The Copy Writing Emotion Principles:

Emotion Principle 1: Every word has an emotion associated with it and tells a story.

Emotion Principle 2: Every good ad is an emotional outpouring of words, feelings and impressions.

Emotion Principle 3: You sell on emotion, but you justify a purchase with logic.

Let’s take the last point first. Why do you think people buy the Mercedes-Benz automobile in America?  The answer: We buy on emotion and justify with logic. The car is sold by virtue of its emotional appeal and then justified in its advertising by an appeal to logic.

Look at the emotion of a message conveyed in the form of a song. The music is like the vibration or that special harmony that you work at creating in an advertising message. If the music appeals to the audience and their soul, they are really set up to receive the sales message-or in the case of a song, the words, which incidentally also have an attached emotion. A song is similar to an advertisement.

In writing copy for an advertisement, often you get your reader in an emotional frame of mind as a result of the environment you have created, and logic becomes less important. For example, I’ve always used the phrase near the end of my ads, “If you aren’t absolutely satisfied return your product within 30 days for a prompt and courteous refund.” Who ever heard of a refund being courteous? It doesn’t matter.

• The emotion or the feel of that phrase really says that we are a very respectful and understanding company that will return your money very promptly. With very few words, I conveyed the feeling of being a concerned company that acts promptly.

When you analyze these words and see how you can use them to create a message that has emotional impact, then you have mastered an important lesson in writing copy. Here’s some copy I wrote that points out the emotional differences in copy.

• Which sounds better?
  • Example 1: The old woman in the motel.
  • Example 2: The little old lady in the cottage.
• I was writing an ad on some rubbing oil I had discovered in Hawaii and describing how I had discovered it .  Example 1 was in my first draft but example 2 sounded much better.