John Cocktosen

A lot of people have asked me how to get to the third layer of understanding your buyer. If you haven’t seen that post, I’ll plug it below. Now let me break it down… Layer one, what people say they want, is easy… Because they’ll tell you. Whether it’s in surveys, interviews, comments, reviews, etc. Stuff like “I want to make more money,” “I want to lose weight.” Layer two, what they actually want but won’t say, takes more work. You get there by watching what people do, not what they say. For instance, don’t trust a relative who says they’ll buy your product when you launch your business. Trust the one who asks how he can pay for it. You also get there by being observant in conversations. People reveal their real beliefs by accident, while talking about something else. There’s this story from my book Quiet Persuasion that illustrates this. This girl I know was gossiping about another woman I had just met. They work in the same field, so she heard the stories: the woman’s husband was a massive cheater who got caught multiple times. When I asked why she was still married to him, my friend said “Well I don’t know, but I guess when your husband buys you a Porsche for your birthday, you tend to look the other way.” The thing is, these two women had never met. My friend had no inside knowledge. She just heard the cheating stories through work and filled in the rest herself. But her speculation told me more about her own beliefs than the other woman’s. She’d never admit it openly of course, but what she was essentially saying is that she’d tolerate cheating herself if her husband was wealthy enough. And that’s layer two. The beliefs people reveal without realizing they’re revealing them. Layer three is the deepest, and you won’t get it from a conversation. Layer three is understanding that most people carry old emotional wounds, often from childhood, that shape what they buy without them knowing it. In my book I call these schemas. The guy who keeps buying status symbols is not looking for a watch. He might be trying to drown out a feeling of defectiveness he’s carried since he was young. The woman who buys every self-improvement course is not looking for tactics. She’s trying to prove she’s not the failure someone once told her she would be. You don’t need to become a therapist to write to this layer. You just need to ask yourself one question: What is this person trying to feel, or stop feeling, that has nothing to do with my product? Answer that, and you’re talking to a deep, deep part of them. Now, you never write this out loud in your copy, obviously… You never write “buy this so your dad stops thinking you’re a failure,” because, first of all, maybe it’s not their dad. Maybe it’s their mom, their uncle, a teacher. Second, this would break the spell. What you do instead is describe a scene where that wound shows up. The morning he caught his reflection and didn’t recognize himself. Or the time he couldn’t buy his kid the toy he asked for. Or the night he realized his “someday” only had a few years left. You describe that scene precisely enough, and he doesn’t read it. He relives it. And once he’s back in that feeling, your solution becomes more than a product: it’s the way out of something he’s been carrying for a long time. That’s layer three in practice. You never name the wound. You touch it.