Simple and Effective Persuasion Techniques for Individuals and Businesses

The five most important skills according to Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant are reading, writing, arithmetic, programming and persuasion.? Reading and writing improves your critical thinking and articulation of ideas while arithmetic helps you to make sense of the world; this could be in business where you will for instance need to balance your assets and liabilities and ensure the former ranks higher in order to increase income while ensuring you limit liabilities.? At personal level, you will need skills in arithmetic to budget, invest and grow your portfolio.

Programming is the language of things in the fourth industrial revolution; be it artificial intelligence, product design, augmented reality or internet of things (IoT) and sooner or later one may have to have knowledge in a couple of programming languages such as java or python to navigate the ever-changing job and business environment.? Programmers are currently some of the most highly paid and sort after group of professionals in the world.

Persuasion is the art and science of influencing people’s attitude, decision and behavior through strategic communication.? It forms the core of professions such as sales, marketing, advertising and leadership and is a must have for individuals both in business and work environment.? Multinationals such as Coca-Cola and Diageo spend millions of dollars yearly on marketing and advertisement and hence record big improvements in revenue and market share as a result beating their competitors.

Research indicates that companies that grew 1-15% year over year spent an average of 16% of their revenue on marketing while those that grew 16-30% year over year spent an average of 22% of their revenue on marketing.? Those that grew 31-100% spent an average of 50.2% of their revenue on marketing thus underscoring its significance on overall growth of an enterprise.

At individual level, marketing is equally important as it forms your unique identity in the professional world and includes skills in storytelling, increasing online presence, networking, personal branding, leadership, presentation and audience engagement.

In hard economic times marked by increasing inflationary pressure, rising lending rates, job losses, shrinking disposable income, declining shilling against the dollar, increasing taxation and generally tough business environment, it is important for businesses to remain resilient by maintaining or increasing their marketing budget.? It is equally important for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to apply affordable and convenient marketing techniques in their operations to remain afloat.? These include cooperation, conditioning and association among others.

Cooperation is a persuasion technique in which a compliant professional such as a marketer or a sales person shows, proves and creates a reality that he/she is on the same side with a prospective buyer.? He informs them that he has their best interest in the sale and only wants them to get the best deal.? An example could be in the sale of a product say a Persian carpet for which the buyer feels the price is high and bargains with the seller for a lower price; the seller may have quoted a slightly higher price since he/she knows that customers often ask for a discount. Upon the customer’s insistence for a discount, the seller may excuse himself apparently to negotiate with his boss on behalf of his/her client.? He soon emerges from the office with a smiley face and informs the client of a new best deal; lower than the initially quoted but within the product price range.? He further informs the client that he has done the best he could since they usually don’t go that low. Believing that the seller has gone extra mile to secure a deal for him/her, the buyer will pay for the negotiated price.

Conditioning and association refers to the pheneomon of connecting either positive or negative feelings to an individual based on the nature of the news they deliver.? If a person comes bearing bad news, we associate him/her with it, if its good news, we embrace him/her and associate them with the good fortune.? This dates back to imperial Persia where messengers were treated to sumptuous dinner at the palace when they brought news of military victory in war far away.? However, a similar messenger with news of defeat was summarily killed on the spot upon his arrival with such news.? In normal daily life, we tend to and prefer to associate ourselves with successful people, good outcomes and events while disassociating ourselves from the bad ones.? This explains why advertisers of automobiles use beautiful female models to showcase their new car models or why coca cola company associates coca cola drink with good feeling that is ‘taste the feeling’.? The new car model and sprite are seen to be excellent since they are associated with the model and the good feeling respectively.

How can you use conditioning and association as a marketing technique in your business?? The aim is to create a great impression on prospective client’s mind and link its attainment to your product or service.? Say your product range include skin care products, you could design a nice picture of beautiful model with a great skin or a video of the same model or lady attributing the glow on her skin to the product and extoll its qualities.? You can then link a great glowing skin to the product.? Or if say you are selling a particular type of hybrid seeds of watermelon, you could design a nice brochure or better yet a video of happy farmers who are just returning from a market after a great sale or maybe have developed real estate projects from proceeds of the sale of their harvests from those seeds.

These techniques are used daily by individuals and businesses that have mastered the art of persuasion.? At corporate level, they are pricey and could cost millions of shillings in implementation depending on the intended geographical reach.? However, they can also be implemented at a small business level at fairly affordable cost.? Thus business should endeavor to implement them (both in large and small scale depending on capabilities) in order to increase revenue and market share.

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?Kevin Ochieng Omolo

Writer and Business Consultant

Echoes of Silence

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