Lemon.
Bill Bernbach was a bigshot with a big problem.
His ad agency had just landed a huge client - Volkswagen. But now he had to figure out how to sell the Volkswagen Beetle to a post-war America that didn’t much like Germany, or German cars.
How did he do it?
Well, he didn’t do what all other car advertisers were doing, and try to build an “alluring mystique” around the Beetle.
One look at the ugly little car told him that wouldn’t work.
Instead, he did the opposite. He leaned hard into the Beetle's ugliness - using it to highlight its selling points in a painfully honest, no-nonsense way.
Using headlines like:
“It’s Ugly, But It Gets You There”
“Live Below Your Means.”
“If You Run Out of Gas, It’s Easy to Push.”
And, most famous of all…
“Lemon.”
The result?
Bernbach’s ad campaign for Volkswagen was mega-successful. Volkswagen became a household name in America almost overnight. And to this day it’s one of the most legendary and well-known ad campaigns of all time.
And it was all because Bernbach used contrast to the hilt.
His Beetle campaign was completely different to how everyone else was advertising cars at the time. And that contrast was what captured people’s attention.
Which just goes to show...
To stand out from a screaming crowd, you don’t necessarily have to shout louder than everyone else. In fact, you probably can’t. What might get you the most attention, ironically, is being more subdued than those screaming around you.
For proof, just look at this image:
Which flower automatically draws your eye?
Probably the blue one. And that’s despite the fact that it’s shorter, smaller, and duller-looking.
That’s because our brains are programmed to notice contrast - that which is different. Not necessarily the biggest, the loudest, or the most brightly coloured. But different.
And there’s many different ways to apply this “contrast principle” to your email marketing:
When all your competitors are talking about how great their product or service is, you talk about your reader’s problems instead…
When all your competitors are sending boring “How To” emails, you send entertaining stories instead…
When all your competitors are emailing their list once a week because they’re scared of annoying them, you send daily emails that bond your list to you much faster…
And so on…
Copying what other people are doing may seem like the “safe” play, but in business copying is anything but safe. In fact, there’s no faster way to make yourself irrelevant.
Anyway, that’s something for you to chew on.
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