I’m going to do a little magic trick.
I don’t know your name. I don’t know your job title. I’ve never met you.
But I’m going to tell you exactly who you are in 13 sentences. And I’m willing to bet you’ll think I nailed it.
Ready? 🪄
You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.
You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.
You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.
While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.
Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you.
Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.
At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.
You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.
At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.
Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.
Security is one of your major goals in life.
How many felt accurate?
If you’re like most people, at least 10.
I just gave you the exact same “personality reading” that a psychology professor gave his students in 1948. Every student got the same 13 sentences.
When he asked them to rate the accuracy from 0 to 5 → the class averaged 4.26.
Almost perfect… For a personality reading that was completely fake 🤯
This is called the “Barnum-Forer effect” 🧠
Psychics use it. Horoscopes use it. BuzzFeed quizzes use it.
The top 1% marketers in the world use it to write copy so “personal” that people actually convert, stick around, and share it with their friends.
I first noticed this at MineOS, when we added a “What is your role?” box to the signup form.
It wasn’t connected to anything in the product.
But people started replying to our onboarding emails and converted more because they felt the entire platform was personalized. I’m not going to pretend that one form field 10x’d our revenue. But it changed how I think about every piece of copy I write.
This is the power of “fake personalization” 🎭
Most people think the takeaway is “write vague stuff that applies to everyone”. That’s NOT how to do it. If that’s all it took, every horoscope would go viral.
There’s a *very specific* way to do fake personalization that makes it actually work, and it has nothing to do with how clever your copy is. Once I figured it out, I started seeing it everywhere, and using it on landing pages, onboarding flows, and ads.
Today, I’m sharing my “fake personalization” playbook:
🧪 How to “read someone’s mind” without knowing anything about them
✍️ 6 copywriting techniques (with fill-in-the-blank examples) that make readers feel like you wrote it just for them
🎁 3 formats that do the personalization for you, without actually personalizing anything
⚖️ How to use it without crossing the line into manipulation