Identity and desire angles

Use these when choosing the angle (big idea) for a page, ad or offer — especially when the product isn’t objectively better. All from Joanna Wiebe (Joanna Wiebe), illustrated with famous campaigns.

TL;DR

• Hold up a mirror, not your product: reflect the customer’s self-perception before explaining what the product does (Dove Real Beauty Sketches)¹².
• Sell a bigger, scarier mouse, not a better mousetrap: make the underlying problem more urgent, costly or embarrassing (Listerine turned “halitosis” into a social disaster)².
• Show the lived experience, funny or painful (Poo-Pourri “Girls Don’t Poop”)²³.
• Sell the dream behind the purchase (“They laughed when I sat down at the piano…”)³.
• Remove blame: relieve guilt or shame; “it’s not your fault” (Always #LikeAGirl)⁴. Ben Bennett’s “blame shift” hook is the ad version (Headline hooks and choosing a copy framework).
• Take the cap off: never make anything look like work — audit CTAs and signup flows for anything they don’t need to hear yet⁵⁶.

Details

Five imagination methods (from “The Secret Ways to Sell Anything”)⁷:

Method	What it does	Example	Question to ask
Flip the status	Reframe the part of the category people quietly look down on as a mark of taste	Nespresso (Clooney, boutiques) beat technically superior Tassimo barcode pods78	What do people in this space feel a little embarrassed about?
Hijack the myth	Attach the brand to a story already installed in the audience’s minds	Marlboro and the cowboy910	What myth already runs in my customer’s head?
Open the hidden door	Teach people a world with its own language so they become “literate” — then generic options feel beneath them	Blue Bottle’s free brewing video course1112	What does my industry know that would make someone feel smarter?
Build the ritual	Turn a dull touchpoint into a small repeatable ceremony	Starbucks’ name on the cup; Patagonia repairs1314	Which dull moment — checkout, onboarding email, confirmation page, delivery notification — could feel like something?
Give them a superpower	Make them feel more capable than they believed	Stripe (“you can build now”), Twilio1516	What could my customer do after finding me that they believed they couldn’t?

For landing pages: these shape the hero and the problem section — e.g. a course page that mirrors the student’s identity (“for marketers who already know the basics”, Nine copy triggers by funnel stage), dimensionalises the cost of the problem, then names the mechanism (Name a problem mechanism and a solution mechanism). The ritual method is a reminder that the confirmation page and post-purchase emails are part of the sale.

Disagreements / caveats

• These are brand-campaign case studies (often decades old, big budgets); direct-response pages still need proof, offer and a clear CTA.
• “Bigger, scarier mouse” and shock tactics can turn manipulative; Ben Bennett insists on speaking to existing anxieties rather than creating them (Why ads get clicks but no conversions).

See also

• Headline hooks and choosing a copy framework

Footnotes

1. 25 Years of Copywriting Advice in 25 Minutes @ 06:00 — Joanna Wiebe ↩

2. 25 Years of Copywriting Advice in 25 Minutes @ 07:31 — Joanna Wiebe ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. 25 Years of Copywriting Advice in 25 Minutes @ 09:06 — Joanna Wiebe ↩ ↩²

4. 25 Years of Copywriting Advice in 25 Minutes @ 10:41 — Joanna Wiebe ↩

5. 25 Years of Copywriting Advice in 25 Minutes @ 12:14 — Joanna Wiebe ↩

6. 25 Years of Copywriting Advice in 25 Minutes @ 13:24 — Joanna Wiebe ↩

7. The Secret Ways To Sell ANYTHING As A Creative @ 00:00 — Joanna Wiebe ↩ ↩²

8. The Secret Ways To Sell ANYTHING As A Creative @ 00:48 — Joanna Wiebe ↩

9. The Secret Ways To Sell ANYTHING As A Creative @ 01:42 — Joanna Wiebe ↩

10. The Secret Ways To Sell ANYTHING As A Creative @ 03:19 — Joanna Wiebe ↩

11. The Secret Ways To Sell ANYTHING As A Creative @ 04:05 — Joanna Wiebe ↩

12. The Secret Ways To Sell ANYTHING As A Creative @ 05:39 — Joanna Wiebe ↩

13. The Secret Ways To Sell ANYTHING As A Creative @ 05:39 — Joanna Wiebe ↩

14. The Secret Ways To Sell ANYTHING As A Creative @ 07:13 — Joanna Wiebe ↩

15. The Secret Ways To Sell ANYTHING As A Creative @ 08:00 — Joanna Wiebe ↩

16. The Secret Ways To Sell ANYTHING As A Creative @ 09:31 — Joanna Wiebe ↩