13 sentences that make ANYONE think you're talking about them š®
The #1 psychology trick for marketing (that's rarely used)
Iām going to do a little magic trick.
I donāt know your name. I donāt know your job title. Iāve never met you.
But Iām going to tell you exactly who you are in 13 sentences. And Iām willing to bet youāll think I nailed it.
Ready? šŖ
You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.
You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.
You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.
While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.
Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you.
Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.
At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept othersā statements without satisfactory proof.
You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.
At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.
Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.
Security is one of your major goals in life.
How many felt accurate?
If youāre like most people, at least 10.
I just gave you the exact same āpersonality readingā that a psychology professor gave his students in 1948. Every student got the same 13 sentences.
When he asked them to rate the accuracy from 0 to 5 ā the class averaged 4.26.
Almost perfectā¦ For a personality reading that was completely fake š¤Æ
This is called the āBarnum-Forer effectā š§
Psychics use it. Horoscopes use it. BuzzFeed quizzes use it.
The top 1% marketers in the world use it to write copy so āpersonalā that people actually convert, stick around, and share it with their friends.
I first noticed this at MineOS, when we added a āWhat is your role?ā box to the signup form.
It wasnāt connected to anything in the product.
But people started replying to our onboarding emails and converted more because they felt the entire platform was personalized. Iām not going to pretend that one form field 10xād our revenue. But it changed how I think about every piece of copy I write.
This is the power of āfake personalizationā š
Most people think the takeaway is āwrite vague stuff that applies to everyoneā. Thatās NOT how to do it. If thatās all it took, every horoscope would go viral.
Thereās a very specific way to do fake personalization that makes it actually work, and it has nothing to do with how clever your copy is. Once I figured it out, I started seeing it everywhere, and using it on landing pages, onboarding flows, and ads.
Today, Iām sharing my āfake personalizationā playbook:
š§Ŗ How to āread someoneās mindā without knowing anything about them
āļø 6 copywriting techniques (with fill-in-the-blank examples) that make readers feel like you wrote it just for them
š 3 formats that do the personalization for you, without actually personalizing anything
āļø How to use it without crossing the line into manipulation
This guide will make you a 10x copywriter ā