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The opening credits play over a long shot of a multi-story apartment complex, a series of rather drab buildings surrounding a courtyard. Set into these buildings we see window after window — some closed with curtains drawn, others giving us glimpses of the various rooms and their occupants.

We get an intriguing look at the odd but endearing collection of everyday folks living out their everyday lives in these buildings, until we finally pull back just enough to realize that we ourselves are gazing out from one of the windows — Jimmy Stewart’s window, to be exact. We then pan downward from Stewart’s face to see that he is in a wheelchair, his leg in a cast.

What is Alfred Hitchcock doing in the opening sequence of his 1954 suspense classic Rear Window? He’s hitting us with a series of revelations. He reveals our environment, then reveals our cast of characters, then reveals our star, then reveals our star’s dilemma. Stewart’s character, L.B. Jeffries, is stuck in his apartment until he heals up, with nothing better to do than observe his wacky neighbors through the window. But he gets more of a show than he’d bargained for when one neighbor’s bedridden wife vanishes from the premises overnight.

Ever seen the same technique used in marketing? You bet you have. It works for a sales letter or web page just as effectively as it does for a film. Hit your reader with a series of colorful, fascinating opening statements while keeping them just off-kilter enough to feel compelled to look further. Stewart’s character feels the same compulsion. Why is Thorwald, the neighbor, coming and going in the middle of the night carrying a suitcase? Wait, are those his wife’s jewels in the suitcase? Where did his wife go? Why is Thorwald washing the bathroom walls? Why is that dog digging so obsessively at the flower bed?…

I won’t reveal the ending, in case you’re one of the three people on the planet who haven’t seen this movie yet. But the way Hitchcock drips information at us one astonishing dollop at a time keeps us on the edge of our set — we have to know what comes next.

You want your marketing content to lead your readers by the hand in exactly the same manner. Dump the whole load of information on them right from the start and it will just land with a thud, like the movie trailer that reduces a two-hour drama to a series of sound bites and car crashes. You have to build your story from one point to the next, giving your reader time to absorb each one.

That’s how you build suspense — in the movies, and in marketing.

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

Ah, the lovable anti-hero. We’ve seen many incarnations of this iconic figure in the movies, including Indiana Jones, Rocky Balboa, various Ghostbusters, and practically every protagonist Tim Burton ever framed into a closeup. The anti-hero is the character you cheer for precisely because he’s not bullet-proof, the one we can relate to as a real human being. In many cases, these figures force themselves to reach beyond their ordinary mortal frailties through sheer determination, grit and moral fiber, transcending their limitations and scaling genuinely heroic heights.

And then there’s Jack Burton.

Burton, as played by Kurt Russell in John Carpenter’s 1986 film big Trouble in Little China, doesn’t bother to surpass himself — he simply is himself. The dimwitted truck driver finds himself trying to rescue his friend’s lady love, not to mention a female reporter he has his own eye on, from an evil Asian sorcerer entrenched in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The sorcerer, Lo Pan, seeks to escape from an ancient curse that can only be dispelled when a green-eyed girl agrees to marry him. (Of course the plot really doesn’t matter in a slam-bang martial-arts fantasy-comedy, so with a sigh of relief I will abandon any further attempts to recount it here.)

Jack Burton has two things going for him in this heroic quest — guts and stupidity. That’s about it. He’s lucky to have some powerful allies in his martial artist, magic-using pals, because they end up doing most of the hard work. In one scene, Burton leaps into the fray only to discover that his buddy has already taken out all the bad guys by himself. In the big climactic fight scene, he fires his gun up into the ceiling to call attention to himself — and then gets knocked unconscious by falling debris. The fight proceeds without him.

So if Jack Burton is such a moron, why do we root for him? Because he’s a fun guy to watch, his heart is in the right place, he sticks by his friends, he’s quick with a punch line, and once in a while he gets something right. (He even dispatches Lo Pan, eventually.) In other words, he’s real, warts and all.

“Warts and all” can work as a marketing approach, too. We don’t always have to trumpet ourselves, our products or our services as the greatest thing since sliced bread. We don’t necessarily have to project an air of perfection or invulnerability. Sometimes our shortcomings have their own appeal, especially if we’re upfront about them.

I’m certainly not the right solution for every copywriting need. I’m not the fastest guy in town, or the cheapest, or the most versatile, or the most experienced. But I’m open and honest with all my prospective clients about what I can and can’t do for them, and if I’m not the best guy for the job I’ll say so. People respond to that, because they know they’re dealing with a real person who will do his best. Rocky lost that first fight, remember?

Whether you’re in shipping, insurance, real estate, personal coaching, or any other trade or profession, you can always score points with your target audience by admitting that you’re human — because, after all, so are they. And human’s a pretty good thing to be, unless of course you’re an evil sorcerer.

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

“Wow,” says FBI Agent Peters to her colleague Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) the first time she meets him in the flesh. “You look a lot like your surrogate!”

No, Greer isn’t paying someone to carry his baby. Surrogates, in director Jonathan Mostow’s film of the same name, are lifelike androids built to live out the everyday lives of humans, who direct the surrogates’ actions through a mental link. See, now that practically everyone in the world can afford a synthetic lookalike, humans need no longer face work-related injuries, traffic accidents or other hazards. People sit or recline safely at home, connected to an electronic interface that lets them see, hear and feel through their surrogates’ artificial senses and perform their daily tasks via surrogate arms and legs. You can even customize your surrogate with any features you prefer — and of course this has led to a society peopled (surrogated?) by model-gorgeous men and women. That’s why Greer’s partner is so surprised. Who would want to look like himself?

Greer’s wife certainly wouldn’t. Maggie Greer lives with disfiguring scars from an old accident, or rather she refuses to live with them. She stays in her locked bedroom, interacting with the world — and with her husband — only through her blandly pretty surrogate. But Greer doesn’t want a surrogate. He wants his wife, the woman he fell in love with and married. He wants the real person hiding behind the image.

When you create a brand for your business, you build a persona, an avatar designed to project a calculated image to your target market. That image is the public face of your company. If you run a personality-based business, however, your clients will ignore generic branding statements. They want to know and work with you, based on your skills, experience and personal values. People work with me, for instance, because of my track record, the fact that I’m easy to work with, reliable and so on. I am my brand.

If people respond to your business specifically because they respond to you as an individual, than you must try to make your own positive traits shine through your company’s branding. Make sure your surrogate walks, talks and looks like you. Then when your client meets the person behind the image, they won’t feel surprise or disappointment — just a comforting familiarity.

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

Ever feel like you’re repeating the same day over and over again — and not a particularly pleasant or productive one? Has the groundhog gotten a glimpse of its shadow and high-tailed it for the comfort of his living room, leaving you to experience more of the same old situation instead of looking forward to a change? If so, then you’ll sympathize with Bill Murray’s character in the movie Groundhog Day, even if you don’t like him much.

That’s TV weatherman Phil Connor’s problem, in fact — he’s just not a likable guy. in fact, he’s an arrogant grump who resents his assignment to cover celebrity groundhog Punxsatawnie Phil’s prediction for winter’s end. The only way his February 2nd could get any worse would be if it happened again. And then the morning, it happens again, and again and again. He keeps having the same conversations with the same people until he’s literally ready to kill himself.

Eventually, however, Connor realizes that this bizarre Groundhog Day has its upside, because he has an opportunity to become the kind of man his beautiful news producer Rita would find ideal. He spends February 2nd after February 2nd learning to speak French, create ice sculptures, play the piano and so forth. Along the way he comes to know and appreciate the people around him. By the time the calendar finally does start moving forward again, he’s a new and better person.

If you feel paralyzed in your attempts to grow and market your business, maybe it’s because you’re trying to master everything at once. A full-scale marketing campaign, for instance, can be an intimidating thing to envision, build, launch and manage. I don’t now about you, but when I see an insurmountable hurdle dead ahead, I stop in my tracks and think twice before surmounting it.

At times like these it may help to take a page from Phil Connor’s playbook. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, goes the old joke. Director Harold Ramis estimates that Connor relives at least 30 or 40 years of Groundhog Days to master all the new skills he displays. You can become effective at marketing your business in far less time than that, and you can do it incrementally. Get the website done. Get your print marketing looking sharp. Learn how to use social media. Sharpen your networking skills.

If you screw up you can always make repairs, learn from the experience and keep going. But unless you do something every day to move forward and improve your marketing knowledge and skills, your business will remain frozen in place, experiencing the same day over and over again. Phil Connor broke out of that loop — and so can you.

Here’s to an early spring!

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

In keeping with the recent Halloween festivities, I decided to re-watch the 1963 Robert Wise film The Haunting. This film enjoys a reputation as one of the few genuinely spooky examples of the “haunted house” genre. The history of the house in question contributes as much to the air of dread as the mysterious cold spots, horrific banging noises and midnight mutterings inside the walls.

A group of visitors monitor these eerie events in an effort to capture evidence of the supernatural. Hill House has remained unchanged since its deranged owner built it 90 years before; his daughter lived in the same grotesquely-decorated nursery from childhood through old age. And now that its former occupants have all died in it, the house itself has grown a personality, one literally set in stone. Sure, the nursery can be refurnished and repainted, but the source of its gloom lies deeper.

What scares us about haunted houses, anyway? Is it the idea that long-silenced voices continue to ring out, that the wishes of the dead and buried still hold sway there? Perhaps we hate the thought that the ghosts of the past can manipulate the present.

Does your business resemble a haunted house?

Think about it. You’ve grown and evolved over the years, and so has your company. And yet your marketing remains rooted in the world of What Was. Oh, you’ve refined the logo, maybe tweaked the brochure copy a few times, but the face lift hasn’t taken. The Ghost of Marketing Past still runs your house — and the branding that fit like a glove years ago becomes less relevant to your current business with each passing day.

Sometimes small changes yield big results, but merely changing the window dressing on your marketing may not be enough to bring your brand back into alignment with present-day reality. It may be time to call in an exorcist — to pull out the old marketing by the roots, demolishing that old house and rebuilding on a new foundation.

Halloween’s over. Evict your marketing ghosts!

For more about me, my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

As you might suspect from its title, Tim Burton’s 1996 film Mars Attacks! does not quite present the world as we know it. This nod to 1950s monster movies lives in its own special reality — a reality in which creepy Martians blast humans into skeletal husks with ray guns, the voice of Slim Whitman can turn said Martians’ heads into goo, and the President of the United States looks and sounds uncannily like Jack Nicholson. Weirdness reigns supreme as an all-star cast struggles to save Earth from a Martian invasion.

Yet even a fun-house mirror reflects a kind of truth. A prime example in this film is a scene that shows the Martians gunning people down in the streets right and left while broadcasting over a loudspeaker, “Don’t run! We are your friends!”

Ludicrous, yes. But people do it all the time, don’t they? I’m not talking about gunning each other down in the streets, though there seems to be plenty of that as well. I’m talking about mixed messages.

We do it all the time, often subconsciously. Our words say one thing, while our actions say something else. That guy giving the speech smiles serenely, but his hands are shaking. The lady testifying in court sounds absolutely sincere, but her eyes are darting nervously around the room. We do it in our everyday body language — and we do it in our marketing.

You might want to take a careful look at the various forms of messaging you employ on the Web or in your print marketing. Is the message congruent? For instance, does your website content scream excitement while the surrounding graphic design presents all the pizazz of Grandma’s faded wallpaper? Do you describe yourself as a sophisticated, upscale consultant while using whiz-bang terms better suited to a kid’s cereal box? Do you brand yourself as the friendly, caring choice in a tone that could refrigerate a side of beef?

An inconsistent message is no message at all. Conflicting statements cancel each other out to produce white noise, while statements that complement a single message amplify that message’s power. Want to make a specific impression? Align all the components of your marketing message into one unified clarion call. Otherwise you simply won’t hold people’s attention — with or without a ray gun.

Okay, maybe with a ray gun.

For more about me, my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

Akiro Kurosawa’s epic 1985 film Ran recasts Shakespeare’s immortal King Lear as a family struggle that leads to war in the days of feudal Japan. Both masterpieces, Kurosawa’s and Shakespeare’s, shed light on our capacity for self-delusion — a capacity not unnoticed by the marketing world.

In the film, Hidetora, aging warlord and patriarch of the Ichimonji family, has decided to step down and bequeath control of the Stooges clan to his eldest son, Taro, counting on the two younger brothers, Jiro and Saburo, to support Taro as the new ruler. Taro accepts the title with false modesty, while Jiro promises to go along in return for his own place in the pecking order. Saburo, however, risks his father’s wrath by denouncing the decision as unwise. Hidetora promtly banishes him, only to watch the two “obedient” brothers tear the kingdom to shreds as they wage war against each other. Hidetora even finds himself banished by order of the new man in charge, Taro, and shunned by Jiro for the sake of political expediency.

Well, as those of you who know your Shakespeare would expect, Hidetora sees the error of his ways and finally reconciles with his youngest, still-faithful son. Drama critics will see Hidetora/Lear as a victim of his own vanity. Marketing professionals will recognize him as a guy who heard what he wanted to hear — instead of the truth.

How many times have we fallen for a too-good-to-be-true description of products and services, only to discover that the dazzling ads either omitted the downside of the proposition or couched it in microscopic “fine print?” I once helped write and produce a cell phone commercial in which the vendor required about a zillion words of legal boiler plate underneath the beauty shot of the phone. By the time we’d wedged all the factual information into the frame, it was so unreadably tiny it resembled a gray haze rather than text. Nobody could possibly bother with all that stuff — and anyway, just look at this beautful phone! Sure, the “special value” requires a two-year contract, full data plan, first-born child, et cetera. Anyway, just look at this beautful phone!…

Want to truly stand out? Tell the truth, if you dare. Be the company that says, “Look, we don’t promise you the moon and the stars. But here’s what we do give you, and we stand behind it.” Be the Anti-hype. Prospects who respond to straight shooting will reject Brand X and turn to you. Prospects who fell for the Brand X glitz and got burned will also turn to you. And your reputation will soar along with your profits.

We foolish humans sometimes have a tendency to shoot the messenger, even when deep down we really do want to hear the truth. But if you’re willing to look down the barrel of that gun without flinching, you may be the one judged worthy before the final credits roll.

For more about me, my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

Repo Man, the amusing story of a kid named Otto’s accidental entry into the bizarre world of car repossession, has earned its status as a cult classic, in part from its refusal to follow the standard connect-the-dots formula of a Hollywood comedy. It stands out by virtue of its sheer originality — while making its own sharp comment on the lack of originality in our society.

One of the funnier running gags in the movie involves the generic branding on every single consumer product seen on store shelves or kitchen countertops. Beer cans sport plain white labels with the word “BEER.” A liquor store shootout destroys several bottles labeled “LONDON DRY GIN.” One moment singled out in Roger Ebert’s review of the film shows Otto entering his kitchen and opening the fridge door to reveal a cluster of generic goods, then digging into a can marked “FOOD – MEAT FLAVORED.”

Do you buy generic products? I do, when I see no meaningful difference in product quality. A company that doesn’t at least imply some particular feature or advantage will lose out to the generic with the lowest price.

What kind of brand identity scores points? Any kind that speaks to your audience. To many people, for instance, a paper towel is a paper towel. But some brands absorb more fluid, others look prettier, and still others make responsible use of recycled paper. Any of these sales points could very well be the deal-breaker for certain consumers. The brands that make these claims don’t want to compete over price — they want to capture the loyalty of a defined target market. That’s why they have names like Brawny (it’s tough!) or Ultra-Posh (it’s soft!) or Ecolo-Wipe (it’s green! — okay, I’m making some of these up, but you get the idea).

Do you have a brand that appeals to your target market, or are you Brand X? Not all of my clients know what sets them apart from their competitors. I’ll ask them what makes their product or service special, and they’ll stumble like crazy to find something. If you don’t know what makes your product unique, then you can’t aim it at a segment of the population. You get lost in the shuffle.

And before you know it, you’re a punchline in a cult movie.

Barton Fink is a serious author, and therein lies his problem. In this 1991 film by the Coen brothers, Barton (John Turturro) has just made his first big splash as a New York playwright. It’s 1941, and Barton has a burning desire to write meaningful plays about “the common man.” He has high ideals, so it’s no wonder that he hesitates over an offer to write screenplays for Capitol Pictures in Hollywood. When he shows up at the studio’s gates, the manic, overbearing head of the studio, Jack Lipnick, immediately assigns him to a wrestling picture for actor Wallace Beery. The premise: “Big men — in tights!”

In the course of the film, alongside a series of bizarre, surrealistic events that I wouldn’t think of spoiling for you, Barton takes it on himself to bring a little “common man” nobility to the wrestling-picture genre, crafting a literate, sensitive story of the wrestler’s inner struggle — a man “wrestling with his soul.” He delivers the finished script to the studio as the finest thing he’s ever done.

And of course Lipnick hates it. “It’s a wrestling picture. The audience wants to see WRESTLING, and lots of it!” He all but fires Barton, keeping him on the payroll on the odd chance he can be molded into the kind of writer the studio can use — one that makes the product he’s asked to make.

And you know what? Lipnick is right. He’s right because he understands that his audience is right.

We have to give audiences what they want, not what we think they need — or what we think is profound or brilliant or funny. Playwright George S. Kaufman once recalled being furious with an audience for never laughing at a “hilarious” line, until it finally dawned on him that maybe it would be easier to fix the line than to fix the audience. He ended up doing all right for himself.

If the writing gets the desired result, then it’s right. If it doesn’t, then it’s wrong. This simple rule holds true for playwriting, for screenwriting — and for copywriting.

Heck, it’s even true for wrestling. They use writers too, you know.

Sometimes the most magical films are the ones with no magic in them — at least not “magic” in the storybook sense. The Japanese animated film Whisper of the Heart contains no magic spells, wizards, witches, demons or gods, and with the exception of one fanciful dream sequence it remains rooted in the real world of a few middle-class kids and adults in 1990s Tokyo. And yet there is magic here — the magic of people deciding what they want to be when they grow up and then transcending themselves to make it happen.

Shizuku loves books. While her classmates occasionally hit the school library to do their homework or prepare for their high-school entrance exams, she’s there every day reading story after story. She also enjoys writing poems and song lyrics for her friends, and they seem impressed by her skill. But that’s as far as it goes, until one day she realizes that someone named Amasawa has already checked out all the books she’s currently reading.

Intrigued by this mysterious stranger with similar literary tastes, she decides to find out who he is. Seiji Amasawa turns out to be a classmate she’s never even talked to before, except to trade the occasional insult. The real surprise occurs when she learns that this “typical teenager” builds violins — and he’s serious enough about it to apply to a school in Cremona, Italy, the Mecca of violin making. As she slowly falls for this ambitious boy, she realizes that she’s reached a crossroads in her life. He has a dream — does she? He’s going halfway across the world for 10 years’ hard study to become a violin maker — is she ready to get serious about becoming a writer?

Shizuku makes a decision to push herself by writing her first full-length story in the two months that Seiji is visiting Italy for his initial evaluation as an apprentice. Anyone who has ever pushed themselves into uncharted territory will recognize the image of the girl slumped over her desk 24 hours a day, pen in hand, neglecting her schoolwork, not eating, not (intentionally) sleeping, and scared to death she doesn’t have it in her after all. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, she hates the story’s second half, she’s ready to burst into tears when she hands the manuscript to Seiji’s kindly old grandpa to read — but she’s done it. She’s a writer.

At some point, this movie seems to say, we have to take that first step forward into the danger zone of What Am I without waiting for the bright light of certainty to illuminate our path. I believe that’s true. It’s true for writers, violin makers, entrepreneurs, or anyone else who seeks to transform his or her life.

This movie reminded me of how scary it can be to write that first story or attempt that new thing, whatever it may be. Writing is frightening. Going for what we want is frightening. Living is frightening — if we’re doing it right.