A Good Marketing Text Works Just Like a Well-Written Horoscope
How to write copy that makes readers feel understood — even when you know almost nothing about them.
Hey marketer! 👋🏻
You might know Derren Brown — the British illusionist famous for showing people exactly how psychological tricks work on them. One of his best-known stunts involves predicting the future. He takes a group of people, hands each one an envelope with "their personal" horoscope, lets them read it, and then asks how accurately it describes their situation. Most confirm he nailed it — that he wrote it just for them, without ever knowing them. And then he reveals that every single participant received exactly the same text.
🧠 Psychology calls it the Barnum-Forer Effect
The principle is simple — vague, positive statements about personality feel surprisingly accurate to specific individuals because the brain adapts them on its own. People remember the parts that fit and quietly overlook the rest. That’s exactly how horoscopes work. That’s how fortune tellers work. And that’s how some of the most effective marketing copywriting works too.
I’m not telling you to act like a charlatan. But understanding this principle will help you write copy that makes readers feel understood — like you’re speaking directly to them. And in marketing, that’s priceless.
👣 The reader has to take the first step
The key thing Derren Brown always points out is context. Horoscopes don’t work when someone randomly shoves them in your face. They work because you chose your sign, read it with the awareness that “this is about me,” and your brain started actively looking for matches.
In marketing, it’s the same. Before a text hits someone as “written exactly for me,” the reader has to do something first. Click on an ad targeting a specific group. Select their role or industry in a sign-up form. Read a headline that describes their situation and decide to keep reading. That small action triggers a process in the brain where everything that follows gets evaluated with one assumption: “This is for people like me.”
That’s why campaigns targeting specific groups — freelancers, young parents, or early-stage entrepreneurs — outperform generic ones. Not necessarily because the content is that much more specific. But because the targeting itself makes the reader think: “This is for me.”
🔍 What this looks like in practice
Here are a few specific patterns that consciously use this principle.
Mirroring — you name who the reader is and immediately add what’s troubling them. “You’re someone who takes marketing seriously but doesn’t want to spend thousands a month on an agency.” Both parts fit the vast majority of your readers. But because they come one after another, the whole thing reads like a precise description of one specific person.
Saying out loud what people think quietly — the things that are everywhere but nobody names. The feeling that everyone else is doing it better, even though you have no idea how. The belief that your product is good, but you don’t know how to show it. When you name these things, the reader immediately feels understood. And the trust that builds from that is incredibly hard to create any other way.
“You’ve probably experienced...” — a gentle phrasing that gives the reader room to agree or ignore, without feeling any pressure. “You’ve probably noticed that the content you share on social media isn’t performing as well as it did a year ago.” Those who haven’t experienced it scroll on. Those who have — stop.
Untapped potential — one of the most universal feelings there is. Almost everyone believes they have more in them than they’re currently showing. “You know your content could be doing more — if you didn’t have to deal with so many other things.” It fits a freelancer, a business owner, and a corporate employee alike.
🎯 Quizzes and personalized recommendations — formats that do this for you
You’ve probably come across quizzes like “what type of entrepreneur are you” or “what’s holding your marketing back.” Their secret is exactly this principle. You answer five questions, get a result — “You’re a Builder” or “You’re a Strategist” — and feel like the test perfectly captured your approach. Meanwhile, the descriptions of different types are surprisingly similar at their core. They just differ in the details that the reader fills in for themselves.
Email sequences triggered by a specific user action work the same way. Downloaded a content creation checklist? An email arriving the next day that opens with “You probably downloaded this checklist because content creation takes more time than it should” — that email will have a significantly higher open rate than a generic newsletter.
⚖️ Where’s the line?
Derren Brown always reveals how the trick works at the end. And that’s the point. The Barnum-Forer effect is fine in marketing when your product or content actually delivers what the text implied. If your copy promises to help the reader with a specific problem — and you actually help them — that’s legitimate. If the text creates an illusion of personalization just to get someone to buy something that won’t solve their problem — that’s where manipulation begins, and it will come back to bite you.
Writing in a way that makes readers feel understood is a legitimate communication skill. A good therapist, a good teacher, a good friend — they all do it naturally. In marketing copy, it’s just conscious and intentional.
This newsletter exists with a clear awareness of who you are. A freelancer or small business owner who takes marketing seriously but doesn’t want to get lost in endless theory. You believe you can figure this out on your own — you just need a nudge in the right direction. The project you’re working on is good and it makes sense. You just need to get it in front of the right people. You see successful brands around you and you want yours to reach that same level. It’s no worse than any of them. How close did I get? 🤔 😅
See you in the next one 👋🏻
Jan Barborik
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