Artist M.C. Escher sketched “impossible” architecture.
Maybe you’ve seen his work? His three-dimensional buildings boggle the mind because, physically, they couldn’t exist. Escher used angles and shading to trick the mind into seeing, and believing, something impossible:
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Inconceivable shapes.
Stairs leading back to themselves.
Water moving at once toward and away from the viewer.
These illusions can’t exist in 2D. The richness and depth and realism of Escher’s work is only possible in three dimensions.
This concept (i.e., more dimensions = more realism) applies in copywriting, too.
To make your copy — your words; these flat, little things — feel more real and compelling:
You must add dimension. You must dimensionalize. Not with angles and shading but by “drilling” benefits: identifying the benefit of a benefit, again and again.
My mentor, copywriting great Kim Krause Schwalm, reminds me of this almost every time we meet. She highlights something on the screen and says, “Ed, this benefit is a bit flat—”
Kim’s career started over 30 years ago at Phillips Publishing, where she worked hand-in-hand with direct-response pioneers like Clayton Makepeace and Gary Bencivenga and Tom Phillips, founder of Phillips Publishing. Today, she’s recognized among the top copywriters in the world.
“—can we dimensionalize it some more?” she says, circling the highlighted text with her cursor.
What she means is:
What is the benefit of the benefit?
And what is the benefit of that benefit?
And what is the benefit of THAT benefit?
Every time you ask and answer this question, you’ve added a dimension to your benefit. And if you keep drilling — if you keep asking yourself, “So what?” over and over — you’ll eventually arrive at the feature’s core benefit, the thing your prospect truly desires, consciously or otherwise.
For example:
Imagine I’m selling an extra-large print of M.C. Escher’s masterpiece, Ascending and Descending:
So through the process of dimensionalization, we’ve turned a flat, surface benefit around interior design into a vivid, core benefit around the prospect’s ego.
Now, which seems more compelling?
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