In 1973 Israel fought the Yom-Kippur war, the bloodiest and most traumatic war inflicted upon the state in its 70 years of history. To this day, 45 years later, we remember our many brothers and sisters who have died, and we as a state still lick our wounds vowing to never forget how we were caught off guard, on the brink of total annihilation.
If you don’t know what Yom-Kippur is, this is the day when we Jews fast and contemplate on our sins and bad deeds of the past year, asking for forgiveness from God and our fellow man.
And that was exactly why our enemies chose this day to start that war…
Imagine the horror of being attacked in the midst of such a day, physically and mentally weak and expecting –
Overnight Israel’s borders were breached by swarms of Arab tank regiments, hurtling towards Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv. By sheer luck, bravery and resolve (or the hand of God if you will) the country was saved from destruction.
One true act of courage and ingenuity of a tank commander named Tzvika goes like this:
The “Tzvika team” was a tank platoon of one – just one Israeli tank (that’s all there was at the battlefield at the time) who, in the dead of night, was facing alone a whole Syrian tank platoon, numbering about a half a dozen tanks.
Alone in the dark, with no hope of any kind of backup, commander Tzvika reached deep in his trick bag to find a way to evade certain death –
Here’s what happened – he created an illusion as though there’s a massive Israeli tank battalion there with him, causing the enemy to stop dead in their tracks, and even retreat.
Now how the hell did he do that?
Under the camouflage of the dark (remember this was back in ’73 – there were no night vision capabilities back then), he used a tactic taught in every military tank commanders school today –
He fired his main cannon and quickly moved his vehicle in the dark to a different position and fired his cannon again from that new position and so on and so forth.
What the enemy saw was cannons being fired towards them from different angles, making them believe there are several vehicles tactically situated before them.
They got the feeling they stepped into an Israeli tank ambush, and turned around and fled the scene.
Now think of what really happened here for a moment –
Firing from different angles, commander Tzvika persuaded the enemy to believe in an illusion, intensified by their pure imagination, reversing the whole story here – causing the strong enemy to feel weak, halt, turn around, and run away scared.
Now here’s where this all ties up to your business and how you can create such an intense vision in your prospect’s mind –
In his famous masterpiece “Breakthrough Advertising”, the great Eugene Schwartz writes about the concept of Intensification –
the way to focus and magnify your prospect’s desire for your product or service through repetition – describing your product differently from different angles, i.e. firing your product from different angles to create a vivid picture of it in your prospect’s mind.
So how can you use that concept for your sales promotion?
Instead of hitting only your prospect’s main hidden desire for your product (which must be there initially or your not going to sell him anything), try to think of all the various ways your product affects your prospect’s life. Bring them into the picture and describe how their lives will be using your product.
Through the sales copy, you want to draw vivid pictures of those scenes – you never know which of these your prospect will relate to the most.
I encourage you to go deep here and think of the emotions that can be tied into the picture to increase the emotional weight of the promotion to the max.
As long as you can do this without having the prospect feel like he’s reading the same thing over and over again (because that’s when you bore him and killed the sale), the more they read the more they’ll be drawn to your product, i.e. the more you’ve intensified their desire and so the more they’ll want to buy it.
The last tip for this article from the greatest living copywriter, Gary Bencivenga –
Many copywriters are afraid to write long copy because they think it diminishes readability.
That only holds true if you bore your prospect until he can’t stand it and stops reading.
The truth is, whenever Gary maid his sales letters longer – the better it pulled sales.
Outworking your competitors is a sure way of beating them.
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