As marketers, coming up with just the right ad copy, the perfect turn of phrase, the clever but understated sales pitch… that’s the art in what we do, right?
But what if we could reproduce it… measure it with a metric: Turn that art into science.
Consider an ad for recruitment. Two versions:
- Apply today to join a great team! and
- Join a great team, apply today!
They’re almost the same, right? But the structure of that offer, known as the syntax, is different. Can you tell which one would get more job applications?
Selin Atalay can. She is a Professor of Marketing at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management in Frankfurt. She recently co-authored a research paper called Creating Effective Marketing Messages Through Moderately Surprising Syntax.
Tod spoke with her earlier this week.
DR. ATALAY: There's so much competition now for consumers' attention and consumers taking action, be it in the form of clicking on a headline, clicking on an ad, or opening an email and reading it.
So we started thinking: What are the drivers of getting people to do what you want them to do in a message? How can you design effective communication so that people do what you want them to do?
A lot of our attention so far has been paid into the style of the message — how is it communicated? What are the words that you choose? How do you make the story interesting? What's the story that you tell? [Marketers] think a lot about the content.
But [marketers] don't pay as much attention to how we formulate the words.
Of course, there's some research in syntax and its complexity, but we thought, there seems to be more to it.
TOD: Your findings came down to something called “syntactic surprise.” What does that mean?
DR. ATALAY: Let me explain with an example. The way we process language is word by word. So as words come to us, we start building it up. Each word we encounter, in our minds, we set an expectation as to what is going to come next.
For example, if I start with “I”, then you would probably expect that I'm going to say “I am.” And if I say “I am,” you expect that I'm going to say “I am Selin”. This is how we process.
[To use a marketing example,] if I say “Amazon,” and I say “Amazon delivers,” then you start expecting that I'm going to say some [products]. This is the most common expectation that you would have.
Surprises is when whatever you say is not compliant with the expectations.
So if I continue “Amazon delivers” with “Amazon delivers fast,” that's not what you expected.
It's not wrong. It is still correct to say “Amazon delivers fast” or “Amazon delivers reliably,” but it's unexpected. It's surprising. And that does something to the brain….
If it's unexpected, I'm intrigued, I keep paying attention. But if it's too unexpected, I don't know what to do with it; I check out. So it's finding that happy, moderate place.
TOD: It doesn't sound easy.
DR. ATALAY: It's not. That's why we had to develop a metric to help people out.
In their full conversation, Tod and Selin talk about the details of that metric, the online calculator she built to help copywriters identify their own level of syntactic surprise — that’s a calculator you can use for free, by the way — plus her thoughts on how this works for offline media, and how AI-generated copy could change the marketing industry. Their full conversation is coming exclusively to the Premium feed tomorrow. You can sign up now by going to TodayInDigital.com/premium.
