Inception - Get Them to Have The Idea First

Man Bites Dog I guardianmarketing.substack.com

Joseph Robertson

Aug 27, 2024

It's time to sell your thing.

You've got prospects. People who fit your customer avatar. People who you deem as potential ideal customers.

They are all the way over there...

Having not bought your stuff.

You want them over here. Having bought your stuff.

And so we end up asking ourselves some variation on ...

How do we make people DO Things?

Look, I'm a business owner, I'm a copywriter, I've got alllll these 'prospects' in a giant sea over here,

I want them to see what I have, and be naturally, irresistibly drawn to buy what I've got.

I know only a tiny percentage of people are going to actually do that, but if I just say the right things ... I can make that tiny percentage go up.

I can make people buy!

Right?

How do you make them do that?

Nuances of this perspective aside for the moment (I don't believe you can "make" people do anything), the job of marketing and "copy" is to connect the dots for people so that if they are so inclined to purchase your thing from you, they are more likely to do so due to the efforts of your marketing and copy.

So,

We gain this perspective that we have influence over other people. Because we'll say some words, and they'll take action because of those words.

Our effort influences their behavior.

Our words influence them.

People buy because of the things we say when they otherwise wouldn't.

We want people to buy so we ask ourselves how do we get them to buy? How do we get more people to buy?

And then we start thinking of the clever words, the slogans, the branding, the pathways, the experiences. We start thinking of all the different structure and words and psychology we can employ to get people to buy.

This all toes the line of coercion, manipulation, and trickery - so don't do evil with what I'm about to share, k?

It's not my way,

I'll show you how to get the outcome you desire without all the bad stuff.

There are ways of communicating which turn out to be more effective in engineering the outcome you desire (someone buying) - no surprise.

This is why copywriting is a thing. But whereas many (maybe most) see copywriting as a tool for manipulation, I see it as a tool for clarity.

And the greatest clarity I can bring people in copy, in the marketing ...

Is the clarity of understanding that what is being sold is the obvious thing for them to buy.

I think that is the ultimate level of copy.

Not emotional and choice manipulation.

Just clarity.

Clarity of understanding that what you have to sell is exactly what they need, is going to get them what they want, and that buying it from you is the obvious choice over anyone else.

This is easy when you have something actually unique.

There is no laptop computer out there like a Macbook. Similar sure. But not remotely like a Mac. Apple doesn't need to sell you a damn thing, they just show it to you, knowing (by this point) that you already want what they have and you can't get it anywhere else.

Vague anecdotal examples aside ...

There's a particular tool/technique which you can use in your marketing and in your copy,

Which when employed well,

Results in your prospect coming to the conclusion in themselves that they already want what you have, before you even show them what it is.

They often don't consciously realize it,

But the pieces click together and in the end form an obvious "duh that's the thing for me" experience.

This is,

INCEPTION

I can't think about Inception without thinking of cities folding in on themselves, spinning tops, and trippy mind bending plot lines.

So,

Spoiler alert

For some context (it's loosely relevant),

In the movie Inception, the main character (who is a thief) is offered a chance to have his criminal record erased by performing the impossible task of planting an idea in someone's subconscious through shared dreaming.

And then of course it gets really friggen weird, going through layers and layers of dream and idea planting, and who knows what's real anymore.

In marketing, the way I see it, there are two different kinds of Inception. I really want to get into the second, but I'm going to briefly outlay the first, because it's super powerful.

At the heart of Inception is the concept of creating dynamic where the idea to do something seems to come from inside the person.

In the movie, they literally go into a person's head (into their dreams) and plant the idea so that when the person wakes up they think it was theirs to begin with.

In business, that would be the idea to take an action - often buying something, but we can think about this for any action we'd like the prospect to take. After all, an action someone takes which they have done of their own volition, with their own natural conclusions, is completely backed by their own perspective and energy, is going to have far less buyers remorse, far more buy in from the customer, a greater likelihood of action taken after the purchase, etc.

Basically,

It's better if the person buying decides on their own that they already want what you have than for us to enact external forces upon them trying to convince them to buy when they otherwise might not.

However,

We're also running businesses, so we do need to take actions which influence the likelihood someone buys.

(The extreme opposite example is, if you do no marketing, people don't know you exist, don't know what you do for them, don't know what you are selling or that you are even selling anything, so of course you aren't going to sell squat)

You can take the very long term route, knowing that if you just keep people’s attention, eventually they will buy. But connecting the dots for them is still necessary communication, and there are ways you can effectively influence their decision without removing any of their agency.

Inception is one of those.

A technique of laying out the dots so that the person experiencing them connects the dots for themselves just before you show them the answer.

Just think of any experience you've had watching a story unfold and you think "I know exactly how this is going to end."

Let's get into it,

The first type of Inception is what you might call physical, or ...

Structural Inception

This is what happens when you sell someone something by using the thing that you are selling to sell them.

Here's an example:

If I had a daily email list and through that email list I sold information/products/services all about how you can make money sending daily emails - this would be Structural Inception.

You'll be sold not only on the desires/interests/motivations that the product/services promises, but also by the fact that you are yourself being sold through the very thing that you are buying to learn how to do. The structure reinforces both covertly and overtly that the thing being sold works.

Ever go through a structural funnel which sells you some kind of information on how you can use funnels to grow a business? (something something 'one funnel away' funnel)

Ever find yourself on a publishing platform, X for example, and run into people who are talking about how effective that platform is for growth and making money and they are offering you a path to learn how they do it?

You can find that all over every platform, Substack included. It's not hard to find Substacks that are all about how to grow and sell a Substack.

That's Structural Inception.

You're using the very thing you are selling to sell the thing itself, so that your prospects have the visceral experience of it's effectiveness and proof that it works - after all, if they feel a desire to buy, it must work, they themselves are the proof!

This one is obvious when you see it.

How to implement this should be pretty obvious if you are selling a structure that your prospects can go through in order to buy.

If what you are selling is at any point a part of the process/experience that your prospect goes through to buy from you, there's an opportunity to apply structural inception.

It doesn't have to be a whole system. You could be selling a particular sales call script, where your prospect flow starts from a video you Facebook, into an email list, onto a schedule to get on a call with your team where the script is used, etc.

It's just one piece of a system, but in the selling of the product in that case, the prospect has to experience it.

We can likely get deep into the weeds on specific examples, so just think about what the typical person experiences as they go through your business from prospect to fan and whether what you're selling is or can be something they fully experience necessarily going through that process.

On to Idea Inception.

This one is much more difficult, but it could be considered the holy grail of copywriting and marketing. This is when you get the prospect to arrive at the idea before you tell them what it is, whether they realize it or not.

If you do it well, they will sometimes consciously come to the conclusion before you get there. "Oh I GET IT! That's what this must mean!" or "This gives me an interesting idea, I wonder if XYZ will work."

They will also often subconsciously come to the conclusion but not really understand what it is they realize, how to think about it, or how to communicate it. The resulting effect of this one, for the prospect, is often the feeling that you have put words to the thing they already understood but couldn't articulate or clarify.

All you need is someone to get there, because then when you present the idea/product/service/etc they will feel like they already had that idea, and you are just confirming the truth/effectiveness of it.

You don't need to convince them that the idea is good, because since they came up with it first, it's naturally already good.

Getting people to come up with the idea themselves sounds great in theory ...

But how the hell do you do it?

How to Create Idea Inception.

Hopefully how to create Structural Inception was obvious ... you just sell through the thing you are selling.

Idea Inception is not obvious.

I'm sure there are many different techniques for making this happen.

I have settled on one approach which I've found unerringly effective, for reasons not the least of which is that if you don't quite hit it perfectly, what you're doing is still going to be powerfully effective for your marketing and communications across the board anyway.

The only caveat is that my way of Idea Inception can be uncomfortable to put into practice most especially if you are used to more obvious direct marketing copy which is far more overt in the selling and action that you'd like taking place.

This is a way of marketing that's more open handed.

It can feel like you aren't doing enough.

This technique of Idea Inception creates outcomes which are difficult to track because the conclusion to take action will often come to the person when they are not presently in your marketing materials.

Here's example behavior:

Someone reads and your email - they don't buy.

They read another email - they don't buy.

This can go on and on for some time, days, weeks, months.

One morning they are in the shower and suddenly they realize the obvious choice - they really want what you have. And so they go directly to your website/order form and buy.

Can't track that.

(There are some techniques you can use to force buying in a way that's trackable in this type of scenario, but I'll get into that in R3 for Email, as it's complex and comes with notable downsides that might be more than offset, depending on your situation)

Let me highlight the principles at play here - these are important to understand the whole picture.

You can't make people buy. It's always their choice their action.

I've sort of already discussed this one above. Choice is not something you can actually control in people. I'll get more into this in a moment. But the fundamental principle here is that you can't actually make someone make a choice. You can only have levels of external influence on their perception which does impact how they end up making choices. The more self aware and assured an individual is, the harder it is to influence their self perception.

This is why this approach can feel uncomfortable - like I’m giving up control back to the prospect to make the decision. Truth is they always have control, we’re actually embracing it and using that to our advantage.

Only 15% of buyers buy in the first 90 days, the other 85% can take 2 years.

This one I picked up from Dean Jackson of I Love Marketing1. It made sense when I first discovered the concept over 15 years ago, and throughout the past 15+ years of marketing I've found this pattern to always be true in the circumstances I was able to measure. It's not a rigid pattern, but human behavior follows this.

You can think about it like, the first 90 days you get people who are "good fit now" type prospects (see R32), and the next 1.5 years you get "good fit later" type prospects.

The reason this principle is important is that overt attempts to sell are inherently short term effects. You can't say "buy this buy this buy this" over and over to someone and expect them to stick around for 2 years and then one day they say "ok yea, now that you've told me 237 times to buy your thing, it makes sense to me."

The long term path is a different style of behavior. And whether you like it or not, because we can't make people buy, they eventually have to come to the conclusion themselves one way or another, if they are still tuned in and paying attention.

Buying is always an emotional choice, but logic can justify it.

AND, logic can define the reality in which the emotion is experienced.

This comes back to the principle of choice above. We can't make people make a choice because we can't get inside someone's brain and put their choice-emotion settings to the perfect levels for that choice to happen.

We'd like to think we can. At least, many out there would like to think so.

You can have influence over people's emotions and therefore influence over people's choices. But the more overt and manipulative the action on someone else's emotions, the more snapback there is experienced. You can push someone into an emotional state where they may buy for any number of reasons that seem to fit that emotion, but when they naturally come back out of that state they are going to wonder wtf they were thinking, and hate you for it.

(Hello buyers remorse and chargebacks)

There's a whole entire conversation to be had on buyer's remorse, but for now I'm just laying this out here. Choice happens in the same part of your brain as emotions.

You chose with emotion. You justify with logic. You define the world in which you experience the emotions with logic.

So, we want to precede the emotion by defining the characteristic of the world in which their emotion is going to be experienced.

If we can do that, we can set them on a path where the natural conclusion is the idea we want to ultimately present to them, and hopefully they get to that idea first on some level of consciousness.

Before I go further,

One more thing.

I'm going to reference a useful framework for understanding how people think about things.

This is The Clarity Hierarchy.

It is a product of

Lukas Resheske

. I find it useful in thinking through and understanding many aspects of behavior.

The Clarity Hierarchy3 looks like this. Everything can be seen on one of these 5 levels:

Philosophy -> Principle -> Strategy -> Tactic -> Tool

In that order.

Philosophies are the things you believe.

Principles are things you know to be true which are provable. You come to your Principles based on your Philosophies. They rarely change (but in the face of data they can).

Strategies are environments in which you enact Principles. In marketing and business, Email is an environment. Substack is an environment. Social Media is an environment. Etc.

Tactics are the things you do to execute the Strategy. In email that can be a welcome automation, a broadcast, a launch series, etc.

Tools are the things you use to put together the Tactics. An email service provider is a tool. Copywriting is a tool. AI is a tool.

See Lukas's4 stuff for a much more thorough in-depth exploration.

I bring this framework into the picture because where we focus on the hierarchy is going to make a huge difference.

Most people end up focusing on the Tools and Tactics, usually umbrella’d under a Strategy (often "the niche").

So, if I want to sell a course about using AI as an email copywriter5 for example, I can try to focus on the benefits and strengths of the tool. The ability to write a whole email series in 30 minutes (something that could take you several hours otherwise). The ability to take a successful sales letter from another similar product and write a version of your business in about 30 seconds.

That sort of thing.

And these might be enticing arguments, but they really only end up being effective if you already believe that you need to get into AI.

If you don't believe that, you might still be seduced by the ability to do 8 hours of work in 30 minutes, but you'll probably be really skeptical. You may wonder "yea, but it's gotta be crap."

However,

Instead of focusing on the tool, I might back up the hierarchy, through Tactics, through Strategy ... and think about the Principles.

What are some clear defining principles of working as a freelance email copywriter?

Speed

Especially these days, the faster you can completely and deliver quality work, the more valuable you are to your clients.

Consistency

This one should be obvious, but consistency of your actions, of the quality of your work, of your communication with your clients all impact your ability to do business well and make more.

Reliability

Similar to consistency. As a freelancer, if your client sees you as *reliable,* they are going to want to hold onto you. Being more reliable increases your long term value and makes it easier to hold onto clients.

Effectiveness of Results

Another obvious one. The more effective your clients believe your work to be, the more they are going to want to work with you and the more you can charge.

Balance of freelance work and marketing your own business

Something most freelancers struggle with, the balance of working on the business and in the business. It's necessary to do really good work for your current clients, while also maintaining lead flow into your business so you can replace lost work or level up when appropriate

All of these principles are valuable to the right freelance email copywriter. I could go in much more detail on each principle.

Point is, if I am effective in presenting them in the right way, they might start wondering ...

Well, are ways I can go faster without sacrificing quality?

I wonder if there are ways I can be more consistent without taking more time.

I wonder if there are ways I can increase my reliability to my clients.

I wonder if there are ways I can increase the flow of leads into my own business such that I don't have to worry about being out of work, but where I don't have to sacrifice any of the creative/execution time of all the freelance work.

Now,

At this point the person might start to think ... I wonder if AI can do all those things for me?

Or at the very least, once I start presenting AI as a possibility, that question is inevitable.

That's it.

Idea Incepted.

It's not about putting the thought in their mind to buy what you have.

It's about leading them to the obvious question, the obvious idea, the obvious next best step which brings them in your direction.

If they are presented with the Principles making up the foundation of the Strategy, and get to the point where they wonder if what you are selling can solve all their problems (before they realize what you are selling), then when you present the opportunity to answer that question they are far more likely to step into that opportunity.

And that is my way of enacting Idea Inception.

I use Principle (and sometimes Philosophy) to define the reality in which the prospect is going to have an emotional experience (make a choice) - rather than focus on the end point and try to convince the prospect to go towards it.

With Principle established, the path into Strategy is clear, and the path from Strategy to Tactic becomes clear, and the path from Tactic to Tool becomes clear.

When Principle is established, everything after it becomes more and more obvious the further down you go.

This is not a straightforward step by step tool or technique, but one which takes inverted thinking, putting yourself in your prospects shoes, understanding the path they are walking and how you can predict the path of understanding so you can precede it enough that by the time you talk about the conclusion, they are already thinking ...

"I wonder if that thing can do what I think it can do for me?"

Be Useful. Be Present. Love the Journey.
Joseph Robertson
, CMO Man Bites Dog

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