Why a Bespoke Approach Really Matters

Daniel Love
Sep 24
4 min read

Person hand-working a vase on a potter's wheel.

Issue #3

This week we’re focusing on personalised content, targeting messaging and exclusive offerings. This approach is important because it helps your business stand out in a crowded market, build authentic connections with your audience, and create a lasting identity that competitors can’t easily replicate.

Brand Spotlight

Second Hand September

Swedish solid oak armchair by Bröderna Andersson reimagined by Hannah Refaat in a boro-inspired fabric.

Vinterior has worked alongside TOAST, Madeleine Kemsley, Drake’s and Tess Newall to handpick a vintage piece and reimagine it in their own creative language. The result is a capsule collection of one-of-a-kind creations – part furniture, part artwork.

TOAST selected a Swedish solid oak armchair by Bröderna Andersson for its clean lines, organic form and functionality, collaborating with artist Hannah Refaat to reimagine it in a boro-inspired fabric. Using waste indigo from garment production, they applied traditional Japanese patchworking and sashiko stitching to create a one-of-a-kind piece. The ‘Own the only one’ CTA in the marketing email was the chef's kiss of this personal and endearing campaign.

See the collection here.

Hot Tip

Marketing Mistakes Made Time (and Time) Again

Sending everything to everyone.
Pushing discounts instead of adding value.
Following best practice blindly.
Trying to say everything all at once.
Treating campaigns as one-offs instead of part of a journey.

Email marketing isn’t broken, it just needs more intention.

Free Resource

Try this exercise…

Think of a number between 1 and 10. Double it. Add 8. Now, halve it. And subtract the number you first thought of.

Convert your secret number to the corresponding letter of the alphabet (1=A, 2=B etc).

Now choose any country that starts with that letter. Remember the country.

From that letter move one letter on in the alphabet and choose an animal that starts with this new letter. Remember the animal.

Now think of the colour of that animal. Remember the colour.

You should have:

A country.
An animal.
A colour.

Amazing. I’ll come back to this later on, promise!

This is actually the way a lot of marketing and copy decisions are made. It’s not quite Derren Brown, and it is just a simple trick, but it’s an odd strategy to rely on for anything more complex.

You might be surprised to discover just how rarely businesses invest in customer research. Instead they prefer to guess, make assumptions, and build personas. Because there are so many more important costs to budget for. Or are there?

This tactic leads to:

Copy no one reads.
Websites that aren’t effective.
Products that don’t attract paying customers.
Marketing that takes a lot of time and money, but doesn’t produce results.

Clearly you can create personas and to be useful they must be memorable, easy to digest, and relevant for decision making. But why not get information straight from the horse’s mouth? Talk to the target audience. If you can get inside your customers’ heads then you will know exactly how to grab their attention and solve their problems.

And it’s so easy:

Customer surveys can be built in minutes and sent in seconds using free online survey tools (e.g. SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Google Forms).
Customer reviews [your own or competitors’] are easily accessible and can be mined for customer appropriate language and ideas.
Even interviews can be constructed and conducted with a small sample of the target audience to get a fair impression of genuine needs, pain points and challenges

High converting copy does not start with copy. High converting copy starts with customer research because the copywriter is never going to dream up copy that resonates more with your customers’ than their own thoughts, beliefs, words, phrases.

Now add in some psychology

There’s a twist to this that we need to remember. We’re all consummate liars, whether we realise it or not.

Think of the way people tweak the truth (or worse) on a dating site for example. One analysis of male user profiles discovered that the average height was two inches taller than the population average.

Even when we don’t mean to lie, we don’t always know our true motivations. We may think we’re choosing French or German wine freely, but actually we are likely to be swayed by the type of music playing on the supermarket loudspeaker system.

How to make use of this deceitful data:

Statistics might need to be analysed and probed for insights. Don’t always take the results at face value.
Surveys can be prepped for the liars. Ask how respondents think other people might behave. This often leads to more accurate results.
Don’t ask if you can observe. Instead, either ask slightly varied questions to different groups of respondents or monitor behaviour in a realistic setting.
Use found data. Google search is very revealing (‘is my son gifted’ was found to be 2.5x more likely to be googled than ‘is my daughter gifted’. People clearly tell the whole truth to their go-to search engine.

Just in case you still feel that mind reading is the way to go for planning what you want to write on that landing page, let me show that simple trickery can work.

Were you by any chance thinking of a grey elephant from Denmark?

I don’t think I’d want to rely on it for more than a party trick though.

Let’s Connect

For advice on your personal content strategy, click below.

BOOK A CALL

Until next time,

Daniel

Brand Consultant | Content Editor | Digital Developer