Every reader you'll ever have is tuned to the same station. It plays one song, all day.
Everyone's favorite radio station is called WIIFM.
That stands for What's In It For Me.
You can't change the dial. You can only get on the air.
(Marketers have long called this radio station WIIFM. I couldn't find who said it first, so call it folk wisdom, not a quote from a famous person.)
The big idea: they are not listening to you
Your reader isn't mean. They're just always busy. Their head is full of rent, kids, a boss, a cough that won't quit. I'm sure you can relate.
Then you show up with "Our company was founded in 1998." Cool story. They're gone.
So here's the puzzle. Why does a reader skip a perfectly good sentence about you but stop dead on a so-so sentence about them?
What the research says (and what it doesn't)
Psychologists have a name for part of this. In 1959 a researcher named Moray reported that some people in a listening test noticed their own name in a voice they were told to ignore. It's called the cocktail party effect.
Careful with it, though. When a 1995 team (Wood and Cowan) ran the test again, only about a third of people caught their name. So you don't always hear yourself. It's a real effect, just not a guarantee.
A cleaner finding comes from a 1977 study by Rogers, Kuiper and Kirker. People rated words in different ways. When they asked "does this word describe me?", they remembered those words best.
That's called the self-reference effect. In plain words: we remember what we connect to ourselves.
Does it prove readers have one radio station? No. But it fits. People notice and keep what feels like it's about them.
Three old copywriting stories, same lesson
Dale Carnegie and the worms.
In How to Win Friends and Influence People, Carnegie wrote: "Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms." He didn't bait the hook with what he liked. He baited it with what the fish wanted.
Robert Collier and the conversation.
You may have seen the line "Always enter the conversation already taking place in the customer's mind." That's the popular version. Collier's own book says it longer. Picture a man in a conversation. You'd listen first, then chime in with a related remark. Then bring the talk around to your point.
The drill and the hole.
You've heard "People don't want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole." It's usually pinned on famous professors. The earliest printing Quote Investigator found credits an adman named Leo McGivena, in a 1947 sales book. He added a few more: buy a car, you buy transportation. Buy a mattress, you buy sleep.
Before and after
Here's a made-up example, so nobody sue me.
Before: "We offer an award-winning accounting platform with real-time reporting."
After: "Know where your money is on a Tuesday night, without calling your accountant."
Same product.
The first one is about the company.
The second is about a person on a couch at 9 p.m.
Quick check:
Count your "we" and your "you." If "we" wins, the station is playing your song, not theirs.
Where this breaks
You can overdo it. A page of "you" can read like a used car lot. And if the benefit is fake, readers smell it fast. The goal isn't flattery. It's accuracy. Find the real thing they want and say it plainly. Then back it up.
Let's make this practical...
Take one feature and ask "so what?" three times.
Stop when you hit something a person would say out loud at dinner.
Then count the pronouns in your last email.
Highlight every "we," "our," and "I," and rewrite the top three as "you."
Try finishing this sentence:
"Nobody wakes up wanting ____. They want ____." The second blank is your headline.
Last, tell a friend your pitch in 10 seconds.
If they say "so?", you haven't found the station yet.
