Learning Empathy from Copywriters & Doppelgangers
Copywriting gave me a toolkit for cognitive empathy. So I asked a copywriter to tell me how she does what she does.
What's the difference between a person and a personal brand? What's the difference between the self and self-presentation?
Human beings have always navigated the fraught territory between their inner worlds and social spaces—between who we are and who others recognize us to be.
However, the context and conditions for doing so have changed dramatically over the last thirty years. In the digital era, our sense of security can hinge on how we shape our image.
I am endlessly fascinated by how this affects our lives, our relationships, and our work. I'm not alone.
"Self-branding is yet another form of doubling, an internal sort of doppelganging," writes Naomi Klein in her most recent book, Doppelganger. Klein has been in an odd relationship with her own form of doppelganger for the last 20+ years. Klein is often confused with another Naomi—Naomi Wolf.
While Klein is an anti-capitalist, social activist, and ecofeminist, Wolf has become increasingly enmeshed in the world of conspiracy theories. She has lost her tether to her more mainstream white-lady feminism, which made her an advisor to Al Gore's very mainstream presidential campaign. Wolf's wild claims and cozy relationship with Steve Bannon create a baffling backdrop for the frequent mix-ups with Klein.
In Doppelganger, Klein offers some fascinating first-person analysis of the way we "double" ourselves online. She writes:
Am I who I think I am, or am I who others perceive me to be? And if enough others start seeing someone else as me, who am I, then?
The doppelganger experience, as Klein tells it, is one in which reality becomes a sort of funhouse mirror. We've put ourselves out into the world as a collection of photos, videos, and words—maybe a website, a logo, and some brand colors. But no matter how hard we work at those things, our digital selves are not who we are. Not really.
Our digital selves are doubles—doppelgangers—and therefore, "it becomes harder for anyone to know what is real and what and who can be trusted."
This is the fourth installment of my five-part series, Decoding Empathy. Today, I want to use the idea of "doubling" ourselves as we present ourselves online (and also offline) to consider what we actually know about others. To do that, we're going to dive deep into—wait for it—copywriting.
I want to think about how our own experiences of being misunderstood or misrecognized by others can help us adopt a more critical and intentional analysis of how others present themselves. How can the lack of curiosity we've all been subject to at some point help us be more curious about others we encounter?
A good copywriter is someone who never lacks curiosity about others—their clients, their client's clients, and anyone their clients might encounter out in the world. Before I introduce you to the very good and curious copywriter I interviewed for this episode, let's think a little more about our doppelgangers.
Keep reading or listen on the What Works podcast.
The Tension That Shapes Us
There is a profound tension between who we are and who we want to become. In the best-case scenario, the tension is a creative one—we accept and love who we are while we tenderly cultivate our ever-changing selves. In the worst-case scenario, we deny who we are and mold the shape of who we want to become to resemble whoever economic institutions want us to be. We can see both scenarios—as well as all the gray areas in between—all over the internet.
Naomi Klein observes that the social, economic, and environmental destabilization we all experience "places demands on us: to change, to reassess, to reimagine who we need to become." If we direct those demands toward an image of self that we love and accept, asking who we need to become to meet this moment is a fruitful exercise.
However, we're more likely to direct those demands to an external, commodified image of self. Who do I need to become to get the job in this environment? Who do I need to become to weather this social storm? Who do I need to become to deal with this algorithm change? Who do I need to become to hold on to what's mine?
We take our best guesses at the answers to those questions and create digital artifacts to share who we think we need to be with others. Those others can offer the approving likes or comments. Or better, they can reach out and hire us. Our doppelgangers receive the validation—or lack thereof—that, for a time, can substitute for a more complete sense of self.
But after investing so much time and energy into our digital doubles, it can become too much to bear. The work required to maintain the doppelganger can overwhelm us. It's not only maintaining the constellation of images, opinions, values, meanings, and ideas that form the doppelganger identity; it's also the weight of others' expectations. It's not only self-representation; it's also relational 4D chess.
No matter how "authentic" we intend our doppelgangers to be, no matter how "personal" our personal brands, eventually, we realize they can never be us.
We are dynamic, contradictory, fluid, transient, quixotic things.
Even when we discover this about ourselves, many of us fail to apply the discovery to others. We recognize that we are not who others perceive us to be, no matter how carefully we've sown those perceptions. But we forget that the same is true of everyone we meet. Our expectations thwart empathy.
Copywriting as Cognitive Empathy
In the first installment of this series, I mentioned that marketing and copywriting taught me about cognitive empathy.
I've always been intellectually interested in how people think and why they believe the things they do. But copywriting gave me a practical toolkit for that curiosity.
So, I wanted to speak with a copywriter about the process they use to understand their clients and present them in text. Luckily, I got to speak with Samantha Pollack, the copywriter and positioning strategist behind Cult of Personality, and I asked her to give us a behind-the-scenes look at how empathy works in practice.
How to get to know someone
Samantha's process, like any copywriter's, begins with the client intake. Early in her career, she borrowed methods and templates from her mentors and trainers. "What I would find when I would approach a piece of writing," she told me, "is I would sit down to write and realize I had no idea what to say. I have no idea who this person is." Even though she'd talked with them and got excited about the project, her intake process wasn't actually uncovering the information she needed to do her work.
"So I just started asking other questions ... I just need to know every single freaking thing down to the teeniest, tiniest detail," she explained. She starts with the basics: What do you do? What are your offers? Who are your people? But then she digs deeper into what she called her "weird questions:" "What kind of music do you listen to? Who is your style icon? What are you looking at online right now?"
Once she's compiled all of those details, she can sift through them to determine what will appear in her copy and what will inform the style or tone of her messages.
The intake process for a copywriter like Samantha is like a really great first date. Sure, you talk about the basics—where were you born, what do you do for a living, do you have siblings, etc. But quickly, you move on to more interesting stuff—the "weird questions" that tell you a helluva a lot more about the other person than what fits on a resumé.
As she gathers information, Samantha uses mood boards to create a visual reference for herself. "I'm a very visual, like arty-farty person," she told me with a smile. Her mood boards aren't something you'd hand off to a designer—instead, they encode "voice, vibe, and personality" into images and words so she always has a representation at the ready.
How to get to know someone's special someone
Samantha's process doesn't stop at curiosity and empathy for her client. Her curiosity and empathy also extend to the client's potential clients or customers. To get to know those people, she digs into her client's online fingerprint.
"I will read every single thing about you online," she explained—not just the content her client creates but also the content—e.g., comments, reviews, interviews—that their customers create. She'll home in on some commenters and try to figure out, "What's this lady's deal?"
Most importantly, she wants to answer the question: Why do they care? She finds (as is my own experience) that the people she works with don't always have a good answer to the question. They know why they care about their idea or product but can't quite articulate why a potential customer would care.
"Why do they care?" is a critical question for practicing empathy. We want others to be interested in us, in our ideas, in the stuff we find fascinating... but why would they care? That question isn't meant to suggest that what we care about isn't worth caring about.
"Why do they care?" asks how our interests connect to the other person's interests. The question reminds us that who we are and what we care about is not who others are and what others care about. Maybe that sounds obvious, but given how much I've seen people struggle with this question, I don't think it is.
Samantha's trick for this is relentlessly asking, "So what?"
She offered an example from one of her clients. They make high-quality candles that come with a complementary playlist. Her client might know that that candle represents a "moment of self-care." But, so what?
"Every time you ask that, you get a layer deeper," she explained. "A lot of that stuff does not end up in the final copy," instead, it helps Samantha understand the product and its customers at a deep level. She added that part of the skill of a copywriter is learning when to focus on the tangibles (e.g., I want a candle that smells good) and when to lean toward those higher levels of value (e.g., I'm celebrating myself).
Samantha needs to make an informed, best-guess hypothesis about who her client's people are and what they care about in order to strike the right tone. She has to extend her empathy and curiosity to her client's prospective clients to tell them what they need to know to make a good decision about buying.
Doppelgangers of Doppelgangers
Ten years ago, in my corner of the online business for ladies internet, it seemed like there were only two acceptable ways to "speak." The dominant strain was based on a particular personal brand written by a particular copywriter. Words like "juicy" and "burning" and "sacred" seemed like magic. Obviously, plenty of folks think those words are magic today.
The slightly less dominant strain of copy was punctuated by completely unnecessary four-letter words. Actually, it wasn't punctuated by four-letter words—they were part of the substance being communicated. And that substance most often amounted to, "I'm not one of those juicy, burning, sacred ladies."
Note, I love four-letter words. I swear constantly at home. I'm no prude. I just know a cry for attention when I see one.
Okay, that was about as harsh as you'll ever hear a critique from me that's not directed at borked systems of power and exploitation. There were (and are) incredibly brilliant women who used both strains of copy. But it didn't take long before all of those ear-grabbing, potent-as-hell words became devoid of meaning and substance.
Those strains of copy became doppelgangers of doppelgangers. Derivatives of derivatives. Everyone sounded the same because no one sounded like themselves.
So, with that in mind and my own inability to write in a voice that's not my own, I asked Samantha how she learns to write in someone else's voice. "I ask clients a lot for voice memos," she told me. She gets really excited when a client has a big archive of video content. "I try to absorb the cadence of somebody's speech. I hear it in my head before I put it on the page."
Samantha is also curious about how her clients relate to and use language—things like slang, idioms, and dialect. "Everyone's relationship to language is a little bit different," she explained.
Samantha told me that most of her clients are women of color. Early on, she felt anxious about using AAVE in copy for her Black clients or copying the flair of a Latina client. "I have to be careful not to create a caricature of a person," she explained.
Figuring out how to separate her own relationship with language from their relationships with language helps her produce copy that is culturally legible and personally authentic without becoming a caricature. "I think it's just a matter of empathy," she explained, "I'm really listening."
A caricature is a form of misrecognition, to use Charles Taylor's term. For Taylor, misrecognition is a sort of violence. If the way we are recognized by others forms a critical part of our identity, then when we are misrecognized—especially when that misrecognition is "confining or demeaning or contemptible"—our identity suffers harm. The result is that the misrecognized person can become "[imprisoned] in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being."
A copywriter could hold tremendous power in this framework. On one hand, they could easily misrecognize the client they're working for and unintentionally cause harm. On the other hand, they could also help provide the language and dialogue that Taylor argues is key to how we form our identities. Copywriters contribute to both the language and dialogue of their clients but, as we've begun to see already, to their client's potential customers, too.
Turning Cognitive Empathy Into Connection
Copywriting, as I mentioned, is a practical application of cognitive empathy. The copywriting toolkit is a toolkit for cognitive empathy.
Samantha shared two more tools she uses to learn about her client's customers—and how to connect with them.
First, she made it clear that she sees her responsibility as making sure all of the people on a client's email list, for example, "are being really well taken care of." Part of taking good care of her client's audience means helping them feel seen and understood.
Get Specific
Samantha asks her clients for stories about their actual customers. What did they need? How did they feel before they worked with you? How did you help them? How did they feel after? (These, by the way, are some of my favorite questions to ask, too.) This "before and after" framework purposefully probes for specific information rather than generalizations.
When she has a client "describe specific scenarios that they've helped people with," she learns a lot more. "I could literally put that right onto a piece of copy and someone can read it and be like, 'Oh, Yes, that's me.'"
Probe Their Beliefs
Samantha also uses a framework she learned from André Chaperon called a chain of beliefs. This one might take a bit more practice to implement—but it's extremely useful.
"You start by [asking], 'What is the belief that the person has right as they click the [buy] button?'" she explained. For example, if I'm going to subscribe to a newsletter, I have to believe that (1) I'm going to read it regularly, (2) I will benefit from the membership perks, and (3) I feel good about supporting the writer's work. Those are pretty low bars, belief-wise. For a $500 online course, the bar will be higher. And for a $10k coaching program, the bar will be very high indeed.
To reach those high bars, you keep asking yourself what someone would need to believe to get to each step in the process. If you start from the "buy button," you can back up a step and ask, "What is the belief someone has when they're perusing my FAQs?" or "What is the belief someone has when they click a link to learn more about my offer?" The chain of those beliefs—and how copy can help move people along the chain—lays out the mental journey a customer might take to make a purchase.
"There's an element of gambling to all of it," she admitted, adding, "You could do your best to prepare; you might have done all the research, and then something tanks, and you just don't know why. Sometimes people surprise you."
Sometimes people surprise you. You can do all the research, harness all your empathy skills, utilize all the copywriting tools, and people will still surprise you. If that doesn't happen every so often, well, you're not paying attention. That's empathy at work.
The Self and the Doppelganger
It's time to circle back to where we started: What's the difference between a person and a personal brand?
Samantha understands that not everyone is, as she put it, "aggressively comfortable" with being vulnerable and getting real as she is. "Especially the higher profile you get, the larger your audience gets, the more you have sort of ... created a monster [that] lives outside you, and you have lost control of the narrative," the more challenging it can be to subvert others' expectations of you.
The riskier it can be.
Samantha, too, finds it challenging to manage the disconnect between a brand persona and a personal sense of self. "I'm in a bit of a choose my battles mode," she revealed. "I'm just trying to show up and do what I do." And while it seems like that should be easy, every incentive and psychological force pushes us away from that goal.
"I want my clients to be their real selves," she explained. I want them to feel like they're represented in the way that they want to be represented." At the same time, our doppelgangers can be an opportunity to play. We can "make up a persona" without it being fake:
You can lean into a part of your personality that doesn't get to see the light of day [often] ... Like characters in a story, and telling stories is the whole point of what I do.
Playing a character, even being aware of our doppelganger selves, can help us express what we might not have been able to say before—as long as we remember that that's what we're doing and that that's what others are doing, too.
Naomi Klein argues that the various ways we partition and construct our doppelgangers—including the personal brand and its content—are all
...ways of not seeing. Not seeing ourselves clearly (because we are so busy performing an idealized version of ourselves), not seeing one another clearly (because we are so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto others), and not seeing the world and the connections among us clearly (because we have partitioned ourselves and blocked our vision).
"Seeing" here is empathy. Seeing is curiosity. Seeing is recognition.
I loved learning about Samantha's process because it was such a potent reminder of the way others are willing to see, to empathize, to be curious, to recognize.
We're not all copywriters (thank god), but we can all learn a lesson from copywriting tools. We can learn that we might never know the whole person on the other end of the Zoom window, the chat box, or the cash register at the grocery store—but we can always learn more about them.
Or as Klein put it, "doppelgangers, by messing with our heads and our illusions of sovereignty, can help teach us this lesson: that we are not as separate from one another as we might think."
Learn more about Samantha Pollack and her copywriting services at cultofpersonality.co!
