The Power of Pre-suasion and Persuasion with Dr. Robert Cialdini

we need to be thoughtful. We need to say to ourselves, what's the pre-suasive feature? What's the pre-suasive moment that's available to me that will drive people to the thing that will best represent their value proposition, give them the best possible outcome from my product or service.

So I gave a quick introduction this morning. I think some of it bears repeating, but I know for me— How many of you guys went to college? Yeah, I guess most of us. I read a lot. Studied and junk, made good grades, but, you know, except for ancient Greek. But there was, every time I was reading books, I was reading them 'cause I had to. And truly, that was kind of like every aspect of school up until that point. If I read a book, I read it because I had to. Somebody said, read this book, read it well, you will be tested. And so I remember walking into a communications class, same deal, went and bought a bunch of books, and thought it was the same thing. And then we finally got to this one particular book in the class. And I read it because I was told that in this particular unit, you had to read chapters 1 and 2 or whatever. So I read chapters 1 and 2. And then I kept reading chapter 3 and chapter 4. And in basically one day, I read this, binge read this entire book. I'd never done that before in my life. Right? And I said, this actually is helpful. This actually makes sense. This is actually useful. It was the first time truly, and I think this is sad to say, that in my educational experience that I found something that was truly applicable to where I was in my life. And it was around that time that I was actually beginning to like launch little websites on the internet. This was 1999, 2000, right? So I was like, this all makes sense. This can help me in so many ways. And that book was Influence. How many of you guys felt the same way when you read this book by this, you know, some professor out of Arizona, and you're like, "Wow, this is amazing," right? I mean, truly, I don't know if there's another book out there that more marketers could point to and say that that book influenced me than this particular book. And it's a book that I went back and I read again and again and again. And then in this last year, "Pre-Suasion" came out. I'm like, "All right, but how do you wind up topping that?" And I went ahead and bought it, 'cause if I'm not totally sure about a book, I'll buy a book, I'll buy the audio version of the book, and if it sounds good, then I'll go buy the physical version so I can write and take notes and dog-ear pages. So we're going, driving on a family trip to the Grand Canyon, listening to Pre-Suasion. And I'm telling my wife, I was like, okay, pause, and I'm making her take notes as we're driving to the Grand Canyon, really beginning to bug her, and she's like, this is actually really, really good. This is way better than most of the crap that you make me listen to on our family trips.

Like, I know.

I know, it's really, really, really great. Went back, read it again, and immediately began applying a lot of things. I'm actually, when we're done with this discussion, I'll send out some of the notes that I took from it and how it's impacted it. But to have Robert Cialdini here in the flesh after so many years of admiring his work is truly, truly an honor and truly a special moment. I know we're gonna get all, We're all going to get a lot out of this time, but if you would please right now just join me, big, big, big round of applause for Dr. Robert Cialdini.

There you go.

No, you're in the— we'll put him in the hot seat. Here you go. You're in the hot seat in the middle.

Okay.

Not many people get to snuggle up between Perry and I, mostly because they don't want to.

Aren't you the lucky one?

So here we go.

Happy to be here. I've got one. Oh, you do?

OK, great.

I bring my own.

Nice. Thank you. So I know we're going to have the opportunity to talk and have some conversation about some things. But I know that you also have some examples and those types of things prepared. I guess, would you like to start with that and have that kind of kick off the discussion?

Yeah. Maybe just talk about the idea of persuasion, first of all, and how it's different from the material influence. Influence, which is about— whoop, I'm going to go back here.

If you hit the black one, it makes it go dark.

You're in trouble now.

OK. So there we go. Influence is about what you put into your message. What do you load into your content that leads people toward assent? Persuasion is about what you put in the moment before before you send your message that makes them receptive to the element of your content that you think is going to move them in this direction. So in influence, there are various principles— social proof, authority, scarcity. Let me give you an idea of what— [NOISE] persuading them to be focused on one or another of those principles can do. There was an A/B test that was done by Royal Caribbean Cruises during the 2016 holiday season. Everyone who— every one of their former passengers who received one or another of those emails were told about a time-limited offer. Scarcity. You could only get it for a certain time. Scarcity was the unique feature of that message that they wanted to leverage for success. And let me show you what the two programs, or the two messages, looked like. One of them— had a pair of ticking clock emojis in the subject line. So before they ever got to the content, before they ever were introduced to the idea of scarcity, there was a message, there was an image there that focused them on the idea of scarcity before they got there. This message, the one with the emojis, produced a several hundred percent increase in profit. How could that be? How could that be? What was it about those emojis? Right? Here's what it was. Something about the human condition. When we are focused on a particular idea, a particular concept, or a particular factor, we automatically give more weight to any information that is related to that idea subsequently. We prioritize any related information over all the rest of the information that we then receive, as long as we still have that idea, that focal idea in consciousness. And when we see ourselves prioritizing information, we assume that it must be important. And when we assume that it must be important, this idea, we search for it. And when we search for it, because it's important, and we encounter information that is congruent with it, now We want to choose anything that provides that factor, that provides that concept to us in our decision-making process. Here's a study that makes the, the case. Online furniture store. They sent randomly half of their visitors to a landing page with fluffy clouds in the wallpaper, the background wallpaper. They sent the other half to a landing page that had small coins, pennies, in the background. Let me show you. Here's the clouds.

It's beautiful.

Right?

It's awful.

Clearly awful. But nonetheless, it doesn't matter. Clouds. The other half got pennies.

All right?

Now, those individuals who encountered clouds in the background wallpaper of their website landing page assigned more importance to comfort in the sofas that they were about to buy. They then searched the website for comfort-related features of the sofas and ultimately chose to purchase more comfortable furniture. Those who saw the pennies assigned more importance to price, searched the website for cost information, and chose to purchase less expensive furniture. Whatever was brought to consciousness first, to their attention, where they had a focused attention on this, became more important, became necessary to pursue, and became the standard for deciding what to do next. Now here was the interesting thing about this because It involves not just the effectiveness of this study, it involves the ethics of it. When these individuals were asked, by the way, did that wallpaper make any difference in your choices, the clouds, the coins, they laughed. They said, Of course not. Of course not. I'm a freestanding entity. I decide what to choose based on who I am, what my preferences are. What they didn't recognize is who they were as a purchaser, a cost-oriented buyer, a comfort-oriented buyer, was altered by what they saw first. So this means that if we use persuasion, not only will it fly under the radar, because it flies under the radar. We have a special ethical burden to be sure that what we present to people first, which makes them focus differently on aspects of the next information they receive, is related to that factor of our information we want people to pay more attention to than any other factor in our message. What's our key differentiator? What's our central element of our product or service or message that makes it wise for those people to choose us?

I have bad news.

Yeah.

They're all gypsies, tramps, and thieves. Scoundrels, the whole lot of them. This one's illegal. Yeah, exactly. That one right there in particular. Yeah, no.

She's the president.

I don't believe it. But it's not a necessary trade-off. If you decide first what is the most favorable feature of what you have to offer that makes it wise for people to choose And then you reverse engineer the process. So the thing that people see first, or before they receive your message, entrains them to that feature. Who loses? Who loses?

Right?

People are being steered to the one thing that makes it wisest for them to choose. That's the one you want them to be paying attention to for long-term customer relationships.

Can we linger here for just a little bit? 'Cause I think this is really, really important. We talk a lot about the idea of before and after, right? And specifically, we look at what's somebody's emotional state before and what's their emotional state after. Thinking and making sure that the choices that you make, 'cause so often, The choices that are made of imagery on a landing page, or maybe background music in a sales video. They're afterthoughts made by designers and graphic artists, and what we don't realize is they can often be incongruent to that emotional stimulus that we actually need them to have if they're gonna be in that buying state. And so being very deliberate about that is, What you're saying, we need to be thoughtful about that as an aspect of the process.

Precisely right. We need to be thoughtful. We need to say to ourselves, what's the pre-suasive feature? What's the pre-suasive moment that's available to me that will drive people to the thing that will best represent their value proposition, give them the best possible outcome from my product or service. Here's what I would claim. I'm going to use a metaphor here. There's a piece of persuasive real estate that has gone almost entirely untended by communicators. It's the moment before— You deliver your communication. So what do you build on that piece of real estate? You build a launching pad for your message. Those ticking clock emojis elevated the impact of scarcity. We know that scarcity works, right?

So thinking tactically then, it's the, it's the image that goes in the subject line, right? Maybe it's an image that goes at the top of an email, of a promotional email. It's the image that you're selecting in your Facebook ad, right? Being thoughtful of that, because oftentimes, yeah, oftentimes we'll just put a Facebook image that we know is going to be evocative and get the view, but if it Doesn't put, how many of you guys have seen the ad that we would run like when we're about to run a ticket to Traffic Conversion Summit and it's a battery that's almost down to nothing? Right? The idea for that came from reading Pre-Suasion. What is the emotional state that we want them to be in? Well, we want them to have a sense of urgency. Right, we want them to have a sense of urgency that things are going on. Now, what does a phone about to run out of battery have to do with the fact that tickets are almost sold out? Nothing, but the emotional state is the same. And when you see that image, it's a trigger of, oh, something is about to happen, I need to take action quickly, I need to plug in my phone. It's the same emotional state, and so it works. It doesn't necessarily have to be tied to the action itself, it just has to be tied to the emotional state.

Correct.

Just like pennies have nothing to do with mattresses.

So in order to change minds, you first have to change states of mind. You change frames of mind that people are in so that they will be receptive to the factor that will get them to change their mind.

Can you tell the story of palm reading? And how that—

Yeah, so when I was in college, I learned palmistry from a friend of mine, which I used as a icebreaker at parties. It was a way to— I always felt uncomfortable at a party. I didn't know a lot of people. And I would have this little trick. I would read people's palms. And I eventually stopped because as soon as I would do a reading, a line of expectant candidates would form. Blocking my access for the rest of the evening from any meaningful conversation, or the buffet table. But while I was doing it, this odd thing occurred. People almost invariably said, that's right. How could you know that about me? "you don't know me. What you just told me is exactly right." And I would have a kind of knowing smile because I was mystified as well. I didn't know how to explain it. Well, here's how to explain it. If I bent back your thumb and I said, "Ah, I can tell from the curvature and resistance of your thumb." that you are a stubborn person. Somebody tries to push you in a particular direction. Not only won't you go there, you'll go the other way. Here's what that would cause you to do. It would cause you to go on a biased memory search to find instances where you were stubborn, and you would hit some. But if instead I said, "Aha, I can see that you're an open and flexible person, and when somebody gives you information you didn't have before, you're willing to change your mind and move in the direction of this new information," I will have sent you now on an equally biased but different memory search for instances in which you were flexible. And in both instances, you will look up at me from that palm and say, "You're right about who I really am." So by putting you in mind of your stubborn side or your flexible side, and having that as the thing that you now search for. Remember in the online furniture store? People now searched for comfort, or they searched for cause. I will be able to be correct about you and get you to behave in ways— well, I haven't convinced you that I'd be able to get you to behave in ways, but let me give you this example. Researchers walk up to people on the street, market research. They say, can you be in this marketing study? We can't give you any money for it, but you'll get some good information about yourself. Well, only 29% of the people are willing to participate in this survey for no compensation under those circumstances. OK. And they're told, this survey that we're going to give you is for a new soft drink. Something completely unknown. You've never seen it before. No one has seen it before. But if you would like to get access to this, we'll send you information about how to get a free supply of this brand new soft drink. Give us your email address. Give us your email address for this new thing. 29% of people say yes. If that same encounter occurs and the marketing researcher begins By saying, excuse me, do you consider yourself an adventurous person? Now 77% give their email address.

Because of the palm reading.

They've been put in mind of their adventurous side.

Yeah, the same thing, right?

Same thing.

Didn't even have to touch the thumb.

And you know what?

It works.

Under the surface. Let me tell you something that just happened to me— not just, maybe 3 months ago. We have a business, and we have a business partner. And this business partner made a big mistake for us, screwed up in a significant way. And this guy called me on the phone to tell me about it. He said, Bob, before we begin, let me tell you something. I hate when this sort of thing happens to nice guys. And then he told me about the screw-up.

Had you written the book yet?

I had written the book.

You know it's good when it works, even though— Yeah.

It works on you. And here's what I heard myself say. Ah, no big deal. Happens to everybody. It's happened to me. Instead of saying, OK, now what's the compensation? Instead of being a hard ass, I was now a good guy. He put me in the good guy state of mind, and it worked on me, and I just Robert Cialdini wrote that book on this. It still worked on him.

Did you tell him about the book?

Make sure he's read it. He probably read it. That's right, by then.

Yeah.

So this is going to work, and it's going to work beneath the surface, and it's going to work very powerfully even on people who are otherwise knowledgeable. About the influence process.

So before we move on to the next example, take a minute to write this down. What is the emotional state that I need my audience to be in to be most receptive to the, to be most likely to buy, right? Is it excited? Is it frustrated? Is it sad? Is it, do they need to feel this sense of warmth and abundance, right? We all have that capacity inside us to feel all of those emotions, but what is it where if they're in this state, they're gonna be most likely to take the desired action? And now what imagery, all right, what sounds do we need to put in place that might evoke that? What words—

[Speaker] Music.

[Speaker] That could evoke that? Similarly, what questions could we ask as an opening sentence, in a headline, In a subject line, what questions could we ask that when answered will cause our audience to adopt the desired identity that we need them to adopt to most likely move forward? Write those down, ask yourself those questions, and go back and look at what's the most recent email you sent, what's the image in your Facebook ad, what emoji are you using in your subject line, and make sure that apart from them you know, trying to optimize it, do you have something that's incongruent? We ran. We had a new offer that we ran lately. That was all it was in the survival and preparedness space. Right. How to get prepared for a disaster. And I'm not kidding. The background music was like, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. I mean, it's like this, happy, go lucky. And I listen to. I was like, something about this isn't right. Perry. I sense Perry, he's like, dude, that music, man. I'm like, happy. I'm ready to, like, you know, dance around. And you're convincing me that I need to get prepared for a certain die today. Yeah. Ensuring that apart from using this as a mechanism for optimizing, making sure that you're not casually shooting yourself in the foot.

I think you can be more deliberate than that because I think I want to get this right because I— but what immediately springs to mind is the congruency of what the persuasion tactic is and what the influence tactic is. Of the 7, right?

Right.

That there's congruency between the two. If you're going to put the ticking clocks on the message, but you have a reciprocity message that you're delivering, that's not going to work, right? So you got to be really— yeah, the handshake emoji would work, or a gift emoji, a birthday cake emoji or something might be more effective if you've got a reciprocity.

If what you've got is scientific evidence, right? Then you put a beaker, or you put Albert Einstein, you put something associated with authority and evidence and science.

Like Harry Potter.

Harry doesn't do science.

That's where they go. They go there. And that's your strength. He's a great doctor. You know, Ryan is exactly right about the sounds, the music. You know, there's a study that if a customer goes into a wine shop and they're playing German music, they buy German wine. If it's French music, they're more likely to buy French wine. Whatever puts people in a state of mind or even an emotional state that's relevant to a particular choice is the one that's going to be prioritized for a short period of time.

Do you have any idea how long that framing lasts?

It lasts for as long as that idea that you've focused them on is still high in consciousness.

The sooner the better.

Yeah, the sooner the better.

The sooner the better, right?

And the longer, the more likely it is that events are going to occur and move their attention to some other concept and then you're, you're out of luck.

As long as you're walking through the long, narrow hallway into a casino and you see winners, winners, winners, winners, winners, winners, winners, winners, winners. Right. The longer you're down that hall, the better you are.

Right. And the more they're like you. Right.

The $10,000 thing. Yeah.

Pam, How are those two tied together? Is it more about the emotion or the identity, and how are those two tied together?

Well, the emotion is something that is acute. It's temporary, right? So that one, you're going to want to be really quick. Identity is chronic. If you raise that to consciousness, that's likely to stay there because it's got a root system. All right? That keeps it high in consciousness. So you're a little safer. But I would say the more— you use what's available to you. But the more that you can focus people on an identity that they own, then the more congruent any choice is with long-term impact of those choices, that they're going to choose things that have legs into the future for them because they're consistent with their view of themselves.

Well, especially you have to understand a lot of times the context under which your message may be sent. So if somebody's entering into your store and now they've crossed the threshold and they're not going to go anywhere, you might have a little bit more time. If it's the, you know, sad save the kitten and puppy ad with the Sarah McLachlan song, You better get them to call right then and there, 'cause the very next ad could be, "Crazy Eddies, like, blah, blah, blah, get TVs, we're going crazy with these deals," and now you're out of that emotional state. Boom, you're done, whereas if you can appeal to somebody's identity, go from sad cat ad to Crazy Eddies all the time, and that's still who you are.

Let me say that it's not just at the top of the message. There are different stages of your message, and you shouldn't be satisfied with the state of mind that you've installed at the top, which may not apply to each subsequent step. I was just in a mini-mind— mini-mastermind.

Yeah, teach persuasion in front of him staring at you like this.

Great. Lucky me.

And here's what Perry said. You work really hard on the headline, the heading. And then you have subheadings. And he said, I think really hard about each subheading that begins each new set of information. That's brilliant. Because you may not want people in the same mindset at stage 2 that you want them in in stage 3. That means you change what you focus them on at the top of the content before they get into the content every time. That's how you optimize this. It's not just the very first thing. It's every time you change the message or some goal you have within the message, you do that again. And then, of course, the most important message you want them to retain and have at the ready occurs before the call to action, immediately before the call to action. That's where they're going to be most likely to move in the wisest direction for them, the one that you figured out before you ever sent them the message, what would be best for them to overvalue, to pay greater attention to than they ordinarily would.

I know you got a couple more. Examples for us?

I think there was a question here, or has that already been answered? Let me give you one more example. Because here's one thing that I'll— and we'll go— one last image that I've got here of how this works with, indeed, imagery. You don't have to do it with sound, with music. You don't have to do it with words. You can do it with imagery, like the clouds and the coins. But here's one that I really like. One of the things that we are challenged with these days is getting people on board with us, both inside our organizational envelope and outside. Outside, we want our customers, our clients, our prospects to feel bonded with what we have to offer our organization, our products and services. Inside, you want your people who are working with you to be on the same page. You want them to move in sort of a unified way, a sense of partnership with you and their colleagues in achieving this common goal. And there was a study done in Belgium to show how you might do this with a simple image. Researchers had subjects come into an experiment. They sat at a table with a researcher, a young woman, who showed them photographs. Of household objects, like a toaster, a table, a chair, that kind of thing. And for 1/3 of these subjects, there was a figure standing behind the object in each case. In one case, it was a single figure standing alone. For another 1/3 of the subjects, it was 2 individuals standing apart from one another. And for a third sample, it's two individuals, not quite like this, but shoulder to shoulder in a partnership, cooperative.

Group hug.

Like this. Let me show you.

Yeah.

And then the researcher— loves it— got up from the table.

He's like, I'm never coming back here.

OK, I'm OK. I'm Italian. I'm OK with touching. Researcher got up from the table and pretended to drop an array of items onto the floor. And the question is, who gets off of their chair spontaneously— they don't have to be requested— gets down on their hands and knees, and becomes cooperative, becomes a partner, a collaborator with the researcher in getting this stuff off the the floor. Let me show you what the answer is here. For people standing alone, who saw the image of one person standing alone, 20% do it. For those who saw two individuals standing apart, 20% do it. Now, you probably are going to guess What I'm going to show you for those people who saw an image of togetherness before they were asked to do something that was a partnership, collaborative, cooperative activity? 60%. You triple it. You triple it. Now when I saw this study, I was in a position where I was not surprised by this effect because I had seen it over and over and over. Where you focus people first, sends them down a channel, right, that causes them to be congruent with the idea that you focus them on. In this case, it happens to be cooperativeness, partnership. Here's what surprised me. It surprised me so much that I was reading this study on my computer screen, and I have a chair with wheels on it, and it literally rocked me back in my chair so that I rolled back away from the screen. Here's what it was. The subjects in this experiment, including those people who had done 3 times as much as their contemporaries, were babies. They were 18-month-old babies. Children. That's how primitive this effect is. That's how much of a feature of the human condition this is. It's in us. It's in us. And by primitive, I don't mean that in a negative sense. I mean it in an elemental sense. It's how we operate. As members of the species. OK, when you've got something with that kind of motivating power, that's where you go. The more I study the influence process, persuasion, and so on, the more convinced I am that the closer you can get to primitiveness, the more power and the more reliability you will have in the effects that you produce. And this is one of those fundamental principles of action. What you focus on at any given moment makes you prioritize all information that's related to that focal concept while it's still in consciousness. And you can see the kinds of differences you get in getting choice and action, not just in babies deciding who to help pick up objects, but in furniture store— in cruise purchasers. Right? So it doesn't go away after 18 months. It's still in us because it's so adaptive to do this. Think about it. If you go into a situation and you pay attention to something, right, it's because it's important. We don't go— we wouldn't last very long as a species if we went into a situation and started paying attention to things that were not important there. So if you pay attention to something that's important, I want to say two things. First of all, it makes sense that you would prioritize attention to things that are related to that concept. That's the important one, right? And secondly, it's going to get you to perceive that if you are focused on this thing, it justifies your focus. It, it warrants your focus on that thing because it's the one that you chose to spend time on. That's the logic behind it. Here's how a communicator can change that equation. By directing people's attention to something, they can get them to spend focused attention there for reasons that have nothing to do with its importance, that have something to do with the communication process where you deflect their attention to this thing.

Can I bring in a tactical application of that? All right, so the premise, just to make sure I understand, is because in our natural state we tend to focus on things that are important, because generally we look at stuff that might eat us or maybe we could have sex with it, right? That's the general rub.

Smaller than us eat it.

Yeah, yeah. Or we can eat it.

Life or death. You're talking about death and life. Life and death.

Talking about the basic aspects of humanity. So because that's so ingrained in us, now the reverse of that almost becomes causational. Because I'm looking at it, it now becomes important merely because I'm looking at it, because historically I looked at things that were important.

That's right.

So the inverse has now become true.

We've confused causation. —causation with—

Yeah, we've confused in our brain. So how can we as marketers leverage that? Anybody in here ever heard of retargeting? When you run retargeting ads all the time and all people are seeing is your brand, your logo, your stuff, you become important not because you are, but because you're there, because you're constantly present and constantly visible. So I mean, if you're wondering what's the ROI, of retargeting, what's the ROI of that? That's the reason. And I've said this before, people like, I see your ads all over the place, right? You know whose ads you aren't seeing if you're seeing mine? My competitors. So I become important, not because I am. You guys know this, you've been around me enough, you know I'm largely worthless. But from a retargeting perspective, because you see me again and again and again and again, I'm there on YouTube and it's like, hey, me again. That guy must be important. Why? Because I visibly see him all the damn time. And it might— and the logical part of you will say, this is annoying. I find it irritating that I keep seeing your ads all over the place. The 18-month-old of yours being like, that's important. That person is really, really important. And yet you keep showing up for stuff like this.

That's a great insight. And it explains something that I heard Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Berkshire Hathaway, explain why they invested in Coca-Cola many years ago, whose value in their stock portfolio has skyrocketed, I don't know how many hundred percent, right? It's because everywhere you looked, you could find a Coke sign or a Coke machine. It was always there. It was visibly prominent, which gave it standing as important and worth paying attention to.

Attention direct response people, if you don't think branding matters, there you go.

But I guess that on the inverse of that, I was thinking, how could you apply that to like— where does that naturally occur, right? So if you're driving down the road and you hear a siren or see police lights, your situational awareness immediately goes up. You slow down your car. You look around you to see where the accident is. You, it's more important to you than it was. You were listening to the radio or talking on the cell phone, but instantly it's more important, right?

Right. And that's why, by the way, have you ever heard, especially in Europe, there are police sirens that go wah wah wah. You know, you know why?

Like a baby sound.

It's the sound of a baby. It's at the sequence of an infant. And that's where we We have evolved to pay attention to that. Makes it worthwhile and justifies our attention.

Yes? Here, we got to throw the magic cube, if for no other reason than because it's fun. Who has it? All right. Oh, up high. No, that was actually a pretty good toss.

I can absolutely confirm what you're saying, like, and I can show you a live example of what we did. If you have a browser, you could show that to the screen. Is that possible? Or— I'm sorry, do you have a browser and could show that quickly to the screen? Is that possible? Then I could show you what we've done.

Probably not. Can you show us like on a Wicked Smart thing?

Yeah, like the thing is we compare dating sites and we have built like a table where you can compare them. And in the beginning, we were just saying like the best dating sites, the top 3 dating sites. And then we switched that to a background with a kissing couple. And the first thing was, do you remember your first kiss? And after doing that, we put them in a completely different mood before consuming our content, and this increased our time on site by like 20% and clicks and stuff. So yeah, this was a big change for us when doing that. And I see that in online shops as well. Like they sell cold-pressed dog food.

Cold-pressed dog food? Yes. It angers me that that exists.

That absolutely exists. I believe it. Like, if you— I see it in in many online shops. But what about if you transformed it to, do you remember how happy your dog jumped around and played with a ball or whatever? And you want to make him happy like this again? And here's the dog food or something like this. So I think this has a big influence on buying stuff.

Yeah, there's only two things that anybody's ever buying, right? Transformation and identity reinforcement. So if we can figure out the identity that they want to reinforce and come up with ways to show that to them, and then, or figure out the transformation that they want to become and get them in that state, then you got it. But the point is, it's about being deliberate and intentional. Sorry, you wanna throw that? Dayton Bill over here's got one. No, can I do it, please? This is the highlight. All right, thank you. All right, Bill, you ready? I feel like I'm really good at this now. You got it.

Thank you. Um, this is great stuff. What about in regards to changing someone's state? And when I'm saying someone who's in an elevated state, a customer service call, is there— does it still apply?

Are there other things that you can do when someone's already at a state to kind of jujitsu them?

It'd be cool to try some on-hold music that reset their mindset.

Yeah, some music that would change.

Zen music, like at the spa or something?

But one way to do it, it seems to me, is to get a sense of commonality with the agent who they're going to be talking to on the phone so that they sense that this is somebody like me. Who's going to empathize with my situation, not somebody from this other, this unstated other organization. It's an individual who is like me. And that disarms conflict. It's hard to be against yourself, right? So to the extent to which you can see yourself in other people— there was a study done with negotiators where half of them were asked to negotiate on a very difficult problem, and they got 30% deadlock negotiations. Nobody won. Everybody walked away with nothing. There was another group, before they began the negotiation, they sent information back and forth to one another about their hobbies, their interests, and background, and so on. All right? That group, deadlock negotiations went from 30% to 6%. Now, it wasn't just because they got information that humanized the other person. When they looked at their data, it was only when there were commonalities between their interests, hobbies, background, family situation. It wasn't until they saw a connection with themselves. So that representative needs to ask some questions about this individual, right? The situation, where do they live, what, what, how many people in their family are, all these kinds of things. And where there are commonalities, they get to say honestly, oh really? Yeah, me too. Or my wife's from there. And it changes the situation from hostile and conflict-laden to something else, something unitizing. Yeah.

The on-hold time when they're looking, oh, let me go and pull up your records. Hey, while this waits to pull up, you know, where you from? I'm picking up an accent. Where you from? You can use that during customer thing as though computers don't move at the speed of light. Now, was there another one over there? We'll go Gaviria and then Partiv. Yeah, I like that you threw it to me. Yeah, this is awesome. I absolutely love all this. So it just seems, just based on what you said there, a lot of this stuff we're kind of doing with survey funnels, we're seeing this translate with segmentation like you just mentioned, asking the question before you get to that. Point of asking for a conversion or sale or whatever. But my question is, do you generally start at the end of the funnel and work your way back when, when I guess thinking about this, or do you start from the top to the bottom when you're, I guess, wondering how you're actually taking someone through this process?

Well, I think there are two steps, and you and your team— it's, it's crucial to do this with your team, right? Identify the principal feature of the message that you are about to deliver, all right, the core element of it that you want people to most pay attention to. That's step 1, all right. And then you go and you reverse engineer the process. You go to the moment before you're going to deliver it, or at the outset of it. And you bring attention to that idea, that feature, that factor. That's how— it's not all that complicated, but it is going to require that you and your team decide on an image or a An adage, a slogan. So if you want change, right, there are all kinds of sayings that are, when you're through changing, you're through. Inhale, or exhale the past, inhale the future. Those kinds of things that are, there's one by this British novelist, E.P. Hartley, that I love is, it's the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. Just putting people in a state of mind. If I stay here, if that's what you want is change, is what you've got is going to require change and produce benefit beneficial change, getting them to take that step, those kinds of things.

You might just have that quote at the top of the page. At the top of the page.

Yeah.

I'll give you an example that I, if you've ever, anybody in here have like the Centurion card? The whole thing they're selling there is exclusivity, right? And so you get a little business card in the mail and you call the number, right? And it's like a 212, it's a New York number, it's not a 1-800. And when you call, they answer, they go, answer the phone and they're not like, yes, American Express. The person on the other end goes, yes, hello. Very kind of abrupt, and you're sort of taken off guard. You're like, hi? Like, yes, this is American Express. Who's calling? It's like, my name is Ryan Dice. I received a card in the mail. OK, yes, sir, yes, sir. In the lower right-hand corner, talking against the cadence, how do you speak when you're Talking to somebody. So what do they want me to feel right now? They want me to feel like I'm kind of on the outside. Yeah, in the lower-hand corner, there should be a code on the card that you received from us. Would you mind reading that code to me? Sure. F, G, R. OK, let me check. Oh, I see. Oh, hi there. Mr. Dice, is it? Yes. Oh. Thank you so much for calling. Um, let me just apologize for my demeanor earlier. As I'm sure you can imagine, we receive quite a few phone calls to this number from people who frankly don't qualify and have not been invited to apply for the Centurion Card. So we needed to make sure that you were who you said you were. Now that I've verified your code, uh, let me just say Welcome and congratulations on being invited to apply for the American Express Centurion card. See how the pacing and everything? So it's everything, right? It was, yes, but how do you talk to somebody if you're annoyed that they're there? It's very quick and very punchy, and then, oh, oh, I see. And now, like, it was just, you know, and tell me, what do you know about the Centurion card? I mean, I was like, oh my God, and I'm like, Oh, this is good, and I'm like taking notes and crap like that. But it's the same thing, right? So, I think that's key, right? What is that state that you need to be in? What is the thing that we want them to pay attention to? We want them to feel a sense of exclusivity. How do we make someone feel that sense of exclusivity? You exclude them and then re-include them, right? We've all done that, and I'm sure there's quotes on that. You could probably show, A picture, if you really wanted to make somebody feel left out, you know, we've all had the experience of being the last person picked for a game thing. So maybe it's that.

The Oxford Club letter that's been around forever for Magora shows a great big closed door on the front of it. And basically, it lets you know that you're on the outside. And inside are all these wheeler-dealers, cool people that know things that you don't. And that's the whole message of the door.

But that key is picking, being very deliberate, right? What is the thing that we want them to notice? What is the thing we want them to focus on? What's that sense? And now, once you've decided that, then you can reverse engineer all the mechanisms to do it, be it imagery, language. I know we're fundamentally out of time, but could you talk about, just very briefly, the importance of metaphor and the selection of metaphor in terms of getting people to do that, like the example that you gave of the virus? Right, and the ways to see that.

It has to do with a point that we were making in Perry's mini mastermind, which was terrific, by the way. What do people counter-argue? They counter-argue the conclusions you draw for them, or the assertions that you make, or the claims in your argument. They don't counter-argue music. They don't counter-argue imagery. They don't counter-argue stories. Stories are. They just are. And they don't counter-argue metaphor. Something like— here's the study. Researchers show people a news report of a rise in crime in their city. And they describe it either as a rampaging beast that must be controlled and stopped, right? Or they describe it as a rampaging virus that must be controlled and stopped. And now they ask them, how should we best deal with this crime, this crime wave? Those who were exposed to the metaphor of a beast They recommend catch-and-cage solutions. More police, more prisons, harsher sentences. It's what you do to a beast. Those who were exposed to the virus metaphor recommend Treatment, cleaning out the conditions that produce the virus, education, mentoring programs, these kinds of things now, all based on where that metaphor took them psychologically in terms of the mind state. They didn't counter-argue the idea. Now, what's interesting about this is that you could predict whether they were going to choose cage solutions or treat solutions based on their political preference and their gender. Republicans versus Democrats, men versus women. Those were trivial compared to the difference that occurred as a result of that one word, that metaphor that put them in a state of mind that was then congruent with a particular kind of choice, a particular kind of action.

15 minutes later, they would have probably went back to their core beliefs.

15 minutes later. That's why you need to get a choice.

Temporary suspension of belief.

You need to get a choice when they are in that state of mind. Don't fool around with that period of time. That's a mistake.

Strike. I think a good place to leave it, a quote that you had in the book. That I wrote down. These are my notes. I'm not like texting, just so you guys know. These are my notes from the book that I'll be sure to send them. But I loved this quote, and I think it's a good thing to remember in everything you do. It was Daniel Kahneman who said this. I think that's how you pronounce his name. Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it. Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it. In that moment you are thinking about it, that thing that permeates, permeates your thought, nothing that exists is as important as that. How do you make sure that what you want them to think is what they are in fact thinking, that you stay there in the front of their mind? How do you make sure that the thought that you want them to have is there? If you could pull that off, then I think you've just pulled off the main primary tenet of Pre-Swim.

And then you get them to act. You must get them to act while they're in that state of mind.

Party?

Oh, thank you. This thing is borderline evil, but beautiful. Question for you: when designing an infographic, should it be visual, sequential, and descriptive, or should it take on a influencing journey? A journey? An influencing journey as opposed to visually descriptive. I'm talking specific to infographics that is accompanied to copy. Yeah, I would say it depends on your market and it depends on your goal, but in general The journey is the one that is going to be most successful, I think, in moving people effortlessly through your material in ways that link together, as a general rule. Just because that journey is something in which they don't counter-argue the narrative. They don't counter-argue the journey, the sweep. They counter-argue the end of that. But if you've got them buying in all along, they're less likely to contend against the conclusion. Joe?

Last question. And then when we're done here, don't leave. We need to do Wicked Smart. So you can clap, but don't leave.

Real quick, Jason Fladland here just shared this with me. There's 39 book recommendations from billionaire Charlie Munger that will make you smarter. And number 11 says Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. A frequent and persistent recommendation from Munger. I believe he's given away more copies of this book than any other. Which is pretty badass. I don't even know if he knew that.

Well, that's wonderful to hear. Whenever we have a— I bet. Whenever there's a Berkshire Hathaway meeting, Charlie Munger tends to recommend our books. And we see this Berkshire Hathaway spike in our Amazon ratings.

So real quick, since you have spent your whole career figuring out how to get people to say yes, Yes. How do you use persuasion and persuasion to repel who you want to repel, to say no to things?

In the same way I'm going to ask you as communicators to think about the moment before you send your message, I'm going to ask you as a recipient to think about the moment before you received it. What were those clouds doing there? What happened just before I got the message? Think about that and where you are being steered. It gives you a chance to decide whether you want to be steered in that direction.

It would make sense, uh, I would think it would make sense sort of like a restaurant, right? If you're, if you're a guy in cutoff shorts and flip-flops, when you walk into, uh, Bob's Steakhouse, you're just gonna feel uncomfortable, you know. I think maybe the, the environment that you're setting— like, a lot of this to me, because I started in retail, so e-com came to me a certain way, online came to me a different way than most people, because I think about it It's been kind of easy for me. I said, would you do that if somebody walking into your store, right? And with retail, if you don't want a certain kind of customer, you just don't create an environment that attracts that kind of customer, you know, especially when you're going upmarket. You know, you've got to upmarket that, you know, you're not going to go to Mastro's and, you know, you're not going to Mastro's down here in— or in Beverly Hills with cutoffs and flip-flops. It's not going to happen. You could, I guess, maybe they let you in. but you probably feel uncomfortable the whole time you were there. No more than Roland's skin would begin to boil inside a Holiday Inn, for instance. Like if he were to walk in, he immediately breaks out into hives. I've seen it happen. Yeah, something amazing to watch. But, but it's— right. Yeah. You get— so, you know, it's an environment that just is hostile to him, right? So maybe that, that environment, I think creating an environment that's just not conducive to them. I think when Digital Marketing did a great job over, uh, Richard and Ryan have done a great job at creating an environment that's not necessarily conducive for the startup wannabe biz-opper kind of person, right? Which was a big part of the audience in the beginning. Uh, it was just not really running them away, but just creating an environment that wasn't tenable for them.

Yeah, no, and that's really great. And I mean, I think I do that with like with Genius Network, with the criteria of income and all that. From a personal standpoint, you're now a very famous person in, in the business world. How do you personally say no? How do you use it in a courteous way without coming across— because I think most people here, you know, I get hit up hundreds of times a week. Interview this, would you do this, can we talk? And I always try to be as nice and as pleasant as I can, but my bandwidth is super limited to just everyone. And so, like, how do you—

Yeah, so what I will do is, as I suggested, ask myself, well, what were the principles that this person was just using on me? And what did they do immediately before they launched into that message? Does it take me in a direction I don't really want to go or is not consistent with the image I want to have of myself, which doesn't fit my self-image. That gives me the chance to say precisely that I'm sorry. This isn't for me. This idea just doesn't fit with the way that I prefer to comport myself or to do business. Thank you very much for thinking of me, though.

Perry's taking notes. This was awesome, so thanks. That's pretty great. Thank you so very, very much. I really appreciate it. Doctor, doctor, thank you. And a big, big round of applause. Very much appreciate it.

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