Last week I had the pleasure of hearing Dr Robert Cialdini talk at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas.
For those of you who didn’t make it out of your hotel rooms in time (who schedules a 10am talk at an affiliate convention anyway!!), here are the notes I furiously thumb-typed on my iPhone:
- Products already have merit.
- Just need to use influence principles to sell, that’s all.
- Consistency – small, public, compliance.
- Liking – give them info that lets them match their experience to yours – e.g., “about us” should include personal aspects.
- Scarcity accelerates the merits of an existing product – ask what feature of your product is scarce (what can’t they get elsewhere) – can be a bundle and combination.
- Loss aversion – under uncertainty, it is more powerful for someone to lose something than gain that same thing – must tell people what they will lose.
- e.g., gaining $1 a day vs losing $1 a day.
- The word “new” is bad in marketing – creates uncertainty and creates loss aversion.
- “new” vs “hear what you’ve been missing”.
- Persuasion lets you shortcut marketing gains.
- Exclusivity of information – people are more persuaded by exclusive information.
- Combine scarcity and exclusivity – e.g., beef shortage and by the way, this info comes to us from exclusive sources, nobody else has this information yet…
- Make commodity AND information about scarcity, scarce.
- Implication = when you get exclusive info… make it known.
- Cialdini’s base assumption is always that the product has merit.
- Authority.
- Testimonials from experts in the field.
- When people are uncertain they don’t look inside themselves, they look to authorities – follow the lead of genuine experts.
- Credible communicator – knowledge + trustworthiness.
- Building trust – mention weakness in case first, then introduce strengths/power features.
- Use “but” as a pivot into strongest argument – “take the information I just gave you and put it away…”.
- Markets are made up of people. Not econometrics.
- “blah blah blah but here’s the point I want you to focus on”.
- i.e., change sequence of marketing messages to “bad but good”.
- Consensus.
- Ppl look to their peers in uncertainty – ppl just like them.
- As simple as stating “these are our most popular items”.
- Others must be multiple and comparable.
- You don’t get to claim partnership (with customers), you have to earn it.
- Say “join your fellow guests”.
- Similar others – create specificity based on whatever information you have about them.
- e.g., hotel room towel change – standard, cooperation, many others, many similar others, many specific others (same hotel room).
- Testimonials sequence has to change to match similarity of customer profile.
- Aaron P
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