Page 127 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

57 USE STORYTELLING
TECHNIQUES

I’m thinking of a time before BlackBerrys, before email, before
PowerPoint. Before PCs, pencils, movable type, quill pens, or even
woodcuts. Yes, the Bronze Age. What do you mean, you didn’t guess?
We were still great communicators then. Fantastic communicators,
some of us. Know which ones? The storytellers.

It’s part of what makes us human. The love of stories is transmitted
if not genetically then as near as you can get. And storytelling is
a great tool for copywriters. I wrote in my first book, Write to Sell,
about a proposal I helped write using story techniques. It had a great
title too: “The day I nearly died: a true story.”

The idea

From Hamleys, a toy shop
Hamleys commissioned me to write a microsite a couple of
Christmases ago. The main page was a history of Hamleys from its
opening in 1760 to the present day. Here’s the opening line of the copy:

Once upon a time a boy dreamed of owning a toy shop.

Now Hamleys could have gone down the boring corporate route
with a line reading “Hamleys has been the world’s favorite toy shop
for over 240 years.” But that would have been a boast, not a story
and Hamleys is all about the greatest story of them all: the story of
dreams, and of childhood.

The copy draws heavily on fiction techniques, such as engaging
more than one sense. We all liked the line: “Over the street-

118 • 100 GREAT COPYWRITING IDEAS