One of the email updates I get is from James Clear and today he had a good quote I think is relevant for the times we are living in today. He quotes Eugene Schwartz, who is a copywriting and advertising legend who said:

Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product.

Good right? But you are asking me how that can be relevant to our times…and this blog, a PR blog.

Here’s why. I have always said that the consumer only has one mind. There’s not a PR mind or an advertising mind. There’s one brain that we are all trying to influence. And it’s all copy. Proof of concept:

Public Relations cannot create desire for a product or an idea. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product or idea.

See what I did there? It reads just as well. Now, I want to show you a person who I believe is doing a great job of communicating in our current crisis…Dr. Amy Acton, the Ohio Director of Health. It’s easy for people in her position to come off as preachy and untouchable. Being smart can be alienating. She’s different.

I know it feels like life is shutting down. I feel like life is waking us up.

Feel that shiver on your spine? This is what we do when we are at our best. Seventeen words.

Or when 9-year old Ruby Owens wrote her a thank you letter to Dr. Acton for her positivity and putting herself at risk to help others, Dr. Acton responded:

And I want to tell you Ruby, I see. Not only do I see a bright future for us, I see a bright right now for us.

That’s as good as it gets. It turns hope for the future—a primal human need in difficult times—and turns it into a call to action in the blink of an eye.

Also…

I’m really proud of you. And I’m really proud of all the young people at home right now. I want you and all of you at home to don your cape. Don your cape and keep being a force for good.

Enough, you get it. The point is, all communication has to resonate within the human mind and co-exist with what was already there. It’s why communicating is hard and it is why it matters.