6 Dark Marketing Tactics That Force You to Buy Anything

Every single day you are being manipulated. The biggest brands in the world use dark psychological tactics that you don't even notice. And once you see them, you can't unsee them. Today I'll be exposing 6 tactics and exactly how they work and how you can ethically apply them in your own business to explode sales. If you don't know me, I'm Sabri Suby. I've generated my clients over $7.8 billion in sales. And every single one of these tactics has been deployed and tested in real campaigns with real money. Starting with tactic number 1. Soho House is a membership for creative industries. You cannot buy a membership, you must apply. There is a waitlist, rejections, and people often need to apply multiple times to be accepted. But here is the thing that most people never talk about. The entire criteria is completely subjective because it is not there to qualify you, it is there to manufacture desire. The whole process that you have to apply makes you want it even more. And the waitlist makes acceptance in itself feel like an achievement. And people spend thousands of dollars a year on their memberships and they feel lucky to do so. When you have an application process to qualify people to allow them to buy, then you are the person that is in control of the buying dynamics because they can't just buy whenever that they want. So instead, if you can qualify people, if you can let them know that there are limitations and scarcity to what it is that you do, then that's gonna be infinitely more powerful than not doing this process. Just that one thing alone alone will dramatically increase your conversion rate because people that go through this process are gonna feel like they are the ones that are being chosen and that they are choosing you. So the way that you can apply this to your business is if you are generating leads, instead of saying book a call, you say apply or claim a strategy session where the call in itself is of perceived value. And the way that you do that is you're gonna put a short questionnaire before they jump on that phone call. You wanna put the minimum amount of questions that gives you the information that you need to qualify a prospect. The trick here is, is not just doing the usual shit that most people do and being like, how much is your budget? When are you looking to buy? You need to make it feel like it's also tailoring the experience to them by asking them, what are you currently doing to solve this problem? What have you tried in the past? Because they are not buying from you, they are being accepted by you. And that is tactic number 1, the application funnel. Which brings us to tactic number 2. So that first tactic is about manufactured exclusivity, where this next one is about manufactured ownership. And subscription services have been using it on you for years. Every single subscription service on the planet offers a free trial. Take YouTube Premium, for example. They offer 30 days free. Once you accept that offer, you're on YouTube, you're using it, you're being able to download videos, watch them offline. Then lo and behold, YouTube Premium dries up and you have to pay. And then all of a sudden, you start getting hit with like 3-minute ads and multiple times at like the best part of the video. Most people that use the free version, they're kind of happy with that because they've never had a taste of the premium. And there is a very specific reason on exactly why they do this, because it is so much harder for someone to say no to something than it is for them to get them to say yes to something. And once they do, then effectively, in order for them to continue receiving these services, they have to say like no, that they don't want to pay. And the pain of giving up all of these features is way more than the actual initial acquisition and someone making the decision of whether or not they want to do this in the first place. But this only works if the product is actually good. If you can build a product that is so good that once someone experiences it, that there is more pain associated to them to not have that in their life, that's when this thing works. So here's how you can specifically apply this to your business in an ethical way. Let's just say that you're an e-commerce business and a lot of people do this where they offer free 100-day returns. The reason that this works so well is you find yourself on the site and you're like, that looks nice, let me buy that as well. You end up buying more products than you initially thought you were going to because you know that there is no risk associated with it because you can return it for free for 100 days. It is way more effort for you, one, to actually go to the store and then send that back. And you end up basically increasing the average order value because you're allowing somebody to experience that product. And the more time, energy, or resources that they invest in that whole process, that's gonna make it even more stickier and harder for them to say no and walk away. And that is tactic number 2, the endowment effect, which brings us to tactic number 3, which is a sneaky little tactic that you would've experienced firsthand at McDonald's, but you would've never even realized it. Walk into any McDonald's anywhere in the world and look at the menu and you will see small, medium, and large drink sizes. And the medium is priced so closely to the large that ordering anything else seems almost irrational. And here's the thing, the medium isn't there to actually be bought. It's there to make the large feel like the only sensible and valuable choice. Remove the medium size and all of a sudden everyone just starts ordering a small. Put it back and then you watch that everyone automatically starts ordering the large. McDonald's isn't pricing drinks, they are engineering a decision and they are complete masters at it. And just the fact of doing that, you'll also get 30% of people that will actually take you up on your large size or your premium offer purely because it's there. But When you don't have an offer that is greater than the price that you usually sell, chances of somebody taking that is zero. You don't wanna make the decision a binary one, like, yes, should I buy or not? No, it should be which package do you want to buy? So when they pick your middle one or the entry level, it feels like a bargain and it feels like they are making a smart and educated decision. So the way to apply this specifically for your business is to take your core offer, the main thing that it is that you sell, and create a tiered system. Think about all the nice-to-haves that maybe aren't in your current offer, or maybe they are and you can basically remove them and have a middle package and a lower package. And you just wanna make sure that whenever you're giving somebody a proposal or you're asking them to buy, that there are multiple things that you can offer them. And the other thing that makes this so powerful is that it protects your margins. You sell to the middle package, the decoy offer, and then for the people that want a better deal, you can downsell them to the entry offer, or you can price anchor them with the high offer. And that is tactic number 3, decoy pricing. Which brings us to tactic number 4. And this is something that IKEA mistakenly discovered and it is now one of the most powerful retention mechanisms in retail. So it's a Saturday, you drag your ass to IKEA and then you step into the biggest psychological minefield that exists. And you think that you're going there just to get a chair or a sofa. The price of individual products, a lot of them are very, very competitive. So you go in there for a chair, you buy the chair and you You put it up in your lounge room and you're like, when I saw it in the showroom, everything looks really nice, but in my house it just looks a bit odd. While you went out there to buy a $149 chair, you end up going full YOLO and dropping $3,000 to fit out your entire living room with IKEA furniture. Because you walk into that room and you're like, I really like this. I like this aesthetic. I want the whole thing. IKEA didn't just mistakenly set up these showrooms that show you the entire setting in one go. Think about how normal furniture is sold. Like you go into a lounge room, a lounge shop and there are a bunch of lounges. That's not how IKEA does it. And that's why they're the biggest furniture company in the world, is that they orchestrate the entire setting. They make the room feel like a home. And that is by design. They dramatically increase their average order value. And the reason that it works, it basically changes the standard of what the prospect has in their mind. They might have thought that their website was completely fine before because they've never seen what their brand could look like once it was redesigned on a smoking hot landing page. And the biggest businesses in the world, They're the businesses that their entire product ecosystem is designed that the first sale then drives the need for the second sale and on and on and on. And they just have monstrous lifetime value and therefore they can spend the most money to acquire the customer. 'Cause a business owner gets a customer to make a sale where a business builder makes a sale to get a customer. And the biggest point of difference is that it's not done through a sales pitch. It is a perfectly orchestrated system system that is a ladder that gets people to buy the first product and that just sends them up that ladder in a logical progression. You don't need to tell them to do it. It in itself creates the demand for that next product that you've gotta sell. So here's how to apply this specifically for your business. You wanna map out exactly where your prospect is right now and what the dream destination looks like. And then mark out what are all the different steps steps that they need to go through in order to get to that dream destination. And the perfect way to do this is to engineer that every product in that ecosystem creates the need for your next product, which is tactic number 4, the missing piece effect. Which brings us to tactic number 5. And this is the one that Amazon built their entire empire on. And once you see it, you simply can't unsee it. Amazon patented the one-click checkout back in 19— 1999 and literally had the monopoly on it for over 20 years. And before they had it, you had to add to cart, then go through and look at the cart and then click checkout and go through that entire process. And the executives there thought, how can we just remove all of the friction from that sale and have people to buy with just a single click of a button? And after they implemented it, it was just you click the button once and then you're done. Because every single step in a checkout process is a moment for the prospect to reconsider the purchase. Is when somebody's checking out or they're buying, there are literally thousands of little micro decisions that they're making all along the way. And there's only so much mental RAM that somebody has and they literally get exhausted during the checkout process and they don't buy. What you wanna do is you wanna look at whatever it is that you're selling and what are the processes that someone must go through in order to buy. If you are selling a service, do you still send out like a PDF of the contract that someone needs to actually physically print, or are you using something like PandaDoc or DocuSign where they can literally do it all in the click of a button on their phone? Whatever it is, you want to remove all the friction that you possibly can. If you're like, oh, this is fine, we've already got people buying, let them insert their credit card manually and do this. No, no, no, no, no. You must burden all of that complexity for your prospect because your conversion rate has two parts. It's not only a reflection of how good your offer is, but it's also how good the process is and how little friction was applied applied in order to get people to buy. Because there are a huge amount of people that do wanna buy, but they can't be bothered with all the effort that's required. And that is the biggest opportunity for you to increase your sales. And that is tactic number 5, the one-click effect. Which brings us to tactic number 6, which is one of the oldest tricks in the book. And this tactic is exactly why Spotify, 400 million people use their entire product for free. So Spotify has over 600 million users, but over half of those customers do not pay them a single cent. And every single one of their investors questioned this logic in the early days before it was a proven model that everybody now runs with. Because the free tier is not a charity, right? It is a psychological tactic. They know that it's going to be much more effective to get those people to say yes yes to their premium. Once somebody is on the app and they're building playlists, they're discovering artists, it makes it so much harder for them to go over and move over to Apple Music or another product or service. And they go YOLO and they go and they spend the $19 a month and they have ad-free experience. And the free tier is engineered to get the first yes, which in business is the hardest yes of all. And then they know that the subsequent offers that they're gonna make to people, the chances of them taking them is gonna be so much higher because already got that first yes. And it's the exact same strategy that I deploy for all of my clients. What is something that we can give away for free that will allow someone to experience our product or service and experience how good it is? Because the first transaction takes place when someone actually spends time with you, whether that's give you their contact details. Most people look like that, oh, that's just a free thing. No, no, no, no, no. You are asking your prospect to pay with their time and with their attention. So what you must do is you must frontload this thing and you must lead with your best foot forward and you must think, what would be an offer that I could offer to people that it would be impossible for them to say no to? And this is based on the commitment and consistency bias, where if you can get somebody to say yes to a small yes, you get them in motion and a buyer in motion just keeps on buying. And here is the distinction. The first offer is not there to make profit for your business. Most people think I need to be making profit on the very first sale that I make. But all the biggest businesses in the world don't make money or they break even on the first offer. And they do that to introduce people into their ecosystem. And they have already perfectly engineered what their second and third offer will be. And they know what those repeat order rates are. And that's why small businesses remain small businesses. Businesses and big businesses keep on growing. So the way that you can specifically apply this to your business is to splinter off what is the most desirable thing that your market wants. It's not your entire product. It is a splinter of that that you can actually go out there and give away for free or give away at break even, or just ask people to pay shipping and handling. And that's why for my clients that are in the business of generating leads, we still use a down and dirty high value content offer, which is a free piece of information that we give away away to the marketplace. Your lead magnet must be better than people's paid programs or better than their books in itself. It doesn't need to be as big as that, but it needs to be better than that because that's the first transaction that takes place. That is the game. You want to give away the secrets and sell the implementation. Don't be shy and be like, I'm not going to give everything away, especially in today's day and age when someone can jump onto ChatGPT and Claude and they can get all the answers anyway. So instead, the thing that you want to be is you want to be the person that curates those answers. And you wanna give that piece of information that is so good, it's so tactical and value dense that they automatically assume that your paid stuff is way better than everybody else's 'cause you've already proved it. But I can tell you right now that this will explode your business. So you are not trying to sell them everything at once. You are simply trying to get the first yes. And that is tactic number 6, the entry offer effect. And if you like this video, you're gonna absolutely love this one on 17 years worth of marketing experience in 46 minutes. Like, subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one.