Notes on The Laws of Copywriting

My favorite takeaways from Dave Gerhardt’s course

Photo by Romain Vignes on Unsplash

It’s taken time for me to identify as a marketer. It’s always been a less-than-appealing word to me and definitely wasn’t something that I wanted to do or be. I’m not sure where the turning point was, but sometime over the past few months, that changed.

One of the more helpful resources while picking this stuff up has been Dave Gerhardt’s Patreon. Dave is currently the CMO of an eCommerce startup called Privy and before that, he was the VP of Marketing at Drift.

A few weeks ago, he released a short video course on copywriting called The 10 Laws of Copywriting. There was a ton of good stuff in the course, so in the interest of sharing, this post offers my notes on the content along with some follow-up commentary.

LEARN HOW PEOPLE MAKE DECISIONS

• People buy with emotion and then justify with logic.
• There are eight primary desires that we are programmed to have: Survival and enjoyment of life, enjoyment of food and beverages, freedom from fear, pain, and danger, sexual companionship, comfortable living conditions, being superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses, care and protection of loved ones, and social approval.