There's an unusual word I'd like to share with you, which when we know it and use the idea behind it, can massively increase the power and conversion of our marketing messages.
Let me tell you how this came about....
I don't know if you remember the book, ‘The Day of the Jackal’ written by the brilliant author, Frederick Forsyth in 1971.
Instead of the usual WHO DONE IT It was a little bit different.
In fact, it was ‘HOW DONE IT’ and it was the start of a change in the way books were written.
So what happened was...
We knew effectively where the plot was going because history told us that President Charles De Gaulle hadn't got shot. And that there were lots of assassination attempts on his life.
The story...
As the jackal went through planning and starting to execute the assassination, he went to see a Monsieur Hussin, a gun maker, and he told him how he wanted his assassin's rifle made in parts. And it had to slide in aluminium tubes, which then had to fit together, which were going to be a crutch he would use to get the gun through the security guards and the police in his guise as an old French soldier in a long, great coat.
He'd taken some cordite to make his face go grey and sweaty - a fantastic story.
But when he was talking to Mr. Hussin, he mentioned the word verisimilitude. And what does this word actually mean?
It means - having the appearance of truth ,very similar - verisimilitude.
There's an old English version of it called vraisemblance, which comes from the French vrai, meaning true, semblance, resembling, resembling the truth in the words, having the appearance of truth.
Fast-forward from there. Having read the book, I met the wonderful Ted Nicholas, a marketing genius.
He'd flown in to the UK from Switzerland (where he was living at the time.) And was here to do some business. Ted had agreed to meet me, as I was going to interview him for my Achievers Edge Audio newsletter.
We got on really well and ended up doing a marketing seminar together.
In the conversation, Ted said to me, he said, "There's an important word to use in marketing and you probably have not come across this word”.
And the word was verisimilitude."
And of course, I was very proud to be able to say I knew what the word meant.
I said, it means ,having the appearance of truth.
And he said, "Yes but most people just don't know this word. How come you know it?"
And of course, I told him the story about Day of the Jackal and all the rest of it.
So how does this help us?
Well, verisimilitude, having the appearance of truth means that in our marketing messages, we have to have detail.
We cannot say 1000s of people have tried our new miracle cleaner.
Well, we can, but it hasn’t got much juice has it?
But if we say in our latest survey, we found out that 9,834 people have used our new miracle cleaner and 96.2% report a level of 100% happiness with it, that has believability.
So the way we can take this away and use it is whenever we are crafting our messages, we can start to say, how do I bring this to life?
How do I give this the appearance of truth, so people don't have to take it at face value?
And we don’t use the glibness of thousands of people, thousands of pounds, but we give it the level of accuracy so that people understand.
I'm sure you can take away this and use it.
Next week I'm going to show you, how I made £8,636 per page out of some of my writing. I'm sure you’ll be fascinated in that too.
Go on then
Peter
Peter Thomson
Editor and Truthful Publisher tgiMondays
PPS: If you have any feedback, thoughts or ideas or puzzles please let me know at: success@peterthomson.com
3 окт 2024
