Best NLP patterns

DON’T.

In the book Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy (possibly the most famous advertising man in the history of advertising) said, “Ambiguity in advertising does not work, specificity in advertising works.” Sage advice. Worthy to save us a lot of time as we work out our NLP presence on the web.

What does that mean? Ambiguity means vagueness, uncertainty, haziness, indistinctness and abstraction. Specificity means exact, precise, explicit, detailed, distinctive and unambiguous.

We teach Hypnotic languaging in our NLP Coaching Practitioner Training(scroll down the page to read about it in the content section). And we show how to use the language of Milton Erickson in conversation during coaching and therapy – this is something I know something about.

In my early days in NLP, I owned a business consulting firm, working with advertising clients on a daily basis. Thinking I really knew, I decided to jump on my NLP horse and ride it for all it was worth. So, I wrote an advertisement for our new client, the language school.

The language school had a lot going for it. In business for over 30 years, fluent in Chinese, Japanese, German, French and Spanish. So, I wrote a Hypnotic induction for a radio advertisement. To the best of my memory it sounded like this:

“Imagine yourself speaking a new language. Float down into your body and see what you would see speaking that language; hear yourself speaking that language and feel how good it feels as you speak your new language. Now look at the people around you and how they look when you speak your new language perfectly. Hear the compliments you are going to get as you speak your new language, and notice you are really perfect at it…”

We kept track of our results, and in all the years of advertising for clients I only had two abject and total failures. This was one of them.

There was no response. Not a little response, not a trickle of new customers. There was NO RESPONSE. Wow!!

And then I got it. When people listened to the ad, they went into trance. The ad worked to put people in trance. It was excellent. But to get people to sign up to learn a new language? No. Why?

Because they were already in trance and when the commercial ended, they were still in trance imagining what they were instructed, but not signing up. Not taking action. After the ad finished then they came out of trance. By the time they came out of trance the ad was long gone.

So if someone asks for you advice on how to write a hypnotic advertisement using NLP Milton Model and/orHypnotic Language patterns …