Advice from Eugene Schwartz. 

Eugene Schwartz is celebrated as one of the best copywriters who ever lived. His book, Breakthrough Advertising, is on just about every list of “books copywriters need to read” that you’ll find. It’s definitely on ours.

In his book, Schwartz shares two ideas that apply to your research process.

The first is the idea that you, as a copywriter or marketer, can not create the desire for what you sell. You can only channel a pre-existing desire towards your solution.

Here’s what he wrote: 

Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product. This is the copy writer’s task: not to create this mass desire – but to channel and direct it.

Let us share a few examples of what we mean by that. 

Uber didn’t create the desire to hire a car to take you somewhere. That need or desire was already out there—served by taxis and public transportation and carpools. What Uber did was create a better solution for finding a car to get you from one place to another, then channeled the existing desire away from previous solutions to the new opportunity.

Or consider a product like the FuzzBuster, a radar detector that helps drivers evade police speed traps and tickets. It was invented by Dale Smith who was tired of getting speeding tickets. So he built a device that could detect radar surveillance. This was an entirely new product and an entirely new product category. Never seen before. But it didn’t create the desire to avoid speeding tickets. Everyone ever pulled over by a cop already had that desire. Fuzz Buster simply tapped into that desire to become commercially successful.

Or consider luxury goods providers like Tiffany or Gucci or Hermes… they don’t create the desire to show off wealth or status, but they do a great job of channeling it to sell their products.

We could keep going with example after example, but you probably understand. A big part of what you are looking for when you do research is the underlying desire for a solution like the product or service you are writing about.

The second idea from Schwartz related to research is this:

“Copy is not written. If anyone tells you ‘you write copy’, sneer at them. Copy is not written. Copy is assembled. You do not write copy, you assemble it. You are working with a series of building blocks, you are putting the building blocks together, and then you are putting them in certain structures, you are building a little city of desire for your person to come and live in.”

Again, you’ll want to keep this principle in mind as you research. You are looking for these blocks to assemble into your message. You’re looking for words, phrases, pains, desires, motivations, objections, hesitations, and triggers. You’re keeping an eye out for psychographic data and social proof. And you’re going to turn all of that into hooks, leads, headlines, subheads, body copy, bullets, benefits, calls-to-action, and more.

That doesn’t mean you don’t have room to stretch your creative muscles as you write (and we talk a lot more about that in our Copy Mastery course). But copywriting isn’t poetry. Or even prose. You are looking for the elements that help you connect to your prospects so you can help them solve their problems and become a better version of themselves.