sell it and. Buy a hunting lodge in southern Illinois because that’s what he was his passion to run. This hunting lodge. Which is a big thing in the South, and you know, people in other parts of the country may not understand that we got hunting lodges in Arkansas. But anyway, the the Midwest and the South, you know. Running Lodge is not a bit, not a, you know, it’s a it’s a. It’s a popular thing anyway. That’s what they wanted to do. And one of the brothers said he had a business background, maybe even a business screen said hold on a second, if you guys can be just patient for a few years. I’ll make sure you get that hunting lodge. But we’ll do it and. We’ll have money in the bank when we do it. We won’t be, you know, we won’t be having take out a loan or anything, OK. So he started. They they went down there, got a loan from the bank and they got some heavy equipment and they started selling the dirt. The dirt was, you know, fertile rich dirt. That was good. For construction projects, so people from all over South, Southern and eastern. Missouri would come in maybe Illinois and buying that dirt by the truckloads and taking it back. They had the the machine to to dig it for them and they paid the loan back and things are going really well and they got they kept selling this dirt and they got to a point, you know, when you start peeling away layers of land, you get down to another layer. And that layer was a nice bedrock. Of rock, good rock that was used could be used for foundations and they but they. But to cut it out they had to get a tool out of Europe. Very expensive. So went back to the bank, got a lot. Loan they’d already paid off the loan, by the way, from the first equipment they bought, went back and went. Got this this rock cutter from Europe brought it in, started selling that rock expensive, made BUKU some money. Had to buy another one to do that, to keep doing it. He made hundreds of millions of dollars. They ended up building. Their own hunting lodge, and not instead of having to buy one this it was. It was all about demand. There wasn’t any social media posts about. I’m sure there might have been an organ. Thing, there was a need for social media posts. There wasn’t a need for an e-mail marketing campaign. There was a need for all this fancy marketing because the demand was already there. You, you know, you tell somebody what you’re doing actually visit with a. Friend, today in the coffee. Shop business, he started. They were doing quality work, I said. What are you? You know, how are people? Tiny and goes right now just. Referral people are really pleased what they’re. 1. And they’re coming to them and doing that now, I I don’t don’t misunderstand me. I’m not on here to tell people not to market. I’m obviously I’m not saying that, but I’m saying that sometimes we have we we we really lean into our fancy marketing stuff stuff you and I do every day. And sometimes we forget or we underestimate the need for demand. If you don’t have demand for your product or your service. For whatever reason, and that can fluctuate too by the way, you know the economy can be terrible and you’re what you do.

Sorry.

And the even the time, it could be the time of year, like selling bathing suits in Toronto, unless you’re going away in the middle of January. It’s not a good move, you know. Now, if you’re going to the Caribbean.

Well, there there’s a there’s a. There’s a flip side that you can sell those at a discounted price, usually and. Get them off the shelf, but. But yeah, I mean, you know, the demand fluctuates, it can fluctuate, but sometimes demand just not there, whatever the product or service is, you got to cut it loose because no amount of marketing you do will create. Or generate that. Demand, but demand is a very complex thing. It takes more than just, you know, we we’ve already discussed different ways that demand happens. It can happen from a viral video about a Stanley mug it, you know, it could, you know, clearly Apple touched on something. They weren’t first to market, but they did something better or whatever. You know, we we had several examples about how demand can be, but copyrighting going back to the the subject at hand is the facilitator. It is like the choir conductor, the orchestra conductor. You are putting it all in place and you’re you’re communicating the message that you have to the people who demand, who have the demand for the product or service you have. So you’re you’re saying in a way that they understand you’re being clear. You’re not really trying to manipulate them so much, although we do use things like, you know, principles of persuasion and stuff like that. And and we’re we’re going to do an episode in nostalgia one day, just nostalgia, because nostalgia is the principle, the loss possible of persuasion. That’s what I call it.

Thank you.

The loss, it’s the one that’s not mentioned by the gentleman who came up with the principles of persuasion. I think there’s seven or eight of them. He never mentions nostalgia. When you get 50 years old, you start to realize how important nostalgia is. That’s another. That’s a side. But copywriting is that thing that facilitates and you think about it, copywriting. Is done on your website. It’s done on Flyers you put out. It’s done on emails you send out. You know it’s done on social media messages. Yes, ebooks. People create ebooks that create case studies all this.

So some media posts.

Stuff. But copywriting is the conductor for facilitating the demand and getting it to the people who need to hear about it. So yeah, that’s my hot take. I guess you might say about the demand is not created, but it is. It can be facilitated with the with the.

Hey dude.

With the help of copywriting.

Yeah. Hey, Todd, thanks for talking about demand and if anybody’s interested in Todd’s work, go over to copy flight and figure it out. And he’s got good things, including the website copy framework as well as. Hiring them from a consult from a consult, amongst other things, so have a great day, Todd, and we will talk to you soon. Thank you.

See you later.