Copywriting Secrets for Channeling and Focusing Your Market’s Desire Onto Your Product

Nothing drives action like desire. 

The desire to be richer, smarter, healthier...

Our human desires help explain our careers, our partners, and of course, the products and services we buy. 

So, how do you ensure that your products or services stand out from the competition and speak directly to what your customers long for?

In this article, we explore human desire and how to capture it, channel it, and direct it towards a particular product or service.

What is Mass Desire — and How is it Created? 

Legendary copywriter Eugene Schwartz defines desire as “The public spread of a private want.”

Private desire can be shared by a few thousand, such as the urge to own fine antiques, or it may be shared by tens of millions, such as the desire to lose weight.

The copywriter's job is to direct this desire into a particular product.

When you craft messages that speak to your prospect’s desires and introduce a product that perfectly satisfies these desires — selling becomes easy. 

But speak to the wrong desires — and your ads start to sound “salesy” and false.

It all starts with understanding the nuances of your product features and then showing how these product features satisfy desire. 

Selling Product (Features) Vs Selling Desire (aka The Benefits)

When I start my research, I always start with the product features. 

That way, when I discover my market’s desires, I can connect these features to their respective benefits.

Joy Organics does a great job of highlighting the benefits.

The company sells a CBD tincture. Notice how their bullets highlight desires like “melt away the stresses of the day” or “find calm, rest, and a good night’s sleep.”

This page is grabbing attention first by highlighting the benefits.

Further down the page, you can find the features, such as:

• certification

• oil quantity

• oil grade

• and quality control, environment, and warranty information

Starting your product pages with benefits elicits an emotional reaction. 

Gerald Zaltman, a Harvard Professor, said that 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious. Simply put, customers buy using their feelings and emotions.

And we get those benefits by connecting your product features to your market’s desires. So, how do you unmask these mass desires and use them for your marketing campaigns?

Well, you can’t invent desire.

Desire doesn’t come from your product or you – it can only come from your customers.

They take place in their hopes, dreams, fears, and wants that already exist. Your main job is to channel those desires to your product.

Second, we have to know what these desires are, and there are three ways to find out…

Three Ways to Study Your Customer’s Desires:

1. Use your own knowledge of people's hopes, dreams, desires, and emotions.

You're an industry expert, and you have an idea why people are drawn to your product… perhaps you were first a consumer before becoming an industry leader…

2. Study competing products, read reviews, and compare them to your own product

Product reviews are a gold mine as people would actually let you in on their minds

You can start by reading good reviews like this one from the biggest online store in the US:

Bad reviews are good sources of information as well. They are great to know what people expect from the product that didn’t happen, like this one:

3. Study competing advertising messages and see how the market is currently connecting people’s desires to their products

Now that you know how to look for your customer’s desires, studying them can be perplexing…

There can be a lot of wants, dreams, and hopes…

An important question you might have is, which of these desires am I going to tap into?

To fully uncover, remember that every mass desire has three vital dimensions:

1. Urgency, intensity, degree of demand to be satisfied. For example, constant arthritic pains compared to a minor headache.

2. Staying power, degree of repetition, the inability to become satiated. For example, raw hunger compared to a craving for gourmet foods.

3. Scope. The number of people who share this desire. For example, the number of men willing to pay $10 for an automobile accessory that saves gas - as compared to those willing to pay the same price for one that merely prevents future repair bills.

The greater you can channel these dimensions, the better they appeal to your customers.

Every product appeals to two, three, or four of these mass desires. Only one can predominate. Your choice among these alternate desires is the most important step you will take in writing your ad. This choice is embodied in your headline.

Choose the mass desire that gives you the most power in all three dimensions. 

 Need Help Discovering Your Market’s Desire?

I’m confident that I could help you get some clarity on your copywriting and marketing strategy pretty quickly. 

No pressure, no sales tricks. 

I love connecting with health and wellness professionals for short calls offering up my expertise to:

• Build up my network

• See if I can help anyone on a longer-term basis 

• To just get out there and serve (I’ve found that good things happen to people who put service first) 

If you’re interested in having a chat, you can select a time that works for you by clicking here to book your call: