Page 191 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

89 WHAT ARE THEY
AFRAID OF?

When you’re selling, it pays to consider your prospect’s most
basic drives. There’s a handful of them including fear, greed, sex,
altruism, and curiosity. In copywriting terms, you’re usually faced
with a choice between fear and greed, in other words, your prospect
is running away from something or toward something.

Gaining higher social status is a great motivation to play with, and it
falls under the category of greed. Anxiety over debts piling up falls
squarely in the fear camp. It’s been shown time and again that fear
selling is more persuasive then greed selling. Perhaps because, as
someone once put it, “a man will fight twice as hard to hold onto a
dollar as he will to gain ten.”

The idea

From Octavian Vaults, a wine storage company
I came across Octavian Vaults while researching the world of wine
collecting for another client. Imagine you’re a serious wine collector.
(Unless you are a serious collector, in which case, skip that bit.) Now,
you’ve just invested, let’s say, £5,000 in a case of 1995 Bordeaux
premier cru. Where are you going to keep it? Under the stairs?
I don’t think so. In that nice limed ash rack next to the cooker? No.
You need somewhere safe. Somewhere your investment isn’t going
to get knocked around, or spoiled. You need cellarage.

Octavian Vaults play, subtly but effectively, on the wine collector’s
fear that the precious bottles they’ve paid so much for are going to
be either worth less, or, possibly worse, not worth drinking. The
headline to the double-page ad in Decanter reads,

182 • 100 GREAT COPYWRITING IDEAS