The Persuasion Power of IMperfection

It turns out in the larger world of culture and fashion, we’ve reached a breaking point. This is important for copywriting because of something we’ve always known and practiced, and today we’re going to take a wide-ranging look at the opposing forces of perfection, which is not real, and authenticity, which is not perfect.

Both perfection and authenticity have been used to sell stuff.

And we’ve seen a lot of people, especially in social media, stretching notions of perfection about as far as it can go.

So the perfection trend seems to have reached the breaking point I was just talking about.

I saw this in an interesting article exploring the trend in Bloomberg Businessweek:
“We’ve been looking at perfect faces and vacations and homes on Instagram for more than 15 years, and on TikTok for most of a decade, during which time creators have pursued new audiences by pushing what already works further toward a logical extreme—the uncanny perfection of everything.

“At this point so little is left to upgrade, they’re now positing ways to improve the color of one’s armpit skin.”

The article is titled “The Optimization Backlash Has Begun,” and it’s all about how people are really getting tired of having images and standards of false perfectionism rammed down their throats.

Writer Amanda Mull took a good look at the new trend: Showing your flaws as part of marketing, movies and social media.

We’ll go much further than the recent past to set the stage, and then burrow into some great ways you can take advantage of this trend in your copy and video marketing.

RESOURCE:

The Persuasion Story Code

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CFD2KXNQ