The New Influence Featuring Dr. Robert Cialdini, and Dean Jackson - I Love Marketing Episode #396

There's a new principle.

That's what I was going to ask you about. So now this is exciting. You've discovered a new one.

Yes, and I'm calling it Unity.

I love that.

But it has to do really with membership in a particular group.

Yes, right.

A tribe, some in group that defines us. And if a communicator can arrange for us to see him or her as inside that group, one of us.

All.

The influence barriers come down for that communicator.

It's the godfather of influence. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the pioneer in the psychology of influence. It was his ability to translate the science into meaningful applications that made his universal principles of persuasion so accessible to us all.

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to geniusnetwork.com who knew that.

He would develop and popularize a field that is now part of marketing, leadership, sales, digital communication, and even government policy. Please welcome Bobby Cialdini.

Well, welcome. I am super excited that we get to spend our time together again. And I can't tell you what an impact influence has had in my life. I mean, it's been one of the foundational books that I've used to build on. You know, in everything that I do, I use all of those the principles of influence in. It's one of the three books that I recommend to people of everything that I've read. If you're going to get started in marketing, that's in the number top three books that I recommend constantly for people. So I'm excited that we're going to talk about the new and expanded version of this. So I think it would be good if you could maybe tell a little bit about the background of your work because it's been kind of defined your life's work since then.

Well, as your very gracious introduction suggested, I started out as a traditionally trained and traditionally practicing academic doing research on my college campus with college sophomores pretty much as the students in laboratory settings and recognized there was something missing there. And I needed to get away from those academic constraints into the environment where the influence wars are being waged every day. After all, we're always either sending out influence appeals or receiving influence appeals of one sort or another every day. And there are certain people who know how to do this because their economic livelihoods depend on using the influence process properly and effectively. And it seemed to me that those.

Professions, sales, management, recruiting, fundraising, marketing, advertising and so on, those were the people who really knew what I should be.

Focusing my, my, my thinking on.

So I began to invit. I began to infiltrate their training programs with disguised identity, disguised intent to learn what they had done that produced yes from people regularly. And I spent two and a half years in those, in that undercover activity to learn something beyond the college campus where I had been studying this process.

But it turned out soon after the publication of Influence, that a lot of people were interested, besides that, in harnessing the process in ethical ways, in morally responsible ways, to move people into positive choices that they could make that they were hesitant to make. They were sitting on the fence, they just were dithering. They weren't thinking through what exactly the costs and benefits might be. The merits of one's case were simply not being presented to them in an optimal way. And so they wanted to know about optimization of the persuasion process for that reason as well.

It's almost like an autopilot thing. When somebody is presented with this, with into the right circumstances, one of the elements of influence, it's almost like instinctual.

There's a belief that in order to.

Get big effects, we need to do big things to change people in substantial ways.

It's just not true.

There are big power sources inside people.

And our job is to locate the switch that flicks them on that then.

Drives their behavior, just for fun, to just maybe quickly name what the six elements of influence are so we can set the context for what we're talking about here.

So the first is the rule of reciprocation. People want to say yes to those people who have given to them first, done a favor, a service, provided a gift. People want to give back. So you go into a room where you want to be more influential. Your first question should not be who can help me here? It should be whom can I help here? Whose circumstances can I elevate? Whose outcomes can I increase? They will stand on the balls of their feet wanting to do the same for you. Next principle is liking. Nobody's surprised that we prefer to say yes to those we like. But there are two small things we can do that substantially enhance the feeling of rapport that people feel with us. And one is to point out genuine similarities, and the other is to give genuine compliments or praise as warranted. Next principle is social proof. This is a term, by the way, that's used, we coined it back in with the first edition.

Influence.

Social proof didn't exist before. I'm so glad because I was thinking of using people proof. Right. What's happened with social media now? Yeah, Think about social media. I'm so glad that I, I use the term social proof, where the, the fact that a lot of other people are doing something, especially people like us, is the proof that we should do it too. It's not fact based proofs, it's not scientific proof, it's not logical proof, it's social proof. So that's the other thing, simply letting people know of the others who are around them, like them, who are choosing or have been choosing our recommended step forward.

In what year did the first book come out?

The first book came out in 1984.

Okay, so this was well before anything with the Internet.

Next is authority. If we're uncertain about something, one way to reduce our uncertainty is to see what the experts are saying and what they are doing. And if we have expertise, we have to be sure that the people who we're trying to move in our direction are, are properly informed of that before we ever try to influence them. Next principle is the principle of scarcity. People want more of those things they can have less of. It's just the way we are. So things that are rare, scarce, dwindling in availability, if we properly inform people of those characteristics, they get a little crazy. Then the next principle is commitment and consistency. People want to be consistent with what they have already said or done, especially in our presence, especially publicly. They don't want to say one thing, do another, or misspeak by saying one thing and then contradicting it the next time. They want to be congruent with what they have already made, made a commitment to. So asking people to take very small steps in our direction causes them to be much more likely to want to continue to take steps, even outsized steps, in our direction in the future. And then finally there's a new principle.

That's what I was going to ask you about. So now this is exciting that you got to the point. That's masterwork of the six. And then in revisiting now, you've discovered a final, a new one.

Yes.

And I'm calling it unity.

I love that.

But it has to do really with membership in a particular group, a tribe, some in group that defines us. And if a communicator can or arrange for us to see him or her as inside that group, one of us.

Yes.

All the influence barriers come down for that communicator. We say yes to those people, we cooperate with them, we believe them, we trust them. Those people who are of us become people who we want to favor and follow.

Researchers had a young woman looked Like a student asking students who were walking by if they would make a contribution to the United Way and she was getting some kind of response. If she preceded that request with one statement, she increased by 250% the number of contributions. The sentence was, I'm a student here too. And now 250% greater compliance.

Wow.

Isn't that something you just like you have to when you say things like that. When I read your book, I've read your both pre suasion and. And influence multiple, multiple times. I keep them in my office and in my library as readers that I kind of will open up and just get a study, read one of the things and then kind of meditate on it. Like you're saying when you say things like that. I have to just let that sink in for a second because if you put a number to it that if she's sitting out there for any number of time and without that sentence, she's sitting there and she's able to raise $100, let's say. And then in the same amount of time by adding this little phrase, she's able to raise $250. It's pretty amazing. Yeah.

What I like about it is that it shows us how small the change can be to flip on that big power source inside people. In this case, the source is, oh, I am of this. This person is of us. One of us with. With four words.

And you don't even. Yeah, it doesn't even. It wouldn't. You wouldn't think that that would be the. The big shift.

Right. The. The power is not in us. It's what we have turned on in the recipient of our message. What are the big power sources that exist that drive their behavior? And this unity is one of them. Few months ago, I read a newspaper, I said I grew up in Wisconsin, where the National Football League home team has always been the Green Bay Packers. So I've been an avid Packer fan for all my life. So I read in this newspaper article that the two celebrities, Justin Timberlake and Lil Wayne, both musical artists, are also avid Packer fans. Dean. I immediately appreciated their music more and wished them greater success.

There we go. That's it.

So it can be many, many people.

I would never have had an interaction with Justin Timberlake or Little Easy, but.

I want them to win now because they're of me.

That's so funny. I could just see Wayne blaring out of your office on campus there.

That's right.

Your homeboy. He's one from. He's Your Wisconsin brother, that's so great.

He didn't even grow up in Wisconsin. He just likes the packers, like me.

But that's so funny that that's a. You know, you think about that as soon as you talk about this in influence to the uniform, that the home team, it's us, that there's that belonging. But then we're only when we're winning, but when we lose, it's, they lost. We want to distance ourselves from the losses. But we won and they lost. Yeah, that's the. So that's really interesting.

One way you can get people to want to be at one with you is to show them your success. They want to be of people of attainment so they can share that identity.

What would be one of the most surprising things that you learned? Updating the book.

It wasn't an easy decision to do this update because, you know, there's this old saying, don't fix what isn't broken.

Right.

You don't stay successful by doing the same thing. By staying where you are, you have to always move forward. Shark in the water, you're always moving forward. Otherwise you get left behind. And that's what my grandfather was saying. If you want this to continue to be a good situation, things are going to have to change.

Yeah.

I realized there was a need for this new edition. It had been 14 years since the last edition. A lot of new research was available and I wanted. Including that new principle that I wanted to put in there.

Yeah.

Now the question of what, you know.

What surprised me most?

I'd say there were several things I.

Could probably raise to the surface here. There was a study done that contradicted.

Everything I had been doing when I.

Was trying to get colleagues on board.

With a new approach or an initiative.

Or an idea I had that I wanted to run up the hierarchy.

And.

Get buy in from top people. First I had to get buy in from the people around me. I wanted their. Their assent that this was a good idea. So I could say that as I move up the line, you know, how did I. How could I do that? And I would always try to use what is essentially the idea of giving. Asking for their feedback on this idea. I'd give them an outline or a blueprint of what I was suggesting and ask for their opinion on this. Asking for their feedback was the right thing, but asking for it as an opinion, it turns out, is a mistake. When you ask for somebody's opinion, you get a critic.

It's true.

You get somebody who literally steps back, away from you and goes inside themselves to search the pros and cons and come up with their inside opinion. Right.

The research shows if you substitute for the word opinion the word advice, you get significantly more favorable reaction to your proposal. When you ask for an opinion, it's okay, us then me, I'm representing people like me against your idea. Right. When you say, can I get your advice now? It's the two of you. There's no effort involved here. We change the word opinion to advice. It's not. Doesn't even take a full breath to generate that difference.

Right.

And we get this big effect now.

It's an instant. Like you said, it's a click that already he's shifted over here. That tells you what lens to he's gonna reply from. You know what?

It strikes me as worthy of supplementing one of the most successful marketing approaches that we've had in many years. Co creation as an effect that really works big. Getting our customers, getting our prospects, getting our clients to help us co create the next version of our products or services, what model features we should add, which we should. And we ask for their feedback on this. Right.

I'm a big fan of co creation.

Yeah.

And I'm just saying there's an optimizer I used to always ask for opinion. Give me your opinion on this. No, optimize your co creation requests by asking for advice instead of opinion.

I love that. It's such an important distinction. Unity seems like an exciting new development here. Are there any more of the specific things that you have developed around Unity, how that can be deployed or how we can trigger that?

First of all, we can look for those things in the history or experience of the people we're trying to move in our direction that we can legitimately say, oh, I'm a Packer fan too. Oh, I'm a runner too. Oh, I'm. I'm a firstborn too. Those kinds of things that are associated with an identity that we have, we should, we should sift through the information that people give about themselves on Facebook or LinkedIn and so on. It's not embargoed information. They want us to have it. And where we find those things, we should raise them to the surface. We become one of them. Not like them. Look, you know that study I was talking about, this student, the college student on the campus.

Yeah.

She didn't say I'm a student like you. Student is just too big a. It's just too big a category that I'm a student here.

Yes, yes.

Now you're a Spartan or a Sun Devil or a Blue Devil or a Bruin or whatever. You know you're of them that makes the difference.

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