To the future class of 2015, Russian courts have always had juries.
I learned this, plus 74 other factoids, from the 2015 mindset list, an annual report from Beloit College that aims to prepare professors for the incoming cohort by reminding them of how the freshmen class sees the world. Some of it’s political, like the above, some of it’s technological (“Amazon has never been just a river in South America,”) and some of it’s pop culture-based (“Frasier, Sam, Woody and Rebecca have never Cheerfully frequented a bar in Boston during primetime.”) And to a marketer who does coywriting (also known as a communicator,) it’s pure gold.
One of the more common copywriting exercises out there is to develop one or more avatars that represent the ideal reader of your work. You give them names, jobs, backgrounds, aspirations, and, yes, ages. The mindset list is a huge asset, or at least it will be to me, especially as it grows over time – the website has it going back to the class of 2002, or roughly how a 31 year old sees the world, but there’s also a book that promises coverage of every generation since 1880. I don’t know if the book gives lists for each age, but if it does, that’s got to be one of the best desk references ever.
What I like best about the list is how each mindset is represented as actual fact. Sure, if you look things up or stop to think about them, facts become opinions, and wrongly held ones at that, but our subconsciousnesses work on our core beliefs, and while I’ve never thought of it that way, there are lots of things we take for granted that are actually core reflections of who we are (I still have to stop myself from checking the time before making a long distance phone call to see if it’s after 6, or better still, after 11 for the big discount, for example.)
So I’ve got a great copywriting tool for framing messages to specific groups, and that’s super cool, but now I’m wondering – are my core assumptions faulty enough to need changing, or is it more useful to keep them?
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