Invite consumers to give advice instead of an opinion.
Many companies try to bond with their customers by asking for their opinion. But this is an introspective act, one that ultimately directs their attention toward their own needs.
So, instead, ask them for their advice, which prompts them to put themselves in your shoes, creating a more genuine bond between company and customer.
This will also help them identify with the product, which is a way of pre-suading them into purchasing more.
Pre-suasion is the art of priming someone to do something by executing certain directive actions, or uttering certain directive sentences, before the actual moment when that person has to make a decision.
This is pre-suasion: setting the stage and putting the pieces into place, thus getting people to say, or do, what you want.
I’ve given up chocolate for Lent and while I’m also in a less disciplined way trying to eat less sugar there is something particularly satisfying about chocolate, dark chocolate. So as much as I see breaking chocolate’s hold on me as a good thing, right now I’d love a taste.
1. Each week, we’ll provide a theme for creative inspiration. You take photographs based on your interpretation of the theme, and post them on your blog (a new post!) anytime before the following Wednesday when the next photo theme will be announced.
2. To make it easy for others to check out your photos, title your blog post “Weekly Photo Challenge: (theme of the week)” and be sure to use the “postaday″ tag.
3. Follow The Daily Post so that you don’t miss out on weekly challenge announcements, and subscribe to our newsletter – we’ll highlight great posts. Add Media photos from each month’s most popular challenge.
Just a few wonderful posts:
I’d rather be . . . (daily post)
I’d rather be . . . (figments of a ducTchess)
I’d rather be . . . (mara eastern)
I’d rather be . . . (stenoodie)
I’d rather be . . . (everyday strange)
I’d rather be . . . (jasper’s journal)
Stories (jinan daily photo)
Stories (here and abroad)
Stories (my point of view)
Stories (simply photos)
Stories (reluctant photographer)
Stories (chronicles of an anglo-swish)
Stories (journey of lens)
Stories (j hardy carroll)
Stories (no fixed plans)
Stories (this & that)
Stories (stenoodie)
Stories (mittened hands)
Stories (willow soul)
WPC: I’d Rather Be I've given up chocolate for Lent and while I'm also in a less disciplined way trying to eat less sugar there is something particularly satisfying about chocolate, dark chocolate.
"We expect places and products to be less attractive than in marketing brochures, but we never forgive humans for being worse than their first impressions."
— from "The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Incerto)" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
— “stupid us”
“The process of gaining agreement with a message before it is sent.”
What it means:
Pre-Suasion involves all the steps a person takes to make their listener more receptive to the message before that message is delivered. This prepares the listener to say “yes” before the message is even received.
Example:
“When interviewing for a new job in front of an evaluator or team of evaluators, after saying that you want to answer all questions as fully as possible, say one more thing: 'Before we start, I wonder if you could answer a question for me. Why did you invite me to interview today?’ As a consequence, your evaluators will hear themselves saying positive things about you and your qualifications, putting themselves in a state of mind that is favorable to your candidacy before you even begin making your case for it.”
Read more in the Power of Pre-Suasion.
Source: Dr. Robert Cialdini, business keynote speaker, author of Pre-Suasion: a Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade
Kyle Crocco is a Content Consultant in Santa Barbara for BigSpeak Speakers Bureau and Airtime Watertime®.
Since 2015, I am teaching consumer behavior to international Master's students and Swedish students from the civilekonomprogram in the 10-week long course in Advanced Consumer Marketing (50 students). In my module, I explore how consumers make choices, how behavior can be influenced, the concepts of consumer identity, green marketing, status-signaling, self-control and indulgence, as well as a the eye tracking technique and experiments design as contemporary marketing research methods.
In addition to research articles from marketing journals, I ask the students to read pop science literature: either Influence (1984, 2006), or Pre-Suasion (2016) from Robert Cialdini (Professor Emeritus of Psychology & Marketing at Arizona State University). The first book covers six principles of persuasion, and the second book develops a seventh principle and the concept of Pre-Suasion. Both have plenty of business illustrations and research studies. There is a lot of material online about the first one, so only a handful of students chose the second one. I actually found Influence better written than the more recent Pre-Suasion.
I'll briefly present both books and using the slide decks from the lectures: (1) Influence / (2) Pre-Suasion.
Influence
Cialdini published “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” in 1984, and in a revised edition in 2006 (with more studies cited). It is also published as a textbook (since 2003).
In his influential book (ahah - no really, it’s a best seller), Cialdini argues that we all have built-in automatic response to stimuli called "fixed-action patterns." Behaviors comprising these patterns occur in virtually the same fashion and the same order every time. These regular, blind, mechanical patterns of actions are activated by a ‘trigger feature’. Cialdini characterises these automatic responses with click-whirr: “Click and the appropriate tape is activated; whirr and out rolls the standard sequence of behaviors.” Basically, we need shortcuts in today’s complex world (judgment heuristics), as brilliantly explained by Kahneman in his Nobel Prize lecture (2002).
In Thinking Fast and Slow (2011) Kahneman presents decision making as relying on System 1 (fast, intuitive, automatic, effortless, implicit, emotional) and System 2 (slow, logical, conscious, effortful, explicit, rational). But because people save cognitive effort whenever possible (we are very lazy), they tend to rely on System 1 when making mundane, routine-like decisions (i.e. grocery shopping). Such psychological understanding of decisions making has implications to many consumer behavior situations.
In this book, Cialdini presents six principles to mimic the trigger features that stimulate automatic decisions. It works well most of the time, and, Cialdini notes that it can also be used unethically (so people should be aware of their influence).
Reciprocity: we want to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us
Likability (Similarity): we say yes to someone we like
Social proof (Consensus): to determine what is correct, find out what other people think is correct
Authority: deep sense of duty to authority
Consistency (Commitment): desire to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already done/said
Scarcity: limitation increases desirability
Based on this understanding, I further asked the students to reflect on their everyday consumer behavior and pay attention to their own decision marking. They came up with interesting questions that we further discussed in a seminar. Overall, they seemed to have better understood the principles of influence at play on consumer behavior by considering their own consumer experience.
Pre-Suasion
30 years later, Cialdini decided to write another book “Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary way to Influence and Persuade”. (2016). He said that there was finally enough research to back him up. That’s why the second half of the book are basically references (and bibliographical notes). In Pre-Suasion, he argues that what successful influencers do is introducing a sympathetic message, a concept, or an idea, at the right timing (creating a ‘privileged moment’), so that their audience associate positively what comes next.
“By guiding preliminary attention strategically, it's possible for a communicator to move recipients into agreement with a message before they experience it. They key is to focus them initially on concepts that are aligned associatively with the yet-to-be-encountered information.”
Cialdini further argues that it is the process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it. But the window of opportunity is only open for a privileged moment where people are more likely to be influenced, so pre-suasive practices create opportunities to persuade.
Persuaders use ‘Openers’ (e.g. frames, anchors, primes, mindsets, impressions) that render individuals vulnerable to aligned requests. Then, attention is focused on one aspect of the situation, and suppressed from competing aspects. Cialdini develops on how to attract initial attention with ‘Sex & Violence magnetisers’ that connect to our primitive motivation (reproduction and survival). He also argues for using language that is self relevant (you; age, sex, health, or anything specific about the recipient), emphasising unfinished tasks (making it more memorable, retaining attention until the activity is complete), and creating a mystery (i.e. an enigma in which the recipient is invited to review the subsequent material).
Unity is more than just liking (similarities), something is shared (the persuadee believes that the persuader “is one of us”). Cialdini tells the story of a family A sending Christmas cards to another family B who they don't even know, but then send each other nice wishes every winter, since family A received a postcard from these strangers (probably by mistake). For 10 years, they keep on exchanging Christmas cards until one day, the stranger family B asked if their son could stay with family A for a short while. Over time, both families created a WE relationship, that resulted in letting a stranger stay at their place.
Warren Buffet’s letters to investors at Berkshire Hathaway intend to create a feeling of BEING together, with family/kinship arguments. By writing 'we made this mistake’ early on, and later what investors should be doing (keep giving him money), Buffet readies them to process the next thing he's going to say more deeply because he established himself as a trustworthy source. Also, by addressing investors like family members, he pre-suasively make them judge his argument as even more convincing.
Eye tracking experiments
The idea for the students is to design and test a laboratory experiment using the eye tracking technology. Throughout the week, each group applies their understanding of an advanced research method in a relevant consumer behavior phenomenon of their interest. They use a stationary eye tracker at LiU to collect data; and a nightmarish organisation so that they can both run and participate in each other’s experiments (10 groups).
At the end of the week, they hand-in a report explaining why they conducted the experiment (consumer behavior background, hypotheses), how they designed it (understanding of the eye tracking technology), what results were provided (analysis of heat maps and gaze maps, combined with dichotomous choice data), and who can use their findings (relevance, conclusion). A final seminar where each groups presents their work enable the whole class to come together (understand what kind of guinea pigs they have been) and reflect on their learnings from the module on consumer behavior.
It is always fascinating to see what the students come up with as experiment designs. Most of them compare two stimuli, while modifying one of them ( = the experimental treatment) to test their hypothesis. They were interested in the impact of colours (red would be associated with cost savings), the relevance of product endorsements (Zlatan Ibrahimovitch’s signature), the impact of sexual cues in advertisements (on brand recall and product choice), the role of product information on choice, in various settings (displaying certification on packaging, indicating health-benefits on the price tags), and whether directional cues are actually transferring attention or distracting.
This course is a really great learning experience from me, and I believe the students appreciate having the opportunity to design their own experiment, even though it’s in a tight schedule! They also seemed satisfied with the practical aspect of the module (“instead of reading articles, we did something!”).
