Perspective, Perception, and Your Next Marketing Campaign
The Copywriter Column #113
The best copywriters are disciplined in the art of self awareness – the ability to recognize their own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.
Why? Because if you want to succeed in marketing, then you need to be able to remove yourself from the equation. This is where learning the difference between perception and perspective is useful.
Perception is your interpretation of the world around you.
It’s an amalgamation of your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, experiences, relationships, and more.
Andrew Bustamante says, there is no advantage to your perception, and when it comes to marketing and copywriting, I completely agree.
Perceptions can cloud your judgment, affect your creativity, and get in the way of the jobs to be done. This is why it’s so important for copywriters to practice the art of self awareness. When you’re aware of what your perceptions are in the first place, you can step outside of them.
Perspective, then, is the ability to observe the world outside of yourself.
It’s fuel? Curiosity.
It’s your ability to ask the right questions in an attempt to understand the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, experiences, etc. of those you’re seeking to interact with.
It’s one of the reasons I believe empathy is a copywriter’s secret weapon. It allows you to truly sit in the shoes of someone else.
I write about it here and here.
I’m not alone in this. For centuries, philosophers, great thinkers, and other leaders have understood the distinctions between perception and perspective.
Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.
– Epictetus
You have power over your mind–not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
– Marcus Aurelius
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
– Henry David Thoreau
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
– Anias Nin
Empathy begins with understanding life from another person’s perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It’s all through our own individual prisms.
– Sterling K. Brown
Compassion does not just happen. Pity does, but compassion is not pity. It’s not a feeling. Compassion is a viewpoint, a way of life, a perspective, a habit that becomes a discipline…
– Glennon Doyle Melton
Clearly, you can see the value this has not just for marketing, but for living a richer, fuller life too, right?
So next time you sit down to write that next marketing campaign, stop. Take note of your perception, your perspective, and do your due diligence to sit in the shoes of those you’re reaching out to so you can better understand how they see the world.
Breathe that into the words you write and you’ll no doubt have a bigger impact.
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