Your copy can't save the wrong market

Reading soundtrack:
Temple of the Dog — "Hunger Strike"

Last week I came across a post by Cain Smith, a copywriter I really respect, and I've read it three times since.

He came up with a simple game: if you could sell to any market you wanted, what would the PERFECT one look like?

Funny thing is, almost nobody plays it. We spend years polishing the product and the copy… and the market ends up being whoever happens to show up.

It's an old question, too.

Gary Halbert was asking his own version of it 40 years ago (you'll see in a minute)… Cain's answer just turns it into something you can actually score.

Halbert first, then Cain.

The only advantage Gary Halbert wanted

You probably know this one. Gary Halbert used to open his seminars with a question:

"If you and I both had a hamburger stand, and we were competing to see who could sell more… what advantage would you want on your side?"

And the room would say the usual: the best beef, the lowest price, the secret sauce, the corner with the most foot traffic…

Then Halbert would drop the line:

A mediocre burger sold to a starving crowd outsells the best burger in the world sold to people who just had lunch.

Market before offer. Offer before copy. 

In that order, every time.

The legendary Brian Kurtz, who spent 34 years at Boardroom working alongside Gene Schwartz and Gary Bencivenga, took Ed Mayer's old 40/40/20 rule and moved a single point on purpose:

• 41% of a campaign's results come from the list

• 39% from the offer

• 20% from the copy

That one point is the whole lesson… he didn't want anyone thinking the list and the offer carried equal weight.

And look at what gets the smallest slice: the part we copywriters spend the most time polishing.

Cain's game is just one more question stacked on top of Halbert's:

Fine… but what does a starving crowd actually LOOK like?

The 4 boxes a perfect market checks

According to Cain (and I'm with him), a market is only worth your effort when it checks four boxes AT THE SAME TIME:

1 - Size. How many people are there to sell to? If there are 300 of them in the whole world, you'll hit the ceiling before you learn their names.

2 - Wallet. Can they afford a premium price? Plenty of people would love to buy… the question is whether the money EXISTS.

3 - Urgency. Do they need to buy NOW, because the pain won't wait until next month?

4 - Response. Do they buy from a direct offer (an email, an ad, a sales letter, a VSL)… or does it take 14 meetings and a lunch to close?

Sounds easy. The catch is that the four fight each other.

A big market usually comes with a thin wallet… (so you sell cheap, in volume, chasing the next customer every single day)

A rich market is usually a small one… (so you burn through the niche in 18 months and go looking for the next one)

Pain that isn't urgent turns into "let me think about it"… (and "let me think about it" is the polite way of saying no)

Checking all four is the exception. 

And that's exactly where you plant your flag.

What checking all four looks like

Cain gives two examples, and they couldn't be more different.

Two very different businesses… same pattern:

• A big crowd

• Deep pockets

• A pain that won't wait

• And people who buy straight from the direct-response offer

And notice what's missing from that list… nobody mentioned the copy.

It still has to be good, obviously…

…but good copy in the wrong market is a beautiful goal scored in an empty stadium.

Real urgency is found, not manufactured

Out of the four, one decides the game… and it's the only one copy can't create.

Size and wallet you can figure out in an afternoon of research, and response you can test with a $50 ad…

Urgency: either the market already has it… or you'll have to MANUFACTURE it.

And we all know how to manufacture urgency, right?

The launch, the scarcity, the cart that closes in 5 days, the bonus that vanishes at midnight…It works.

But it's expensive, it wears your audience out, and you have to rebuild it EVERY cycle. The cart closes, and the urgency evaporates.

When the urgency belongs to the market, it doesn't evaporate… it wakes up with your customer every morning.

A simple way to see the difference:

A product that feeds an ambition has to fight for this month's budget. (the language course, the MBA, the trip)

A product that plugs a leak is up against the loss. (savings getting eaten by inflation, the toothache, the website that's down)

Ambition can wait. A leak can't.

The 14-point filter

Here's the part I want you to use THIS week.

Take your market (or the client who just emailed you) and score each one from 1 to 5:

• Size: 1 (fits in a room) to 5 (millions)

• Wallet: 1 (counting pennies) to 5 (pays a premium without blinking)

• Urgency: 1 (someday) to 5 (the pain keeps them up at night)

• Response: 1 (only closes in a meeting) to 5 (buys from an email)

Add it up.

Under 14, you put in exactly the same work… and the results rarely show up.

That's the filter I run before I say yes to any project. If a market scores under 14, I'd rather show the client which one is dragging it down than write the copy anyway.

So before you write a line, before you build the funnel, before you take the job…

Play Cain's game.

Hit reply with the market you serve (and your four scores, if you ran them). I'll tell you which one is holding you back.

That's it.

Talk soon.

Peace ✌️

— Lucas

P.S.: David Ogilvy had a line about this. Advertising can sell an inferior product, he wrote… "So it can – once."

After that, the customer catches on and never comes back… so not even the best copywriter alive can save a bad product.

In a HOT market, a “so-so product” will still sell, especially when the competition is weak. But if you want the same customer to buy again, the product has to be GOOD.

The market gets you the first sale.

The product gets you every one after that.