Open the way through the heart

Back in the 1940s and 50s…

Norman B. Norman was an ad exec who worked with famous brands you’re likely familiar with like Revlon, Chanel, and Colgate-Polmolive.

Back then, marketers didn’t learn their stuff from Claude.

They often learned what worked from door-to-door salesmen. And here’s a story that, I’ll be honest with you, I can’t fully verify… but it’s too good not to tell, so here it goes.

Norman, as legend has it, would go knock on doors himself to do market research.

Because when someone cracks the door open, you’ve got maybe six to ten words max before they grab you by the arm, drag you inside, and demand you tell them about your offer or otherwise slam the door in your face.

So yeah, six to ten words, about the length of a standard headline.

And that whole pitch has to land hard enough that a total stranger will hear you out and what you have to say.

This is where a lot of today’s marketing and advertising principles were born.

And Norman took it all a step further with something he pioneered called “emotional advertising”. His whole philosophy boiled down into one single sentence: Open the way through the heart, not the head.

In other words, don’t lead with logic, lead with what your reader already feels and build a single, preemptive selling proposition around the whole thing.

Anyway, I’m reminded of all this recently because of a copywriter I met years ago inside Alen Sultanic’s “Nothing Held Back” Facebook group who offered to critique some of my sales page copy for free. Since then, we’ve stayed in touch and I just got a call with him the other day to talk about how he’s planning to expand his offerings.

And one thing he taught me way back then has stuck with me ever since.

He said you can treat the headline on the top of your sales page like something you’d say to someone immediately after knocking on their door. Imagine you blurt it out to a complete stranger through their screen door with no setup, no context, just that single solitary line all by itself.

Do they go, "huh… tell me more"?

Or do they go, "yeah, I have no idea what that means" and shut the door?

That's the whole test.

And it's humbling, because most headlines fail. They only make sense if you've already read three paragraphs above them. Which, whether you’re standing on a doorstep, or landing at the top of a sales page, you don't get.

Anyway, that's the lesson for today.

Next time you go to write a headline, imaging you’re knocking on somebody’s door first, and they open that thing up, you say…

Say it loud, see if it lands while talking to a total stranger.

Did they let you in or not?

And I don’t really have anything to promote to you today, but I will offer you this. If you’ve got a sales page you happen to be working on and you want some feedback on the headline, I’ll take a look. Just reply to this email with the link.

Talk soon,

Kevin Hood