Used Car Salesmanship

I was sick this weekend and was surfing the net hoping to find a good distraction.

Among the content I was reading I found this dubious ad:

Since I was looking for entertainment, I decided that reading a sales pitch for a fake Perpetua Mobila was actually worth my time.

So I clicked the ad…

… and arrived at a sales video.

An amazing sales video, worth every minute of the 46 minutes I spent watching it. Much better than most storytelling on television, and you also get to appreciate and learn from some of the best used-car-salesmanship I’ve seen. Have you ever enjoyed being sold something? Have you ever enjoyed being sold something that you knew was not worth its price? That‘s a good marketer at work!

I saved the video, and whenever I’ll need to produce marketing material, I’ll watch it again, cover-to-cover, for inspiration. That is, only if the price I get quoted by the guy who produced this is too high.

But for those of you who don’t have a spare 37 minutes for a marketing video, I’ll summarize some of the things that impressed me:

  • Speaking directly to audience’s emotions (“Remember, this is not about getting back at the companies who have been ripping you off for years – although it is pretty cool to do that – it’s about taking care of your family“)

  • Raising the question of price, and immediately going on a few-minutes-long ramble about the value you get from the product before answering it

  • Completely ignoring that we’re on the internet, thousands of miles apart, and this is a completely deterministic conversation, and a minute after saying the price is $99.97:

  • Since the video is just part of the page (bonus for whiteboard background) and has no controls, audience must choose between watching all at once or closing never to see it again, allows for much more real-life like interaction (Audience will hate this, but it may be worth it in conversions. Don’t ever do this wrong)

  • A few minutes after the end of the movie, suddenly it pops back to life…

2 thoughts on “Used Car Salesmanship”

  2. If I’d had to guess – Word for scripting, a whiteboard, markers and a video camera for most graphics, a voice actor for voiceover. Nothing fancy.

    But there might be more to it – there is software that fakes the whiteboard+hand animation style quite well, like Brushes which Steve Blank uses.

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