Fall In Love with Your Inner Plagiarist
June 24th, 2008 Chris Posted in E-mail, General, Marketing | 4 Comments »
A friend of mine was telling me the tale of a marketing communication person that, faced with a tight deadline (the most charitable rationale ascribed) to produce some web copy, liberally borrowed from a competitor. Of course, there was much a do about this: company can’t plagiarize…blah, blah blah. I hoisted my beer and likewise lampooned the poor individual.
Fast forward a few months and – low and behold – I have become an unabashed, recidivist plagiarist. While this probably sounds worse than it is (especially if you try to say it out loud three times fast), it still is a pretty big change for me. I come from an environment where thought typically needed to be original and marketing product had do be developed from scratch. The result was a lot of hunched backs and banging keyboards as new prose was developed for each marketing piece in the business.
I’m not saying that’s bad – nothing would be worse than having a CxO prospect get it in their head that a technology company rips off IP from another – even if it is just the marketing stuff. So much for thought leadership. But when it’s just you against the world – that just doesn’t seem as important.
Case in point, we do a fair bit of email marketing (ad passim, ad nauseum) and we’ve been having pretty good results to date. Then, the other day an email from a guy named Dan Kennedy arrived. He sells marketing systems and has a pretty amazing track record at writing copy that sells, a lot. Let’s just say his hobby is horse racing (owning, not betting).
What’s interesting is that this email really didn’t impress me. It wasn’t very well formatted and was pretty aggressive in it’s language – really challenging the reader to take action. But this guy is a wizard so I said what the heck. I took it, changed a few words to fit to our business and let ‘er fly.
Now, here is my rationalization on why it’s OK:
- We don’t compete with Dan Kennedy guy so we’re not really hurting him.
- He’ll never find out (OK – that one is lame)
- We’ve attended a conference hosted by him where he has encouraged folks to apply his work.
So, I think he’d be OK with it. I’ve discussed this with a few other micro business owners and discovered that I was a plagiarism light-weight. People were borrowing whole marketing campaigns, verbatim from other’s who have had success. Again, in different markets so as to not be completely egregious.
This is really part of a broader principle that is key for micro business owners: success leaves tracks. When your small team is continually faced with a mountain of projects to get done to sell more – why reinvent the wheel. You can just look across the fence and see what people in related industries are doing to be successful. What are your neighbors doing:
- What does their web site look like?
- What is the order process for their product?
- What is the wording on their google ads?
- What suppliers do they use?
- What do their sales letters look like?
- How is their store laid out?
- etc…
Remember – this is not necessarily the same as gathering competitive intelligence. It’s about finding people in similar businesses and discovering what they’ve done to be successful. Then blatantly copying them.
Oh yeah – the plagiarized email I sent. It sold three times as much as the best one I’ve ever done from scratch.
C.
P. S. Post a comment or send me a note and I’ll forward you that email…
June 24th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
I wonder who on earth you could be referring to….?
July 24th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Hi Chris – I would love to see the original email and also the one that you ‘tweaked’!.
ps – say Hi to Colleeen, I met her at a CAPS meeting in Winnipeg recently.
Dorian
July 24th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
hi Chris
OK, you’ve got me intrigued. Can I get a copy of that letter?
As a comparision: We once did a direct mail test with a $2,000 a letter direct mail guru, our left brained engineering President and me, the Marketing MBAer……guess who came in last? And who tied for first place. Yup, the guru was at the bottom. All I can think is that our target market was left brainers.
Patti
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