Copywriting the Arcane

ARCANE: known or understood by very few; mysterious; secret; obscure; esoteric…

Copywriting for business inherently includes a certain amount of arcana. But perhaps no topic is more arcane than cardboard tubes. Believe it or not, cardboard tubes have hundreds of uses beyond moaning into them, “Luuuke… I am your Faaaather!”  You will find a cardboard tube at the core of your toilet paper, as well as your thousand-pound roll of printer’s stock. And I recently received a poster of Zac Effron in a cardboard tube from Tiger Beat. By mistake, of course.

So, how do you glamorize a product that is basically a commodity? It’s not easy, but it helps to have a client who freely admits that it’s a commodity. This gentleman stated right up front that his product was hardly different from his competitor’s. So I dug a little, and fashioned a story about consultative selling, wide selection and quick delivery.

Anyway, this masterful masterpiece of mastery just went live, and I invite you to give it a cursory glance. Oh and, honey! Could you toss me a roll of toilet paper? Here be the link: http://papertubesnow.com/

(BTW, I originally thought to title this blog – not just this post, but the entire blog –  “Master of the Arcane,” a title I thought incredibly apt. Stupid, yes, but apt.)

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What a Concept!

In interviews, and in general, I often claim that one of my strengths as a MarComm writer is “my ability to dive into an unfamiliar situation and quickly learn enough to market some product or service that I may not even heard of a week before.”
And the person I am speaking to says, “Fascinating!”
And I’m like, “Thanks!”
And he says, “No, I think it’s fascinating that someone who writes for a living would open his blog with a 46-word sentence.”

Anyhooo…the Quick Study is a talent, and in the Agency Environment (another of my big buzzwords) it’s critical to your success and longevity. This is particularly true in these times when the $20K projects are all dormant, and you have to substitute four $5K gigs in their place.

My point (that only took 3 paragraphs to reach) is that there is a specific place where I learned these things—a tenacious little Dayton OH agency called Concept Company. Concept has been around many a moon and does a bit of everything…print ads, public relations, web development…for a variety of clients. However I think one of their biggest strengths is in locking up a really arcane niche: Graphic Arts, or GA for all you abbreviators out there.

GA is pretty much anything involved in printing and packaging:

• Commodities like ink and paper
• Services like printing, labeling and converting
• Capital items like presses, splicers, and feed/rewind devices

Glamorous, no? Um, no.  But to me, that’s the genius of it.  My samples are full of Concept/GA projects, as well as other Concept projects in manufacturing, defense contracting, real estate, sporting goods, and so on. So take a look at some samples. And visit Concept Company’s site today! (a call to action, even…I really did learn something there!)

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