Long Copy: A Consumer’s Perspective

I’m going to tell you why long copy is here to stay, no matter what Michel Fortin and John Reese tell you.

And when it comes to guys who keep their ear to the ground and their eyes on the numbers (and test results), no one has my greater respect than those two guys.

Yes, attention spans are dwindling. Yes, it’s becoming more and more an audio-visual world on the Web.

But let’s look at the whole question from a consumer’s point of view.

Consumers have no time — right? Consumers are impatient — right?

Consumers want to get to the bottom line and make their purchase and move on to watch the Simpsons or have a beer or sneak off into the bedroom with their honey or grab the potato chips out of the cupboard so they can watch six hours of TV, right?

All stereotypes. Some may be true.

But I can’t believe I’m the only discerning consumer in the world when it comes to certain purchases, and in fact I have some pretty solid proof that I’m not.

Discerning consumers need specific information.

And specific information requires copy long enough to give it to consumers — all of it.

This weekend I had an experience as a consumer that drove the point home, big-time.

I’m a second-time buyer of video equipment. The first camera I bought was nice, but it was the size and weight of a brick and difficult to stow away into a suitcase.

My needs for a new one were very specific. It must:

1. Be small
2. Be light
3. Use mini-DV cassettes
4. Have a jack for an external microphone
5. Be able to mount on a tripod.

That sounds reasonable, but there don’t seem to be too many models in production today — at any price — that have all of those characteristics.

I finally found one (the Sony DCR-HC96) after several hours of jockeying back and forth between three Web sites and Google searches.

I ended up reading a 140-page manual online, supplemented by several dozen user comments on amazon.com, to get the information I needed.

Long copy? Web 2.0? You bet. The 140-page manual for this product is longer than any sales letter I’ve ever seen (even Michel’s for Traffic Secrets!). But I couldn’t have gotten a key point I was looking for without reading a couple of the more detailed Amazon comments.

Just in case you think I’m alone in my need for specificity, I found several Amazon comments from owners who had spent 10 times the effort and time researching mini DV camcorders, including several trips to stores.

One, who had purchased another model, admitted to having broken down in tears when it didn’t perform as promised.

What does this have to do with long copy?

Simply this.

If Sony and its vendors had imaginatively anticipated what I (and probably several thousand other finicky consumers) were looking for and had arranged user-experience and feature/benefit information in an easy-to-access way (and no one ever said long copy has to be the typical scroll down a single page that we’re all so used to in the info-marketing field)…

… Then Sony would be selling a LOT more of this camera.

Now the chances of Sony or any other Global 1000-type corporation even considering the question are more remote than Donald Trump deciding to go for the shaved-head look.

OK, fine.

But for the rest of us who are writing copy, think about this lesson very carefully.

Long copy is by no means dead, or an impediment to sales.

Brain-dumped sales presentations may have gone the way of the eight-track tape, but don’t kid yourself that people making purchase decisions don’t need and want the necessary information (especially experienced buyers who are coming back for an improvement on what they already have) to go ahead and order.

People do.

Give them what they want. You’ll get a higher response rate.

By the way — you might be wondering why I went through all the misery I described to get the info I needed to buy.

It was because I have a client, or a series of clients, so massive and lucrative that it was worth the effort. Clients that dropped out of the sky totally unexpectedly. Who will need a setup exactly like the one I cobbled together through all this detective work.

Don’t count on your customer being as motivated as I was to find the information that wasn’t readily available. Normally I wouldn’t have been.

Expend the extra effort and your market will spend the extra money.

I’m sure of it.