Escapement: What Seiko Taught Me About Why People Actually Buy

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Hi, my name is Adeel Abbas. And since 2014…

I’ve been getting my wits dirty trying to master the mysteries of copywriting, marketing, advertising, and everything around it.

Just to find out what makes people buy…

By pure psychology, I mean the way we’re wired as homo-sapiens; our human behavior so to speak – our needs, our desires, and us being social animals. This is what determines it all…

… whether we’d buy an offer presented to us or not.

So, while I was on the brink of having a mid-life crisis realizing I “wasted” years mastering skills I thought moved the needle…

… my mind went towards the Seiko 5 I was wearing at that time and…

“You’re wrong.”, my thoughts said.

“Think of skills as internal gears in an automatic. You still need each one for the watch to function the way it’s supposed to.”

“But what makes these gears move in exact measured steps?”

“Escapement.”, I said to myself, realizing what I just figured out.

For a layman like me, an escapement system is what makes an automatic turn mechanical, mainspring energy into steady, timed steps – which allows the watch to tell time with precision. These steady, timed steps are what make the familiar ticking sound.

“Without escapement, an automatic can’t tell time.” I said.

“Yes. In this game, escapement is PSYCHOLOGY.”, my thoughts and I repeated in sync.

And in this case…

Every tactic – headline, offer, CTA – is a gear. Doesn’t matter how well-machined it is. Without something converting raw attention into precise, measured movement toward a decision, it’s just… noise.

In other words, psychology is a vital instrument in marketing/advertising to tell what makes people tick or ick.

Depending on how you present your offer and how they perceive it.

Anyway, after realizing this and applying what I figured out…

I started getting elite level results for my clients:

7-9% macro-conversions on cold-traffic landing pages.

48-64% micro-conversions on warm-traffic sales pages.

(This was years ago, when I was only doing sales/landing pages.)

CRAZYEGG: MICRO VS. MACRO CONVERSIONS

When I started sharing my results, many of my acquaintances in the marketing world did not believe me and some even called it BS.

But greats like Bob Bly, author of The Copywriter’s Handbook, probably saw what I was doing and how I was doing it:

Long story short, I became so good, people started calling me fake.

Meanwhile, my clients and I? We were raking in money.

Now when everything was going smooth as butter…

… enter the dragon: large language models.

LLMs in short or AI for a layman like me.

And it changed the entire game – for better and worse.

Because this time – AI came embedded with escapement.

I thought I was a goner since many of my clients left for AI.

Now, I don’t blame them at all. Logically speaking…

At that point in time, AI looked like a better, faster, cheaper, and easier way to get any kind of digital output you wanted out of it.

And as any smart capitalist – your end goal is to do two things:

1. Cut costs and…
2. Multiply profits.

So, when it looked like AI could write copy for them for a small fee – they thought (and I thought this too): “Why should we pay Adeel $1 per word for copywriting when AI can do this for peanuts?”

But it didn’t take me a while to realize what AI can and cannot do.

It can output gears – hook, offer, angle – in 2 minutes. And this time, it can also show you how to use all the gears to move the needle.

What it can’t do is trust its own judgement.

Because when you question it – AI instantly falters and goes back on its own words. Like a child who lies when caught red-handed.

Newer updates now make AI stand firm more but when you question its output – if it’s based on real-world experience instead of what it read online – AI will go back on its own stance, again.

There is where good old intuition comes into play.

Intuition deems if AI’s conclusions fit in a specific, real-world scenario you gave it to solve or if it’s pure speculation based on data points that are not relevant or do not apply to that scenario.

Intuition – in this case – is your human judgement. Something you build based on years and years of trial-and-error experience.

In other words, while AI can give you an output with precision…

… if you don’t know the gist of what that output should look like…

You get mediocre output that may work fine and may even get you industry-standard results – considering how AIs are being dialed in for marketing – but can it deliver outputs beyond industry norms?

If AI is making all those decisions?

So, what do you do when you don’t have that intuition dawg in you?

Well, like anything good in the world…

… you build it from first-principle thinking.

You break everything you learned down to its absolute basics.

And you strengthen it from there.

With years and years of trial-and-error.

(That’s how I did it. But I’m sure there are other ways to do it, too.)

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And since conversion copywriting plays a critical role in everything marketing and advertising, I’m going to start from there.

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So, if you’re in this marketing game – maybe as a freelancer, agency owner, or a serial entrepreneur – and you can’t stand AI mediocrity…

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