Persuasion Slide

Gravity

The first element of the slide is gravity. Gravity is what makes slide work. We'd never get to the bottom of it without gravity. And in our framework, it represents the customer's initial motivation. And I'll say customer, even if it's perhaps a lead or some other persuasion situation. It represents their needs, their wants, their goals,this is what they are bringing to us, not what we are trying to create in them.

This is why they sought us out in the first place,or why they're reading our stuff,or why they signed up to get more information and so on.And when we are asking people to do something for us, we are fighting gravity.We aren't aligned with the gravity that they're bringing.

Example is, we visited a site that offered copy editing services, and as a copywriters, we occasionally need editing services. And in this case, their call to action was "Place an Order"and online and was more information. At that point, their messaging was not compatible with our? purpose, my need, which is at this point, to learn more about them.And so that was a very ineffective way of presenting their information, that didn't line up at all. Instead, we want to focus our messaging on how what we have to offer lines up with our customers wants, and goals, and needs,moving to the next step.

An example is Ramit Sethi's website, which he's a pretty well known, and quite successful internet marketer who focuses on teaching people how to be rich, strangely enough with a website that says, iwillteachyouhowtoberich.com. Now, people who come to that website fairly predictably, have one key motivation.They want more money. For whatever reason in their life, they don't have enough money, they don't have a job, their job doesn't pay well enough, or they aren't meeting their financial objectives, whatever. But if we look at his messaging, it's things like, I'll teach you how to make 10K in 10 minutes, or how to make $1,000 a month in your spare time with skills that we already have. Now, these may or may not be plausible messages,we may say, "Well, that's ridiculous."But in fact, they are fully aligned with the needs and wants and goals of the people who come to that website. And obviously, they're very effective.Ramit, by the way, was a student of BJ Fogg's, so he has a pretty good understanding of behavior science, and Fogg's behavior model. Now, from a conscious motivation standpoint, if we ask somebody why they're going to buy a car, or why they bought a particular car, they will give us examples of conscious motivators, like they need it for transportation, they needed a car with better fuel economy than what they had, they wanted a reliable car, one that would hold its resale value and so on. And these are not necessarily unimportant factors if we're buying a car, but they totally ignore the non-conscious motivators that also come to the showroom with people. One might be a need for status. If we show up in a Lexus showroom or Mercedes showroom, there's a good chance that even though we're focused on, or extensively focused on the reliability, and the great engineering in that Mercedes, there's also a need for status and prestige, and a desire to show to our neighbors that we can afford this high-status vehicle.

Some people buy expensive sports cars, because they think it'll make them more attractive, more sexually appealing. Some people use cars for signaling. For instance, if we're a Prius owner, we will probably brag about the great fuel economy and the money we're saving on gas. In fact, the economic savings may not be that great. But by having that Prius nameplate and showing people we're driving a hybrid vehicle, we are showing that we are a person who cares about the environment, and using that as a way of attaining a different kind of status. Now all of these things, people would not generally admit to being the reason they're buying that vehicle, but they can be important. And one other example would be fantasy. we happen to own a Hummer, and we have to admit,every time we get in,some little part of my brain is thinking about,"Boy, we could really take this"on the Baja 1000 If we wanted to."But now, we never will take it on the Baja 1000,we use it for schlepping stuff around town like most people do. But these are all elements of non-conscious motivation. And even in business to business sales, these factors can be important. Now, we think of business business as being sort of hard headed, rational,okay, we got to have the price, we got to have the features, it's got to be delivered, and so on.That's certainly all important.If we fail on those things, we will fail in our business to business sale. But often, there are non-conscious factors that can be very important.?

Are you somehow helping the person that you're dealing with be more secure in their position?

Are you helping them get a promotion or the approval of their boss?

Do you have a strong emotional relationship with that person?

Often, in a business to business sale, the strength of that personal relationship is what makes the decision.So even in business to business, non-conscious factors are really important. Now, almost always, we're going to want to use both conscious and non-conscious motivators. There are a few exceptions.If we're selling fragrances, we're probably going to focus mostly on emotion. We'll show an ad image of an attractive person in a romantic situation, for example, with not too much in the way of conscious factors about how popular our product is, or how good it smells, but in a typical sale, we need both.

Nudge

Now the next element in the slide is the Nudge. This might correspond to BJ Fogg's trigger and this is how we get our customers attention and start persuading.

Now we know at the top of it, a playground slide a mom or dad has to give the kid a little push at the top or if they're a larger child perhaps they'll propel themselves forward with their arms.This is the nudge and it begins with getting the customers attention and it can take many forms.It could be an email, a phone call,a very visible call to action, an alarm, a popup ad. All of these things are potential nudges.Here is an example of a nudge that is ineffective, just about every blogger wants people to subscribe and in this case the nudge to subscribe is this tiny little envelope icon that nobody is going to notice and even the few people who do notice it are probably confused by exactly what it means and so needless to say this nudge is going to be ineffective at getting subscribers.

Compared that to my friend Chris Brogan who on any content page on his site, we will go to it and a third of the visible page will be taken up with his nudge to subscribe. His audience is primarily entrepreneurs and so he has this big block that starts with his picture at the top looking pretty friendly. He says, "You want to grow your business?"so he's aligning his message with his visitors gravity. He starts with us to begin with, he's focused on the visitor and growing business which is why people are visiting his website to begin with and just a very simple little forumand so it's pretty difficult to miss that but just in case we do miss that, he has yet another nudge, popup ad that again says get my best work sent for free and he provides a couple of benefits to the user there so once again this next nudge is aligning with what his visitors came to that website forand it's a pretty good bet that we cannot visit Chris's website without getting nudged at least a couple of times to subscribe and now the key elements of the nudge are two-fold.It has to be seen.

Now we saw how Chris did that and it also has to begin the process his messaging did that because if we provide a nudge without motivation, it will be ineffective. A good example of this is LinkedIn and we love LinkedIn's ad's strategy of putting our picture in as a logged in LinkedIn user in somebody else's ad because we can't really help but not look at that ad because its got our picture in it. We need to know hey why's our picture over in the right hand margin. Now in this case the ad asked me to follow Comcast Business. They provide us with no reason to follow Comcast Business . We are not a Comcast customer. We are not even in Comcast territory and they didn't provide any reason like get great content from Comcast,learn to market better from Comcast, anything.They just said we might like to follow Comcastso needless to say we did what probably most people who got that nudge did is we looked at the nudge,we saw it and then proceeded to ignore and do nothing.

Angle

Now the angle of the slide, that's what gets the kid to the bottom is the motivation that we provide both conscious and non-conscious. Now we all know that if a slide has sufficient angle that it'll work, the child will slide down smoothly and arrive at the bottom. And we can use two kinds.

We can use conscious motivators,things like the product benefits, the product features, gifts and discounts, specifications in some cases, price is a conscious motivator.

And we can use a non-conscious motivators,things like emotional appeals, appeals based on psychology and appeals based on cognitive biases, little quirks (peculiarities) ?in the way humans think.

And again, we're generally going to want to include both conscious and non-conscious motivators.Now,examples of conscious benefits are how much money the customer will save, how powerful our product is, whether somebody can get their money back if they don't like it, and so on, all good stuff.If we're selling industrial equipment,that's going to be mostly a conscious sale, people are going to want to know what the capacity of the machine is,how old it is, how powerful it is, and so on and so on.Are not going to be a lot of emotion involved in that sale, but other companies use primarily conscious motivators. In this case, we have an appeal to subscribe to an electronics deal site, and they talk about things like coupons, and advance notice in discounts and price drops, early access, and all of these things are benefits and they're all conscious motivators.Not really a lot of non-conscious messaging going on.And if we're interested in electronics, this may well be enough, gifts and discounts are very popular motivators,things like online, you'll see free ebooks, free videos. Sometimes even perhaps a gift card for surveys,we have to bribe people. In retail sales are hugely important motivator, they drive most retail traffic.

A few years ago, one major retailer decided to try a different approach because particularly in apparel retailing, the practice has been to markstuff way up to unrealistic levels, and then offer huge discounts in a weekly sale flyer. So people get this weekly sale flyer, which is a nudge, and they see wow, we can save 40% on these sweaters or slacks or whatever, and show up at the store.

And one company decided to stop the madness. And they said, what if we offer people everyday low pricing, we're going to continue to advertise our products in those weekly newspaper fliers or mail flyers. But people will be able to come into the store knowing they're going to get the best deal all the time.They didn't just miss the deal they wanted last week. That sounds like a great strategy, but unfortunately, it was a disaster when JCPenney tried it.

Sales tanked as soon as the new strategy was implemented to the point within a year, they were on the verge of bankruptcy. And the problem was that without those discounts, they had no motivation.The customers got nudged, they were continuing to get those flyers, but compared to the competitive fliers that offered these apparently big sales, big discounts,there simply wasn't that additional motivation. So there is sort of a happy ending, they except for the CEO, the new CEO, he got fired. They brought in another CEO,who went back to the old strategy. And today, when e go to jcpenney.com for example,it changes every day or two, but it will be all sales, all the time, whether it's a percent off and dollars off, they've gone back to the same discounting strategy that had worked for them for years and continues to work for their competitors.

Now, the problem with this kind of motivation is that it is expensive.If we normally charge for shipping, we will sell more product if we give away free shipping. If we offer people a discount on our product, we'll sell more of it than we did when we didn't offer a discount. But both of those things are going to have a big impact on our margin. As well, if we do other things offer inducements. So we just amp up advertising. All these things are expensive ways to motivate our customer where instead, non-conscious motivators are essentially free because they're often simply changes to our ad copy, to our design, our messaging, and they can be even more effective in some cases than those conscious motivators.

Now we think of Amazon as being a very sort of hard headed left brain type retailer. That's all facts and figures and so on.But if we analyze the area of their page that's above the fold, we'll find a lot of non-conscious motivators.

They use social proof in the forms of numbers of ratings and reviews, as well as the star ratings.They use scarcity, the product is getting low in stock, they highlight that in fairly big type showing, hey, this product is getting low. They use free, which is an important psychological motivator in two different places. They hide text in the description, which has been shown that if we have too much descriptive information it can kick people into that uncomfortable system two form of thinking.

So like many online retailers, they give us a little bit of description, and we can click to find more if we really want that additional information. And then just out of us, they use authority,one of Cialdin's basic influence principles,where they have commentary from bestselling authors and experts.So we're going to get into one more non-conscious techniques,but at the moment, we're going to wrap up discussion of the persuasion slide model.