How to Gain Persuasive Power Over an Audience

There are six principles that can be leveraged to make someone do something [1]:

1. Reciprocity: People feel obligated to return favors or perform acts of kindness when they feel they owe you something. Brands use this to great effect by giving freebies and samples.

2. Commitment and consistency: When someone commits to something, they are more likely to do things that adhere to those values. The first commitment should be small and insignificant, like signing up for a newsletter. The larger ones, like paying a subscription fee, will follow, as people like to maintain the image they have voluntarily created.

3. Social proof: When too many people are doing something, it is often seen as a safe option. We have evolved to take these shortcuts to conserve energy for more important things in life such as pretending to be busy at work.

4. Authority: People are more likely to take advice from experts and seasoned professionals. This is why every toothpaste is recommended by eight out of ten dentists.

5. Liking: If you like someone, you will say “yes” to them more often to preserve the relationship or your position in their life. Brands frequently use attractive salespersons to honeypot potential customers.

6. Scarcity: Anything that is rare, is more valuable, unlike Instagram models, who seem to pop up everywhere. Apple Inc. uses this tactic well by stopping production of their older devices, even though were great hits among customers.

In the rest of the chapter, let’s look at how you can fake every single one of them to your advantage and understand whether it is worth it.

How Most Brands Apply the Six Principles

Any valuable entity, whether it is a blog or a product, can effortlessly apply the aforementioned six principles. However, they will require time.

Consider social proof for example. If you are starting a restaurant, it may take months or even years before you get a few hundred good reviews that can attract strangers and tourists from your Google profile.

Ain’t nobody got time for that!

The easier way is to give your customers a 10% discount for a review. Don’t tell them to give a five-star, though. Because you don’t need to. They will feel grateful for the 10% discount and will probably give a good review anyway. That’s because of the reciprocity principle. They feel they owe you something, which in this case is a good rating.

Most of the principles can be easily applied like that.

Businesses invite “experts” to give webinars and speeches to demonstrate authority. Pretend to have your values to get you to like them. An example that pops into my head now is how most brands pretend to give a damn about the environment, especially Apple, who specifically design devices that can’t be repaired!

Of course, the easiest one to fake is scarcity. Luxury designer brands only produce a handful of their products or destroy the remaining stock to retain the “value” of their products.

The most tricky one to apply is commitment and consistency because it can be intricate and different. 

Consider the example of KFC — a company that produces junk. If you are averse to their food, they will entice you with something small, a snack perhaps, such as chicken popcorn. In your mind, you are still not eating the crappy fried chicken, but in reality, you just transformed yourself into a customer.

It is true that KFC may not make much from little bites like chicken popcorn, but that experience has made you more open to buying from them. It’s a matter of time before you order a full meal and chomp down that crap while watching reruns of Friends.

Similarly, in the digital world, SaaS companies encourage their potential customer to sign up for a free trial or subscribe to their free newsletter. This way they are transformed from a mere “audience” to an “interested prospect.” The next few weeks where you explore their offerings and content is the “nurturing” phase where you are “warmed up” to their brand.

I’ve subscribed to a few things I probably didn’t need, simply because their free newsletter eventually got to me.

Conclusion: Time Proves Everything

There are two things to keep in mind here.

We want to apply these principles while selling things that may not be best in their category to people who probably won’t need them for profit.

We also want to protect ourselves from hucksters and corporations that do the same stuff.

The simplest metric here is time. Wisdom doesn’t come overnight. If something or someone is legit, it will stand the test of time. Even if you do make a quick purchase by mistake, you can immediately realize and blacklist that business or trade forever and protect yourself from further losses.

References

1. Influence

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Next Chapter: Writing Articles That Persuade: 5 Tips

Previous Chapter: What It Means to Be Persuasive

Index (with Prologue): The Fundamentals of Persuasive Writing