Gwyneth Box – Poetry and Copywriting – A Shared Approach

At first sight, poetry and marketing copy would seem to be two entirely different writing genres: on the one hand, poetry is an art – one of the highest literary forms – while the commercial nature of marketing materials places copywriting firmly at the other end of the scale.
This brief course aims to show that there is no such dichotomy: both copywriting and poetry aim to evoke an emotional response and to influence behaviour or opinion.
The same techniques that poets use to convey their message and meaning and to produce the desired – and often subconscious – reaction in their audience can also be used in marketing materials to affect and influence the potential client. But because such tools as metre and layout are so closely associated with the discipline of poetry, their power is not always recognised or fully exploited by the copywriter.
Based on the premise that “words are not enough”, we’ll look closely at how literal meaning, word-associations and cultural connotations, sound, metre, line breaks and layout are all used in careful combination by the poet to create different effects and to influence the reader’s mood and response.
Understanding these techniques will draw attention to some of the subliminal effects produced by the marketing copy we encounter each day and make us more aware of the effects we create when producing our own business literature.