In this episode, we take cues from Shakespeare's "wise fool", learning how to infuse content with high-arousal emotions and shock tactics to engage and persuade.
Discover how you can drape your content in a cloak of motley and enflame your audience's emotions, adding extra impact to your marketing message.
This is more than just a journey into content creation; it's about understanding human psychology to make your story stand out and resonate with your audience.
Content cited in this episode:
Parisian Love
Think Different: Apple's 1984 Superbowl Commercial
Contagious: Why Things Catch On
---------------------------------------------
If this episode sparks off any new ideas, we would love to hear them! Please email us at info@writebusinessresults.com OR fire us a DM on social media. Links to all our favourite haunts are below:
LinkedIn:
Instagram:
In this episode, we take cues from Shakespeare's "wise fool", learning how to infuse content with high-arousal emotions and shock tactics to engage and persuade.
Discover how you can drape your content in a cloak of motley and enflame your audience's emotions, adding extra impact to your marketing message.
This is more than just a journey into content creation; it's about understanding human psychology to make your story stand out and resonate with your audience.
Content cited in this episode:
Parisian Love
Think Different: Apple's 1984 Superbowl Commercial
Contagious: Why Things Catch On
---------------------------------------------
If this episode sparks off any new ideas, we would love to hear them! Please email us at info@writebusinessresults.com OR fire us a DM on social media. Links to all our favourite haunts are below:
LinkedIn:
Instagram:
Hey, what's up guys? This is Ivan Meakin and you are listening to Content Untap, sponsored by Riot Business Results. This is the show where I go on a mission to unpack all those tiny little details that make up fantastic content. I report my findings back to you and I try and give you some practical tips that you guys can take home into your next project. If you do like what you hear, please do all those classic podcast of things you know, like share, subscribe, tell your friends about us all that kind of stuff that helps us spread the word and reach more people just like you, which is awesome. So if you wanted to have a more in-depth conversation about what you're hearing today, just set us up on LinkedIn. You can go to the Riot Business Results LinkedIn page or you can go to my own personal LinkedIn page and FireRSA DM. We can spark a whole conversation there. Thanks, guys. Let's just crack on with the episode.
Speaker 1:Back in February, I went to go see a production of the Shakespeare play, as you like it, in London. It was a really great show. I mean, I love Shakespeare, but this one actually made me feel like we're Juvenators in some way. I mean, the whole set of the world is a better place for this happy union of lovers in this mythical forest. But the thing that really caught my eye about that play is something I've been pondering for months now. It wasn't really the performance of the protagonists or this kind of complex love triangle that was developing. It was the character Touchdown the fool, the kind of gesture of the play. But buried beneath the motley and the silly prancing around on stage and the chingling of bells, there was some real wisdom being shared on stage by that fool and like an understanding of the world as the other characters didn't quite see it, and it's actually summed up best in his lines the more pity that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly. It's a really great line and to me, when I thought about it more and more, it was very clear that this figure of what kind of seems to be comic relief is so much more than that, so much more than just a respite from the trials of everyday people and just giving people a laugh, and beneath this comedic surface there was something a lot more meaningful.
Speaker 1:This is why I'm doing a podcast episode about this, because what's really interesting is that this paradox of the kind of the wise fool is a really common theme in storytelling and if we take it one step further, as we learn, there's a lot of concepts that are being played out with the material fool and Shakespeare and the fool's role in Shakespeare that can be used to great effect on your content. And this is what this episode is going to do. It's going to look back to the great bard, look at what the fool is doing in Shakespeare plays and understand how we can wrap our own content in this cloak of motley to make it stand out more and to inflame the emotions of our audience. It's going to be fun. So the first thing is often the fool is so much more than me.
Speaker 1:See, I saw that in as you like it, and after some research it became very clear to me that this fool seems to possess a kind of omniscience that other characters don't, with one foot immersed in the world of the author, the other one breaking the veil, reaching out from the story to teach us something. So, for example, in King Lear, the fool is able to comment on things that other characters care. So he protects the king, but he mocks him openly as well and possesses this understanding of events that no one else sees in the play some kind of mysterious knowledge of things to come. For instance, he's born as the king not to trust his treacherous daughters, gonario and Reagan that's the name. So why does Shakespeare use a fool to do this right? Why not use a protagonist or another character that's more important in the play to dispense wisdom, perhaps like a classic guide, like in a typical hero's journey, like a Gandalf or a Dumbledore or any other kind of classic guide that you see in these traditional story arcs? So I'm sure more scholarly folk than myself can offer a more academic answer to a lot of what I'm about to say, but for me, I think that the unassuming nature of the fool acts as a perfect vehicle for an audience to accept truths, sometimes even hard truths about their own lives. So the content's not forced on us by the fool. I think that's really important. When we see fools in Shakespeare engage with the audience on stage, we're not made to feel like we're being lectured on morality or given some kind of boring or drab monologue about our failures. I think what the fool's able to do is dispense wisdom, all under the guise of Jess, which we're only too glad to receive with a laugh and a chuckle and then ponder on later about what the hidden meaning behind his words are.
Speaker 1:And I think this is the literary form, or one form, of this idea, of the sugar-coated pill. It's that spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. So what does that mean in content? Well, lots of business owners and lots of content creators have some hidden agenda to their message. Of course they do. A business owner will want to get clients, but won't need to click on buttons. A content creator will want you to like, share, subscribe and follow them, potentially even donate to a Patreon account as well. Right, of course you do. That's how you keep your business going. That's how you become a professional content creator in many ways. So what you have to do is you have to get your audience to accept some hard truths about themselves or get them to take an action. But you're not going to be able to do that if you're constantly just force-feeding them this medicine that they don't want to take, right? So if we can code it in a spoonful of sugar or what I like to think of it, is like a cloak of Motley. If we can cloak our content in that, it's going to become much more palatable to an audience.
Speaker 1:What I find really fascinating is how the similar sort of tactic is used in marketing time and time Again. First a content creator will draw you in with a lead or a great hook, and then, once you're sitting comfortably, they do the little subtle sales tactics right. So a great example of this, and one of my favorite adverts of all time, was one that was laid out by Google actually in 2010. Now, if you haven't seen the Google advert I think they ran it through YouTube the advert titled Horizian Love. I highly recommend that you go and watch it because it is awesome. It basically tells the story of a couple who fall in love through the Google search bar. If you want to watch it, I'll put a link in the show list below, and I highly recommend you do because it's awesome. It's a very simple romantic story which is impossible not to get drawn into, and some of you may even shed a tear, and that's fair because it's incredibly charming and we're charmed by the narrative without even realizing it's an ad for Google until the end, which is crazy, because the whole ad is basically people just typing in things into the Google search bar. So great example of how cloaking your message or your marketing message. In this cloak you bring out a marketing message and they'll get them thinking about your marketing message as a fantastic example.
Speaker 1:The other great example that I have to share with you, which again I'll link in the show notes, is the 1984 Super Bowl commercial from Apple. So what's the kind of hook here? It's a really horrible, harrowing display of a dystopian world, right? Something called the straight out of Penn of Georgia, which is pretty giving the timely year of the Super Bowl commercial. 1984, basically tells the story of these mindless monochrome drones being lectured by a big screen, just like a kind of a digital tyrant, right Before being liberated, because down the aisle, this scantily clad beautiful woman with a sledgehammer running up to the screen smashing it and then the slogan they're different. So super engaging story.
Speaker 1:But the Apple didn't really care about selling features and benefits are talking about how much better they were than Microsoft, right? They basically just used a story to teach us how important it is to think different and it worked. They essentially they click their product in a cape of Motley and it worked fantastically well, right? So this got me thinking. It got me down a bit of a rabbit hole looking at this kind of stuff, to think about how we can take a leaf from Shakespeare's pages and channel like a touchstone of our own, or a version of that, in the content that we create, because essentially we need to dazzle, we need to delight, abuse, surprise our audience into absorbing a message that we want to get across, right?
Speaker 1:So again, just very quickly, let me be clear. I don't want us to trick people into reading shitty, lousy content or creating like trashflick-baked articles, okay. So if you're using this and if you're listening, make sure you have something useful to offer at the end of the day, not just bells and whistles. So that doesn't necessarily mean you have to offer a product, right, you could offer something funny or educational, or you could quality content that's not just going to make a big promise and then just overwhelm people or light to them straight up, light to them to get their attention and then not offer any kind of value at the end of it, right? So let's think about how we can do this effectively, because if you strip all of this back, what we're trying to do basically is build a world in our content that's full of high arousal, emotions or feelings, right, and that's what you chunk all of this up.
Speaker 1:This is what it is like person in love with a different campaign. What they're doing is they're triggering high states of high arousal in an audience. We want to create an environment where we can do the same thing. Right, so we can. Well, our audience can find themselves in these high arousal states, and what I mean by this is feelings of like really energetic feelings or pleasurable states, right. So from a positive perspective, that would be like joy, excitement, maybe kind of love. In a negative state, it'd be tension, anger, fear. These can be both positive and negative, right, but as long as our high arousal states and that's the important thing right, that's the important thing because if you distinguish those between low arousal states, such as like calmness, sadness, depression, we don't really want to channel those in our audiences ever because people don't take action when they're in those states. People tend to take action, whether in states of high arousal, okay, because the emotional side of the brain obviously kicks in and a lot of the times people make decisions without even considering the logic. If they're in. If those states of high arousal trigger to a certain extent, logic goes out the window, okay. So what are some examples of high arousal states.
Speaker 1:Anger, obviously, is a good one Weapon of choice, used by politicians and activists as well. Throughout history, like Che Guevara think about more up-to-date kind of people like Donald Trump use this as well to horrible effects. At any times, lots of politicians have channeled some kind of common enemy to blame for the public's problems. If you could do a similar thing in your content, if you can blame a common enemy for your audience's problems and direct their anger towards it, people are going to be far more likely to be hearing what your solution is and, by the way, this is a really common one for, like trading stocks and shares Copy. I think the Motley Fool fitting actually with the name does a lot of this. So it's not your fault. You're not making money from your current stocks. The game's rigged. I know how to fix it because I've been in the game for 20 years and I'm going to show you how there's things like that. So you're blaming something else for the audience, for your audience's problems. It's never the audience's fault, it's something else. So you can direct that anger towards that and then get people on your side chanting your message.
Speaker 1:So another one is joy from a positive perspective, if you can make people feel super happy. That's a fantastic vehicle for delivering your message. Just watch Google's example of prison enough and you'll know exactly what I mean. Okay, or you could just wait for Christmas, because John Lewis will inevitably send out one of their Christmas ads and make everyone feel happy and feel all warm and fuzzy and festive. Curiosity is another big one. If you can make an audience feel curiosity, you can get people chomping at the bit to hear what you have to say. Next, if you can lay out a mystery or a secret we did an episode about secrets a little while back so if you can chow people's curiosity, you'll get their attention, and essentially that's what you're looking for, right? What's another one? A great one.
Speaker 1:Magicians, youtubers, late night TV salesmen alike all provide elements of kind of shock in their message. In fact, late night TV is a brilliant way of learning, like how to write good sales copy, how to sell things, how to create content and like grabs people's attention. The really good TV salesmen are still amazing at doing this, and I'm pretty sure what I'm about to say next is start it off as a TV salesman, because one of my favorite examples of using shock in content is the YouTube channel Will it Blend. The company is called Blend Tech and they're essentially a company of blenders, right On the surface, not the most engaging product, probably quite boring domestic. The host of the show is basically what you'd expect, right? Some awkward looking middle-aged white dude, until he starts putting random items in blenders and seeing if they will blend. So this is the shock element of it, right, ipads, phones, batteries, lighters all manner of random items have fallen victim to Blend Tech Power and it's an addictive YouTube channel because it just shocks you. You're putting an actual brick into Blend Tech and they say Will it Blend? You're like, oh my God, will it Blend? Sends you on this shocking and surprising train which is impossible to ignore. So shock's another really good one.
Speaker 1:Okay, so how do we start to use this in content? Well, it should be pretty self-explanatory, but if you are a content or business owner, just have a think about what kind of emotion do you want to instill in your audience. Where's it joy? Do you want to get them angry at the system Because the system's rigged and you have a solution to help them break out of the night to five with your property training program? Right, if you can get them angry at the system and not blaming them blaming the fact that they've been sold a lie, something like that and offering them the answer with this new property training that is going to give them the passive income that they want, but they're not going to be chained to their desks working nine to five all the time. That's a pretty powerful message and it can inflame some emotions and inflame that anger that they may already be feeling about their current situation.
Speaker 1:Or it could be joy. It could be a story of how this couple were saving up for years and years and years to finally buy their dream home and they never could because they were stuck in this job until they committed to property, got their first deal, and now, obviously they are living the dream and able to live in the dream house. Right, something like that could inflame joy. Curiosity could have seven secrets to property success, or seven secrets to a rent to rent business model that you've never thought about before. So all of these different emotions you will be able to tell different stories with them.
Speaker 1:Okay, so your job really is to think about knowing who your audience is and knowing what gets them going. What makes them angry, what makes them happy, what gets their curiosity moving. What would shock them? You're going back to the property when. What if I made 500 pounds a month of reoccurring income from this shithole apartment, something like that, and you can show videos of how shitty the apartment was until you fixed it up and boom, now you're making some reoccurring income from it. Okay, that could be pretty shocking. So just think about ways in which you want to inflame and like, fan these emotions. Okay, use these in your content. It doesn't have to be a story, it could be a fact. You could present people with a video of some information. You could just chuck stuff into Blenders and see if it blends if you have a Blender company. So this is what I want.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to say in this episode. Like the fall is a metaphor for how you can dazzle, delight, inspire and inflame people's emotions before you basically sell them anything or deliver any kind of marketing message. Very much like the full prances around on stage in Shakespeare and you think he's funny and then all of a sudden, boom, we hit you with some knowledge bombs, which is why it's so impactful. Okay, because you've already bought into his idea, you've already engaged with him, entertained by him, and then he sells to you sell some kind of message. So, before we leave this episode, I would say just consider the fall and be wise, right? The paradox of the wise fall here?
Speaker 1:Because high arousal states are a sneak attack on our senses and if you could do this well, it will completely disarm an audience and let their guard down and then, after we've smiled and laughed along with you, we can then ponder the deeper meaning of the words, which would be a baked in sales message or thing that will get them one step closer to making that buying decision with you, right? So what I think is I think it's about not trying too hard to convince people to change. Instead, it's about delighting Will them and inflame their emotions, shock them, and if you can do that and tell great stories and present great content in that way, your content is going to be unique and it's going to be engaging. So all I ask is when you're next creating content, you pick up your pen or you're at your type, your keypad. Think of the fall, think of how you can inflame emotions and see what kind of results you get. Right, and LinkedIn me, dm me, let me know how it goes, because I'd be dying to know how this works out for you.
Speaker 1:I will leave you with one quote from the sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov, who is a brilliant writer, so if you haven't read his books, check him out. He says that, of course, is the great secret of the successful fool that he is no fool at all, and I believe that. So I hope that was useful. Guys, until next time, keep telling stories, keep hearing content and I will see you soon.
Speaker 1:Hey guys, thanks again for listening to another episode of content untapped. If you are interested in finding out what we're up to at Right Business Results or create content to grow an oil audience, please do get in touch at info at rightbusinessresultscom and we will get back to you post-haste. Secondly, if you wanted to continue the conversation about creating great content or anything that you're listening to on this show, give us a DM to the Right Business Results LinkedIn page, or you can DM my personal page and we can spark a whole new conversation about any of this stuff. We love having conversations about content. So even more than a million guys. Thanks again for listening and I will see you next time.