Facebook: envy producer.

Put That Resentment to Good Use – Wall Street Journal – It’s no secret that social media causes a lot people depression, insecurity, and envy. While some post banal updates of their lives, such as “Going to Home Depot to buy a hammer,” most people prefer to share only their best moments. (It seems like I’ve had at least one friend vacationing in Hawaii for about three consecutive years.) This Wall Street Journal article offers a way to deal by suggesting you put any envy and resentment to good use. Psychologists have identified two kinds of envy: malicious and benign. With malicious envy, a person is happy to see their envied “friend” cut down. In contrast, someone who experiences benign envy becomes motivated to match someone else’s success.

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This is the best thing I’ve read in a long time.

No, I’m not aping the hyperbolic headlines you see in social media just to get you to read, although I’ve been meaning to write about that. I really mean it about this piece. The writer is a copywriter by trade, and he laments the overly complex and lofty language used in advertising and other marketing. He argues that if a company can’t describe its product and its benefits, then even a talented writer won’t be able to do it. And that’s when you end up describing something like accounting software as a “complete suite of solutions” or a “holistic, cross-platform experience.” And there’s that word – “experience.” Marketers often talk about selling an experience or an emotion. Or they describe a product as being “aspirational.” There’s a place for those things, of course, but I get impatient when I’m being sold a cleaning product with the promise that if I use it, I’ll have more time to live a more awesome life. I’d prefer more straightforward messaging, like: “decreases cleaning time by 30%,” even if the claim is a little dubious.

For Complex Products, Using Simple Language is a Value-Added Solution

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Each week, “A Linking Mess” offers a handful of articles that have recently caught the attention of our Sr. Copywriter.

This week, I’m linking to three articles about sleep. The topic of sleep seems to get ever more attention, and not just from people like Leggett & Platt employees who have a vested interest in the subject. If you read these articles, prepare to see the requisite stock images of people sleeping (or trying to sleep). I should reach out to the stock-image people and sell them the many photos my wife has taken of me sleeping and spooning one of our dogs.

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