The Influence Expert: 7 Ways to Get People to Do What You Want (Even When They Don't Want To)

Now here's the one thing that the newest research shows. When they ask us to give them input on this new generation or their the shape of their new products and so on, we are typically asked for our opinion on this. Can you give us your opinion on this? That's a mistake. When you ask for an opinion, you get a critic. If instead of asking for someone's opinion where you want their buy in with you on some idea or outline or blueprint you've got for a new initiative, if you ask for their advice on it, you get a partner. And the research shows instead of asking for opinion or feedback or your expectations about this new product or service, you ask for your advice. Ask people for their advice on it. Not only are they more favorable to your idea, they give you better input, more constructive reason because they're of you. They want you to be a success. They're your partner in this.

Bob, welcome to the show.

Well, thank you Shane. I'm glad to be with you.

Before we dive into the seven factors that make us more persuasive, can you explain the difference between influence and manipulation?

Yeah, and I think it has to do with those seven factors. Those are the things that lend themselves to ascent because they normally counsel people correctly to move in a particular direction. So for example, one of them is authority. If the experts are saying that something is a good idea, then we're probably well advised to follow the authority influence. If a lot of people like us are moving in that direction, there's a trend for it that probably also lets us know that that's a shortcut to making a good decision. So there are these seven such principles and, and for me, influence involves pointing to them where they naturally exist. That is informing people into ascent by simply raising the profile of that principle in one way or another in your communication, manipulation involves the fabrication or manufacture of those principles and the counterfeiting them of them. In a situation where somebody lies with statistics in order to get you to believe that a lot of people are doing this or believing this thing that you want them to, or presenting someone as an authority on the topic who's not truly an authority, is a celebrity or something like that, that's not an authority, that's something else. And so it's when you recognize that those particular levers of influence are effective and co opt them into your to your behalf rather than simply uncovering them for the audience member, which I think is not just ethical. I think it's commendable to provide that kind of information to people. That kind of Education to people.

That's a great opening to the conversation. Let's dive into the principles and start with reciprocation.

So the first principle I talk about is very. An early one in the socialization process. In all human societies, we are trained to live by a particular rule, the rule of reciprocation, that says we are obligated to give back to others who have first given to us. Right. That's the way that the society best functions and allows people the freedom to give first with the knowledge that they're not giving something away. I mean, for the first time in evolutionary history, all the species besides us never had the concept of future obligation to return what has been provided to them. But when we have that rule in place, it allows us the freedom to give resources, attention, care, care and so on to others with the recognition we're not losing it. That person is obligated to give back to us when we need something. It's a fair exchange. It's a great system. So we give first. And I love a new study that was done, not even published yet, was done in McDonald's, actually in the countries of Colombia and Brazil, where researchers. In fact, my colleague Steve Martin, who runs our office in UK and was commissioned to do this study in South America, did a study where for a week, every family that came into the McDonald's locations, the children, got a balloon from the McDonald's management. Half of them got the balloon as the family was leaving as a nice thank you for their, you know, for. For coming into McDonald's and purchasing food. The other half got the balloon. Each kid got the balloon as they entered. Those families bought 25% more food because they had been given something first. First is the key. First means it's not the usual behavioral model that we use in business which says, if you buy my product, if you sign my contract, I promise I will give to you the very best service or merits of the offer that I can provide. That means the customer has to go first. This is saying something else. We have to go first. We give value in some way, easily. The, the way to do it that's least costly is to give information to people about things that will improve their outcomes in any given situation. White papers, tips about the top three things to do to improve their outcomes in something not based on our product or service. If it's designed to tell them how to buy us or why they should, then it's seen as a device, not a gift, not a, not a favor. If we do that, people are now readied to give back to us. So the rule for reciprocation, that's the first.

I have a friend who summarizes this as go positive, go first.

Go positive, go first. That's right.

So why is it we don't do more of that?

I think people are afraid. They don't recognize the power of this rule and they're afraid that by going first and giving resources, giving time, giving attention, giving samples and so on, people might, they might just be losing that they're not cognizant of the fact that there's such a strong rule in every human culture that says you're not, you must not take without giving in return. They really don't register the power of that rule, but it is formidable.

And there's different types of things that we can give. Gifts come to mind, maybe concessions in a negotiation. What are the other types that we can think of when reciprocation is at play?

So for example, you're right about concessions. There's research that shows if, and we've done some research, if we walk up to people and say, listen, would you be a long term blood donor and give a unit of blood every six weeks for the next two years? Very large request, right? A starting offer. Everybody said, no, I don't even know where I'll be in two years, I can't make that. And we said, oh, well then would you give one unit tomorrow during the local but blood drive in your neighborhood? We go from 33% of people who agree to give a the next day. Right. If that's the only thing we ask them to 55%. If we retreat to that, we make a concession. Oh, so you can't do the two year thing that we would most like, but would you do this one thing? So now we go from 33% to 55% compliance. And by the way, we man the, we staff the blood services organization, we have observers there. They show up. It's not just that they say, no, oh yeah, sure, I'll do that. Because they want to get us away. No, they show up.

Well, that goes to commitment and consistency, which we'll talk about a bit later. But is there a contrast at play there too? Because now you've taken it from a large commitment to a much smaller commitment, which feels more manageable.

That's a very perceptive point. There's not only is there the effect of making concession that needs to be reciprocated. Oh, you made a concession to me, I'll make a concession in return, it's that you've made a contrast between the larger favor, two years every six weeks to just once, and this one now seems smaller. So we tested for that in the study and we found that, in fact, if we just say, if we include the contrast in our presentation, we have. You can go anywhere from giving six months for two years, every six weeks for two years, or you could just give tomorrow. That doesn't produce the effect to the same degree. You have to get them to say no. So you can retreat to that thing and then spur a retreat in return.

Sure. Is there a. Like, if somebody gives you a gift or maybe does you a favor, is there a balance in the sense of obligation that we feel we need to repay? Or is there like almost an interest, a mental interest that we, we ascribe to returning that favor so we have to do more?

No, my sense is we are obligated to give back at the same level. But if the only thing we can do is to give back at a higher level, we will. To avoid the burden of feeling like a cheater, like a free rider, right? Like a taker, an ingrate. So if somebody does us, you know, buys us lunch, and so we say, okay, next time it's on me, right? But between that time, if this says, this person says, I'm in a bind. Can you drive over to where I am and jump my battery for me? Right. We have to say yes, because this person just did us a favor. While we're in that state of obligation, we will go even higher. Although most of the time we can cancel the. The obligation simply by giving what they gave us a nice lunch.

Is there a time span associated with this? Like after a couple of weeks, does it wear off, or is it more potent at the start? Or how do we think about that?

There is a time frame associated with this. People are more willing to say yes to a request for something in return the closer to the favor we've provided. However, when they have given us very large favors, those things stay in our consciousness and years later we will be willing to give back to them. They, those big, memorable favors stay solid, but the smaller ones, they tend to fade away over time.

Are there sort of ideal operating conditions, like when this works even better?

Well, that, that's one of them, certainly that proximate to the cause, but also when the. What we have given to them is tailored to their needs, their preferences, their current challenges. Under those circumstances, we now have a more muscular version of the sense of obligation. I'll give you an example. Again, we can do it at A fast food restaurant. Right. Researchers did a study. People came in and one third of them just went to the, to the counter and ordered their food. Another third of them came in and were given a very attractive key ring with a beautiful medallion on it. Right. And those people then by the management, oh, thank you for coming to McDonald's. Here's a gift for you. Right. They, they, they then bought 12% more food. You get a gift, you. There was a third group, they came in and they were given a small cup of yogurt as a thank you. Right. For coming in. Now any economist would say they were fools to do that because now people don't need to buy as much food. Right. They bought 24% more food because why do you go to a restaurant because you're hungry? If you give people something they need that's high in their goal hierarchy, they're going to be most willing to give back to you at a higher level.

Sure, that makes a lot of sense. I'm trying to think. One of the examples from your book that I really liked, maybe you can illuminate this for us, was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yes, you tell us about that.

You weren't alive during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It occurred in the early 1960s when the president of the United States was then John Kennedy and the leader of the Soviet Union was Khrushchev. And it was determined by US Intelligence that Russian ships had brought to Cuba ICBM missiles, nuclear head missiles that were installed and pointed at the United States 90 miles away. What Kennedy did was to demand that Khrushchev remove those missiles. And, and there were Russian ships steaming for Cuba at the time that were carrying more. And Kennedy said, we're going to blockade those ships. And Cruz just said, that's an act of war. If you do that, you're going to, you're going to torch, set off a war, not any war, a nuclear war between the two greatest nuclear powers at the time that was estimated to kill a third of humanity. And during that time, the two leaders were locked in this stare off contest and both of them were just adamant about their positions. And finally, because Kennedy was so adamant and strong willed and resolute in this, Khrushchev blinked and he removed his missiles. That was the story that we all heard in the history books and that I learned about when I was alive at the time. It turns out that there was a secret deal that was made between Kennedy and Khrushchev. It was a reciprocal concessions deal. That's. Kennedy said, if you will remove your Missiles from Cuba will remove ours from Turkey that are pointed at you. Right. But don't tell anybody about it because if politically, if I was seen as, as compromising with yielding in any way to our natural enemy at that time, our global enemy at that time, it would ruin my political aspirations for re election. Right. So Khrushchev was promised. Promised. Yes. Okay, I won't say anything. It wasn't until recently that this information was revealed at the, at the Kennedy Library. The after it was embargoed for all those years, it finally came up. And scholars have said, no, it wasn't this hard line that won the day. The hard line was, was the thing that risked the world, the thing that saved the world was reciprocal concession. And it got buried. Right? And it's regrettable because the image that a lot of world leaders got from this, never compromise, never give in, Just be strong and you, if you are strong enough, you will win. It was exactly the wrong thing. That's not what happened at all. It was the rule for reciprocation that won the day.

I love that example. And the power of this particular effect is undeniable. Not everybody has great intent. How do we defend ourselves against this?

I think what we have to do is recognize that we can't just in a blanket kind of way, reject the gifts and favors and services that may be very well intentioned for us. Right. By people who would like to, you know, increase our outcomes in a particular situation. What we have to do is recognize that when those people do that and then use that as a lever to get something much larger from us. We have to reframe what they gave us as no longer a gift to be reciprocated, but a trick, a device, an artifice designed to get our compliance with a much larger request where they will come out much far ahead in the bargain. We have to make that little change. And then here's where the rule for reciprocity comes in. Because I studied a group that would get people to make appointments with them to check out their fire safety issues at home, right? And somebody would come in and give them a home fire extinguisher and then would give them a bunch of reasons to buy a particular kind, a very expensive heat activated fire alarm system that they were representing. So they weren't really there to give us the information about fire safety. They were there to sell this outrageously overpriced system. And what I say to people in this situation is, look, here's what, as soon as you see that, what that the game Was don't treat the fire alarms, the fire extinguisher that you got as a gift, Treat it as a trick. Right. Treat it as an attempt to exploit you. And if that's the case, show them the door and keep the fire extinguisher. Because by the rule of reciprocation, exploiters should be exploited.

Yeah, it works both ways. The second principle in your book is liking, which is we prefer to say yes to people that we like. What are sort of the main variables that carry a lot of the weight to whether we like somebody or not?

There are really two major variables that we can influence. One is similarity. We like people who are like us. So one thing we can do is to point to commonalities that genuinely exist. Remember you asked that insightful question, what's the difference between influence and manipulation? If we point to a genuine comparability that exists between us and the other, other individual. Right. That person feels a greater rapport with us. Oh, you're a runner. I'm a runner. You're an only child. I'm an only child. Okay. Now there's a bond between us. And those people will feel more poor with us and want to do business with us if those are genuinely there. So, for example, there was one study that was done between negotiators who were bargaining over email. And you know, email is the most bloodless communication device we have ever devised. And as a result, they, they were stymied in their negotiations, deadlocked. So that in 30% of the instances, both sides walked away with nothing. There was no mutually agreeable beneficial compromise for both sides. They just left the scene. That was for half of the negotiators. The other half were told, before you begin the negotiation by email, send some information about yourself to the other negotiator, your negotiating partner, what your hobbies are, what your interests are, where you grew up, where you went to school, what your major in college. You know, these kinds of things. And in that case, stymied negotiations went from 30% to 6%. Now, here's the key. I think when the researchers analyzed the data, it wasn't the amount of personalizing information that had been sent across. It was how many commonalities were in those accounts. If there were a lot of commonalities, similarities, they got the most concessions. The key was the parallel. So the implication is clear for us. We now have a tool that we never had before, the Internet, that allows us to know some things about the people that we are going to interact with and hoping to, to influence in Our direction. It's not proprietary information. People give us that information on social, on social media, LinkedIn and so on. We can find that. And where we find genuine commonalities, we can just raise those to the surface. Before we begin, are there sort of.

I have the same question for all of them, but are there ideal operating conditions or set of circumstances when this works even better for the. The for liking principle?

For the liking principle. Well, does when we have had some kind of situation in which we've been excluded from an interaction or we felt our. Our. Our feelings were hurt by somebody, a friend or something, then we're really looking for. People are really looking for that connection, that friendship association, so that. That can be the case as well.

I want to again, talk about how to defend against that, but before we get there, my favorite example from the book, I think, was Joe Gerard. Can you tell us about him and how he used this?

Joe Gerard was amazing. He was the world's greatest salesperson, according to the Guinness Book of records, for like 12 years in a row. He sold automobiles, Chevrolets, from an dealership in Detroit, in the Detroit area. And he sold an average of. Of, I think it was six cars and trucks a day every day that he worked. Now, some people, if they sell six in a week, that's a banner. You know, he sold them six a day for years. How did he do it? Well, one of the things that he says that he did that was so important is for everybody who ever bought a car from him, every month they would receive a greeting card for him, depending on the holiday that month. Happy New Year. Happy Valentine's Day. Happy, you know, whatever it was, fourth of July, whatever the month was. And then you opened it up and it's. It said one thing inside the car. I like you, Joe Gerard. Now, that man used the liking principle that we like people who like us, right? So this is compliments. It's not just similarity. This, the second thing that we can use besides similarity is genuine compliments that people give us, praise that we give to others. And if we do that honestly. And Joe was a people person. He liked everybody. So he wasn't lying by saying, I like you. Just having that message. You would think 12 times a year, every year, automatically this thing comes. No, for Joe Gerard, he said that was important to let people know that I liked him. So it's not just that we like people who are. Are like us. We like people who do like us.

And say, so how do we defend against this? How do we go about neutralizing the Effect of liking somebody.

Suppose you're in a car showroom, right? Not Joe Gerard's, but you're going to buy a new car, right? Here's what the most effective salespeople have been taught to do. Before they ever show you the car, they're going to give you something. They're going to give you a bottle of mineral water. They're going to give you a cup of coffee or tea or a soft drink. They're going to compliment you on your decision to come in at this time of the month. Maybe even compliment you on your choices of colors, schemes, and accessories associated with the car. They're going to tell you, oh, so here we are in Minnesota. And were you born in Minnesota? Well, yes, I was. Me too. I'm a Minnesotan and I'm, you know. Where were you born? I was born in. Well, I'm born in Minnesota, but my wife is from Texas. My wife is from Texas. They'll, they'll claim these similarities, right? And you will find yourself liking that salesperson more than is warranted by an interaction with somebody for 30 minutes. If you find yourself unliking you find yourself liking somebody, inordinately step back from the situation and say, wait a minute, what has that person been doing that would cause me to like him or her right. So much within 30? Oh, yeah, they gave me that, that Coke. They, they, they complimented me. They told me that they live in the same, they're from the same area as me, they're similar to me, right? And then you have to separate the salesperson from the car because you have to recognize I'm going to be driving that Toyota off the lot, not the salesperson. It doesn't matter how much I like the salesperson. I'm going to be driving the car. So you, you have to make your choice based on the features, the, the favorable features of the deal, not of the person who's offering you the deal.

I like that. Moving on to social proof, which is the third principle in the book. Why is popularity so effective?

You know, there's a, I saw a quote about popularity and how people are using popularity on Internet and on, you know, in various ways. And this particular humorist said popularity is all the rage these days. Yeah, here's the point. Popularity, that is aversion of social proof, which says one way we can reduce our uncertainty of what we should do in a situation when we're uncertain what we don't look inside ourselves for the answer. All we see is the lack of confidence. So we look outside and One place we look is to what the people around us, like us, have been doing or are currently doing in a particular situation. Are we getting a lot of people going to this new restaurant, buying this new piece of software? If so, that is a shortcut I can use to reduce my uncertainty about the fact that that will probably be a good choice for me. If a lot of people are doing it and are rating it positively with those star ratings and so on, that's a way I can reduce my uncertainty. Because they've already beta tested this thing for me. They've done, okay, I, I can choose. So that's why it's so popular to choose popularity as a indicator of a good choice. There was a study done in Beijing, China that, that, that I love. It shows you the cross cultural reach of this. So in Beijing, researchers arranged with the managers of a string of restaurants to put a little asterisk on certain items of the menu that people got when they were to order. What did the end. Those items that got the asterisk then became purchased 13 to 20% more frequently. So what did the asterisk represent? It wasn't what we normally see when there are little asterisks next to items on the menu. Like, this is a specialty of the house or this is what our chef recommends for this evening. If you've read any of those Kitchen Confidential books, you know that the chef's special for this evening, it was what was left over from the night before has to be gotten rid of. Right? Okay. No, the asterisk said, if you go down and read what it stood for, this is one of our most popular items. And each one became 13 to 20% more popular for its popularity. Yeah, there's one little. You have to read the footnotes on this study that was published on this research to see one more little feature of all of this that helps explain your or answer your question. Why is popularity so valuable for us? Right. And it is that if you look at the various demographic groups that came into the restaurant, males, females, young people, older people, business people, you know, leisure patrons who just came in, neighborhood patrons and so on, they all were influenced by the asterisk. But there was one group that was far more influenced than anyone else. First time visitors, the ones who were most uncertain, they could look to the choices of others in that restaurant to reduce their uncertainty about what to buy.

Sure. I think that that's a really good point. Right. So uncertainty makes us more vulnerable to it. I think there's a couple other nuances to this that I find really interesting one is feasibility.

Right.

So if we see other people doing something, we feel like we can do it too. Especially I would imagine if we identify as part of that tribe or that person is similar to us.

In fact, I once worked for a company as the chief scientist that sent messages to the customers of local power companies about how much energy they were using relative to their comparable neighbors. Neighbors who had similar sized homes, similar air conditioning and heating units and so on. And that information caused those people who were using more energy than their neighbors to dramatically reduce their energy. And I think one reason is what you said. It's that, well, if my neighbors, like me, can do it, that means I can do it. It means it's feasible, it's practicable. I can do it too. I can tell you something that is remarkable about this company. It was called O Power. It's since been purchased by Oracle. As a result of this, Opower has is responsible for 30 billion pounds of carbon dioxide that have not been released into the environment because people have reduced their energy conservation by just knowing what their comparable neighbors are doing and saying, well, then I can do that.

It can be a very effective tool for good. It can also be used against us. How do we defend against social proof?

Yeah.

Or people like making up online reviews or telling us, you know, other. It's more popular than it is.

Yeah. So what we have to do. So what we have to do with. Let's take online reviews, right? We have to check out the character of those reviews. It turns out there's particular things that allow us to know when the review is phony. Do they. Do they use a lot of personal stories? That means they're not giving you evidence of the features of the product or service because they don't really know they've just been hired to get.

Right. Yeah.

All right. Do they use a lot of verbs rather than nouns for the same reason it's they're telling us what they were doing and how they were operating and how they were feeling about it rather than what the product really was. Right. Those. Those kinds of things. And so we can look to that. But also there was a great study that looked at which star rating on a product review was most likely to produce a conversion from a prospect to a customer. It wasn't a five point rating. It was a range between 4.2 and 4.7. People were on to the tricksters who were loading their evaluations with all of these positive things. So if it was below 4.2, people say, well, maybe this isn't such a great product if it was above 4.7. They got suspicious. So what we have actually is a constant struggle between the product review sites who have algorithms to try to weed out the phoning reviews and, and the, excuse me, the tricksters who are trying to out flank the, the, the ca. The, the, the various ways to protect, to prevent them. And it's, it's an ongoing battle. But there are a couple of things we can do. And here's the thing that I keep recommending in the response to your question. What can we do about this? So, for example, there are instances in which news accounts tell us of companies that were caught providing phony information about their products, I mean their popularity or about their market share or about their ratings and so on. Whenever we see one of those, we need to go on their site and go on every site of our social media and say, so look, these people were cheaters. Don't go back to them. Look, they've been caught cheating, don't do business with them. We have to penalize those people who do the manipulation that you were asking about earlier. We can't just say, well, I'm not going to do business with them. We have to really penalize them at their bottom line level in order to reduce this tendency to manipulate.

Let's talk about authority. Is there a difference between being an authority and being in authority?

There is. And we can have a lot of evidence of somebody who's in charge directing those who are working or operating beneath them to do something, coerce them, or threaten them with some kind of form of penalty if they don't move in a particular direction. Because I'm the boss playing the I'm the boss card that has costs. People don't like being pushed, they don't like being pressured even by somebody who's in authority over them. Very often what they do is they find a way to finesse the system and get around the, the directive. Because what that's about for me is not influence as much as it is power. That's about power. Yes, and we can wield power, but there are costs of it. That's from being an authority. Excuse me, in authority. What we are recommending as a way to be influential is being an authority, somebody who knows a lot about the topic, someone who's a true expert, who is authoritative on the matter, and those to the extent that we can harness that principle by having testimonials from legitimately highly knowledgeable experts that speak to our idea or our product or service, that's going to work. I know that when Bose Acoustics, we were working with them when they added to an ad for a product that they had called the Bose Wave Music System, a line of testifiers right at the start of the ad, all over to the. To the left, just as you read the ad, and up at the top, they saw all these testifiers. It increased purchases by 15% of that product. We know that it was that ad that did it because the increase occurred only to the phone number that was in the ad. It didn't occur in the shops, people walking in and buying? No, it was to that phone number.

And were those testimonials by authority figures or were those testimonials just average people?

This is a great comment. They were testimonials by authorities, people who were legitimate experts on audition and electronic components, audio components and so on. Now, here's the thing that we did help them with. Originally, when the marketing department structured that ad, those testimonials were at the bottom. And look at all of the people who agree with what we've just said here about this. Wrong. By moving them to the top now, the authority aura that they provide is infused into every word of that ad as people are experiencing it. Why would you throw that honest lever of influence away from. By making it at. Not giving it its due at the top? So what I always recommend to people who are using testimonials, and this can include, by the way, as you inferred, they can also include testimonials from similar others because, remember, we want to follow the lead of people like us. Right. So you've got peers that can be testifiers or you have experts. In either case, they need to go at the top so that you have been informed ahead of time that others experts or peers have reduced your uncertainty of whether to believe the information that's going to come next.

How do we defend ourselves against this?

Against authority? Yeah, we're on the authority principle. It is to ask ourselves two questions when we see an authority testimonial. One is to say, is this person truly an expert in this matter? What does Matthew McConaughey really know about Chryslers? Yeah, he's driving and he's telling us how a great Chrysler. Wait a minute.

He's just right.

What's that? Right? There was a great set of TV commercials that began with an actor who played a doctor on TV who began by saying, I'm not a doctor, but I play a doctor on tv.

Right?

Yeah. That ad sold all kinds of pain reliever. Right. Or it was cost cough syrup. If we had thought about it and said, wait a minute, before I believe this person, let me ask, is this person an expert on this topic? No. So that should unhook the expert influence from my mind on this. That's the first thing. But sometimes we will have people who are genuine experts recommending something. Then we have to ask a second question. Is there a reason for this person to be recommending this product or service other than its merits? Is this person hired?

Y.

Does this person get products for doing this? What a lot of influencers get, they get products and income from those products that they advocate on air. So we have to once again unhook their perceived authority here. If they truly are, you know, they are makeup consultants and so on, they all do this and they say, we love this particular kind of. All right, they might have authority, but whether they're acting in the unbiased, independent way is another question we should ask, ask ourselves. And if we see that they're not, unhook the perception that this person should be followed because of that expertise.

Let's talk about the scarcity principle.

We prefer people want more of those things they can have less of, let's put it that way. We find that those items that are rare, scarce, dwindling in availability are more attractive to us. We want those things more of those things we can have less of. And we all know that there's a. An acronym called fomo, Fear of Missing out, that we've all heard about. That's a big problem, a big reason why scarcity works. The idea that if something is rare or scarce or dwindling in availability, it means we might not get it, we might miss it. Fear of Missing out. We might miss out on this thing. Right. And we hate that idea. There's a concept called loss aversion that Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics a few years ago, demonstrated that the idea of losing something of a particular value is twice as powerful on human psychology as the idea of gaining that very same thing. So when we present an idea to people that has all kinds of benefits and advantages that we can genuinely point to, we should not just couch it in terms of this is what you'll be able to gain by choosing our product. We should also honestly be able to say, and this is something you don't want to lose those advantages. You don't want to forego those benefits that will resonate more powerfully. Remember we were talking about that Bose ad that I was.

Yeah.

Mentioned that if you put.

Is that the one where you did the hear what you're missing or.

Yes. So we also, before we even did that with Bose on that same project, the first generation of that ad was very unsuccessful for Bose. At the top of the, of the ad was the word new. And then after that, there was all kinds of information about new features, new elegance, new simplicity, all these, this information. And it wasn't being very well received by the Bose purchasers. So we asked them, we said, look, don't change the whole ad. Change what you say. At the top of the ad, the word new says uncertain. It says, there isn't any evidence about this yet. There isn't any feedback that I can see from my neighbors or friends at the office who've tried it or, you know, it's, it's brand new. I'm gonna, I'm gonna wait. What we did was to change the word new to hear what you've been missing. The idea of missing out says no time for waiting. No, no, I have to get this. I don't want to miss it. I don't want to miss out on this great thing. Okay? That change produced a 45% increase in sales. Then if the Bose marketing department added testimonials, they produced a 15% greater increase to 60% increase from the initial generation of that ad. So it was both of those things together. But the idea of loss is what people really want to avoid. Now, I don't know how many of your followers are online operators. Most of us have a lot of online profile, but there was a study of 6700 e commerce sites and a B tests that were done for various components inside those sites. And some of them were like economic, like, does the site have free delivery? Some were technological. Does the site have a search function? Some were psychological. Does every appeal end with a call to action? Then they read they, they had 29 of those. The top six were all principles of social influence. And the top one was scarcity of supply. We only have a certain number of these with this feature or at this price. It was the top a B test that produced conversion from prospect to customer. Second was social proof. Look at all the people who've already done this. We've gotten this kind of message. And by the way, there's a new research that shows that there's a particularly powerful form of social proof that isn't just a large number of people have done this, but there's a trend to that number. It used to be that last year we had 30% market share. Six months ago it was 35. Now it's 40%. That's more powerful than just saying 40%, because people project growing. That's right. People project the. The function of the trend into the future. So social proof was number two with evidence like that of a large market share or popularity or trends. And number three was scarcity of time. That is limited time offers. This offer is only good for this week. Whatever the time was, those three were the most powerful approaches. So scarcity was two of the top three. Now, I'm going to suggest there's something else that we can do that empowers the scarcity principle and it doesn't require scarcity of supply or time limits. And that is uniqueness of what we offer. If we have something, a feature that none of our rivals can match, that's where we go. Because people will want it if they can't get it anywhere else. Now, a lot of times, because of the homogenation of the way things are manufactured and offered these days, a lot of times there, it isn't one thing that separates you from anybody else in the market, but it could be a suite of things, a particular combination of features that only you provide. Go there, go there. That's what people don't want to lose by going somewhere else.

Let's talk about commitment and consistency principle.

This is the one that says people want to be consistent with what they have already said or done, especially in public as a consequence. Right. If we can ask people to take a small step in our direction voluntarily, but say, look, here is the. Could you do this? Take a small step? They will now be significantly more likely to take a larger step that is congruent with what they have already done. Because people want to be consistent within their behavior and they want to be seen as consistent. So here's a good study in that regard. It was a study done in Chicago with a restaurant owner named Gordon Sinclair. It's a famous restaurant called Gordon's there in Chicago. He's since retired, but while he was operating, he had a problem, no shows. People who would call. Yeah, right. They make a, a reservation and that then they just wouldn't show up and they wouldn't call ahead to cancel. And it was as. He had 30% no shows. Okay. So he walked around and, and saw what his. Saw what his receptionist would say to people when she took a booking. She would say, thank you for calling Gordon's. Right. Please call if you have to change or cancel your reservation. Right. We've heard that many times he asked her to change Two words and to say, will you please call if you have to change or cancel your reservation? And then he asked her to pause and have people fill that moment. And they all said, of course, sure, glad to. And that was their commitment. And no shows dropped by 67% immediately and never went up because he had gotten them to make an active, public, voluntary commitment to something, and now they were going to live up to it to a greater degree. So here's an implication, I think, for anybody, like a manager. Anytime you're running a meeting and you've given members of your team tasks to perform and complete before the next meeting, come back with those. Don't let anybody out of that room until you ask the question, will you be able to complete this by our next meeting? And pause. If the answer is no, that's actually good for a manager to know that means, okay, then I have to give this person more time or more resources or maybe even some help with it. Right? But if the answer is yes, you have now significantly increased the likelihood that that person will come with a properly completed task to the meeting because you've asked them, and they have made an active, public, voluntary commitment to doing so.

One of the interesting things for me about commitment and consistency is we sort of hide inside the walls of our own thinking. How do we. How do we defend against this not only when other people are using it, but how do we defend ourselves from just constantly escalating and being held to opinions that may be no longer valid?

Man, this is a good question, and I'm going to answer it by first saying how we do this with people who we would like to change in our direction, who have already made a commitment to something else, to another product or a service or an idea. Right. I mean, right now we've got a lot of people who are resisting health information about, well, right. How do we change that? We can't say, well, you know, when you made that decision, it was the wrong choice. You were just making a wrong choice. You are, you're not a good decision maker. People want to hear that. That's going to get their back up. And they say, I, I still stand by this decision. What you have to say is, at the time that you made that choice in the information environment, that may have well been a good choice for you. But here's a new piece of information that we didn't have back then. As a good decision maker, people take into account all the information. So you're a good decision maker. And we can get people unmoored from that Commitment that they had made by saying, okay, now let's re evaluate because there's a new piece of information I can give you on this topic that we didn't have back there wasn't part of the information environment. And this is what I think I'm going to ask us to do ourselves, that when we encounter a new piece of information relative to a decision or a choice that we've made and you know, and that we get a chance to change. Right. We need to say if I knew this when I first made my choice, if that was part of this decision, or would I have made the same choice or would this have had enough weight to move me? Right. And my guess is a lot of times that would allow us to say, yeah, I, you know, I want to take into account all of the information, including the information that I didn't have back then.

There's so many other questions I want to ask and we have to cover unity. And then I have a whole host of other questions. So let's talk about unity, which is the new one that you've added to the book. The seventh principle. What is it? How does it work?

It works for a communicator in the following way. If that communicator can arrange for us to see him or her as one of us, that is as someone who shares an identity with them in some kind of important way, right, Like a tribal identity. It can be a tri. Yes, tribal identity, but it can be something. I'll give you an example of a study that was done on a college campus. Researchers asked a young woman, college age woman, to stand on a heavily trafficked part of campus and ask people to donate to a good cause, I think it was the United Way way and she was getting some contributions. If she said before she made the request one thing right, which was I'm a student here too. Would you give the United Way donations went up 400%.

I'm one of you.

I'm one of you. I'm of you. I'm not just like you in style or preferences or those are things. No, I'm of you. Then people will say yes. I used this a while ago on in my own life when it turned out I, I was writing a grant application to get funding for a long three year program of research and it was due the next day. It had to be sent in to the funding office the next day. And I'm reading over it, you know, making sure everything is right. And I had a, came to a paragraph that said made a particular claim And I realized I really didn't have convincing evidence for that claim. But I knew that a colleague of mine in the psychology department where I was working at the time had done a study the year before and had collected the data that were relevant to this and he had it in his archives. So I, I sent him an email and let's call him Tim. That's not his real name. I sent him an email saying, tim, I'm in this bind. I have this grant due tomorrow and I don't really have the evidence, but I know you have the evidence for this one point that's crucial. I'm going to call you to get to talk about how I could get that from you in the form that I need to put it into this grant application. Well, Tim is known as an irascible, sour, negative kind of guy in my department. So when I called him, he said, hello, Bob, I know why you're calling and the answer is no. Look, I can't be responsible for your poor time management skills, Bob. You're a busy man. I'm a busy man. I have things to do today that also have time constraints. So the answer is no. All right. So before I read this research on how people say yes to those inside their we groups, what I call we groups, the groups that they would label as we. Right. I would have said, come on, Tim, I really need this. I've got this, this deadline tomorrow and it's a grant application. He had already said no to that.

Yeah.

So here's what I said. You know, Tim, we've been in the same psychology department now for 12 years. I really need this. And Shane, I had the information that afternoon, of course, I just located us honestly pointing to a common membership in something that was a shared identity for us. So I, I think that's something we can do whenever we have long term relationships. That can be commercial relationships, they can be personal relationships, they can be friendships of one sort or another. If we have somebody that we would like to move in our direction on something, we should start out by saying, you know, we've been together now for this many years and I really. And I have a favor for you. I wonder if you'd be. And the fact that we're now in the same unit.

Yeah.

Inclines them to say yes.

That's very powerful. Let's switch gears here a little bit. What makes Warren Buffett so successful at influencing. Thank you for listening to the first part of this episode. I don't want you missing out on the rest. If you're interested in hearing the complete version, you'll want to become a member? Head to FS Blog Tribe. We cover what makes Warren Buffett so influential, how to ace your next interview, what to say when you do someone a favor, how to protect yourself against cognitive biases, who uses compliance tactics online, the best structuring online sales pages, and so much more. We created the Membership Program to give you more exclusive of content, transcripts, early access, our private podcast feed, and so much more. Sign up at FS Blog Tribe SA.