The BDF Formula
Map your audience's beliefs, desires, and feelings before writing a single word of copy
Created by copywriter Mark Ford and adopted by Bly as a core pre-writing exercise, the BDF formula maps the 'Core Complex' of your target buyer through three lenses: Beliefs (what does your audience think is true about the world, your industry, and their situation?), Desires (what goals, changes, and outcomes do they want?), and Feelings (what emotions dominate their experience, especially regarding the problem your product solves?). By writing out the BDF in narrative form and getting team agreement before writing, you ensure that copy speaks to the buyer's actual psychology rather than the marketer's assumptions.
- Copy that speaks to the buyer's actual psychology requires mapping their beliefs, desires, and feelings before writing a single word.
- Audience assumptions held only in one person's head are dangerous, so writing out the BDF and getting team agreement makes them testable and shared.
- Feelings dominate the buying decision more than rational arguments do, and ignoring the emotional layer produces technically correct copy that fails to move anyone.
- Desires reveal what people are moving toward, while beliefs reveal the frame through which they will evaluate any claim you make about getting them there.
- The distance between marketer assumptions and buyer reality closes only when the BDF is written down and confronted with evidence.
- Map the BeliefsWrite out what your target audience believes to be true about the world, their industry, their role, your product category, and the problem you solve. Include both rational beliefs and irrational ones. What assumptions do they operate under? What do they think they know that might be wrong? What worldview shapes how they evaluate solutions?
- Map the DesiresIdentify what your audience genuinely wants. What are their goals, aspirations, and wished-for changes? Go beyond surface desires (want a faster computer) to deeper desires (want to be seen as competent and efficient). Consider both professional and personal desires that your product touches.
- Map the FeelingsExplore the emotional landscape of your audience. How do they feel about the problem your product solves? Are they frustrated, anxious, overwhelmed, embarrassed, angry, or hopeful? How do they feel about their current solutions? What emotional state would they be in when encountering your marketing message?
- Write the BDF narrative and align your teamSynthesize your findings into a narrative document describing the target buyer's Core Complex. Share it with your team and come to agreement before writing any copy. Use the BDF to identify the emotional hooks, language patterns, and specific pain points that should appear in your headline, lead, and body copy.
A company selling communication skills seminars to IT professionals used BDF analysis. Beliefs: IT people think they are smarter than others, technology is most important, users are stupid, management does not appreciate them. Desires: to be recognized and appreciated, to deal with computers over people, to get bigger budgets. Feelings: adversarial relationship with management and users, feeling disliked, misunderstood, and looked down upon. The resulting headline 'Important news for any IT professional who has ever felt like telling an end user, Go to hell' spoke directly to the feelings dimension.
Created by copywriter Mark Ford and adopted by Bly as a core pre-writing exercise, the BDF formula maps the 'Core Complex' of your target buyer through three lenses: Beliefs (what does your audience think is true about the world, your industry, and their situation?), Desires (what goals, changes, and outcomes do they want?), and Feelings (what emotions dominate their experience, especially regarding the problem your product solves?). By writing out the BDF in narrative form and getting team agre