Robert Cialdini explains ethical pre-suasion: first identify a precise goal for your audience, then create a matching mindset before your message. The word "valentine" or an image of flowers can shift how people think before you speak.
Let's take a little more detailed step through what you can do as an effective and ethical pre suader to move people in your direction. Pre suaders operate successfully, optimally, in two ways. They increase agreement with a yet to be experienced message by first identifying the precise goal of their message. And by precise, I don't mean something like, I want to be a highly effective leader or manager. How many people here are in leadership positions? Most of us. Or I want to be a top marketer. How many people have marketing responsibilities? Yeah, most of the rest of us. So it's not something as broad as that. It's something that allows you to be a highly effective leader, for example, to bring your team together in a feeling of unity and cooperation and partnership. That allows you to be a great manager, or in the case of marketing, to get your customer base to try something new, a new product, a new model, a new feature that you might have for them. How do you do that? That's what allows you to be a top marketer. Those kind of precise goals. So you identify the precise goal you have for that population at that moment with that offer, and then you take the second step. You create a mindset in your audience that's consistent with the goal you have just identified, that is aligned with that goal, that is related to that goal. Because remember what we said, when you focus people initially on a particular concept, it will become more important and all information related to it will be sought after will become focal for that audience. And you do that with the words, the situations, or the images you put into the moment prior to the delivery of your message. We've already talked about words. The word valentine, which the researchers had previously pilot tested to show yes, the word valentine for middle aged French men is associated with romance, or you do it with settings. Those researchers did a pilot test to find that for young women, flowers are associated with romance. So a setting, a floral shop, or images, clouds, pennies channel people toward comfortable or inexpensive furniture, respectively. So you can do it with words, you can do it with settings, you can do it with imagery.
