My friend Bob just read the book 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive and after sharing with me some promotional ideas the book sparked for him, passed along a link to this blog post, which sums up the whole fascinating list. The book contains some persuasion techniques that you’ll recognize instantly – since they’ve probably been used on you time after time by marketers, sales people and your kids! In any case, there are some great ideas in here for marketers to mull, whether selling newspaper subscriptions, ads or growing audience. From a newspaper perspective, in the face of the raging debate over free versus paid (playing out this week in a grudge match between Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell), it’s interesting to note point six and wonder how it applies (and doesn’t) to that debate: “Giving away the product makes it less desirable.” The whole list is fascinating, but rather than giving in to the temptation to reiterate the whole thing here, I’ll just point out few more highlights: “Labeling people into a social group tends to increase their participation ratio.” Makes sense. Many folks like to feel in the group, and then once they do, feel some obligation to the group. Explains why a cheap T-shirt can actually be a powerful team building device. And how about this bit of good news for the poets in the group – evaluating two nearly identical proverbs, people chose the one that rhymed as the more convincing! The whole list is here.
Tags: advertising, marketing, psychology
