Persuasion

The 7th pillar of influence

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Fair warning: the following post contains some sexual, politically incorrect references. It might offend some people.

It’s ok to click away. But if you insist on reading, here goes:

A hairy English man named Yad once shared the story of an out-of-body experience. It wasn’t his experience, actually. Rather, it was the girl he was with who had this strange thing happen to her.

Now in case you don’t know, Yad is one of the world’s great masters of stopping a girl on the street, in broad daylight, completely sober, to chat for a minute and ask for her phone number.

Well, most of the time, Yad asks for the number. Sometimes, he pushes it, and asks the girl on a mini-date right away.

That’s what happened in this case. Except, the mini-date went well, and turned into a maxi-date. In fact, even though they had just met on the street a few hours earlier, Yad and this girl wound up back home in the evening, and found themselves in bed together. And that’s when the out-of-body experience supposedly happened.

You see, the girl was amazed by Yad’s seemingly irresistable confidence at every step of the way, from approaching her on the street, to asking her out, to moving her from bar to bar, and now getting her naked and in bed.

She was wondering how much further this would go, and whether she was really willing to sleep with a guy she had just met on the street only hours earlier.

In the end, she said something like, “We were having sex, but at the same time I felt like I was just having this out-of-body experience, floating around above the bed, watching all this unfold and asking myself, ‘Who is this guy and how is he so relaxed about this whole thing?'”

Well, I’m not here to plug Yad or his pickup skills today. Instead, I want to talk about the 7th pillar of influence.

You might already know something about the first 6 pillars. They were identified and written up by Robert Cialdini in his book Influence. These are the 6 golden rules that  persuaders of all stripes supposedly use — stuff like reciprocity, liking, social proof, etc.

But I believe there is another big pillar of influence that Cialdini left out. It’s in the story above. My guess is that it also drives about 90% of Internet traffic today. And according to famous copywriter Gary Halbert, it might even be the #1 reason that people buy stuff from advertisements.

Have you got it yet? Here’s a hint. It’s the common thread in all of the following headlines:

“Grains puffed to 8 times normal size”

“Its reputation and its odor precede it”

“The amazing money-making secret of a desperate nerd from Ohio”

“Why whales got so big”

I’m sure by now you have it so I’ll stop teasing. That 7th (and possibly most important) pillar is plain old, tried and true…

Curiosity.

Yep, curiosity. Curiosity can drive clicks. It can sell products. And as you can read in the story above, it can even get a girl to sleep with a hairy English man only hours after he’s met her.

Yad on a good day

Which is all good, but how do you go about creating curiosity? Good question. And it’s something that I plan to answer in detail. But not today. If you want to get my take on it, you might want to sign up to my daily email newsletter.

Prematurely moving out of Maslow’s basement

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Just coz it’s science don’t mean it’s true.

I’m currently reading Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick. This brotherly tome teaches you how to present your ideas in a way that sticks in people’s minds — long after you’ve made your pitch.

Overall, I am digging this book.

But there’s one section that irked me when I read it. Somewhere along chapter 4 or so, the Heaths talk about how to make people really “hear” your message. How to get them emotionally invested. How to get them to care.

Of course, you can appeal to their self-interest, which is what direct response copywriters like myself love to do.

But no, say the Heaths.

That’s short sighted, and there’s science to prove it. So they cite research where people are asked to explain what would motivate them to take a new job:

Option 1: more security because the new position is so important

Option 2: more visibility because the new position is so important

Option 3: the great learning opportunity this important new position would provide

Apparently, most people choose 3 when explaining why they themselves would choose a new job. But when asked what they think other people would be motivated by, they choose options 1 or 2. (Short-sighted buggers, those other people.)

So the Heath brothers draw this conclusion, referring to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

In other words, a lot of us think everyone else is living in Maslow’s basement — we may have a penthouse apartment, but everyone else is living below. The result of spending too much time in Maslow’s basement is that we may overlook lots of opportunities to motivate people.

To which I’d say, “Interesting… But do you prefer going to the movies or to the theater?” It’s a question the grandpapa of modern-day direct marketing, Gary Halbert, asked once:

Once I asked at class at USC how many of them preferred to go to plays more than movies.

Lots of people raised their hands.

“Bull!” I said to them. “You are all fooling yourselves and I’m going to prove it.” I then asked for a show of hands of those people who had seen a play in the last week or so.

No hands.

I then asked to see the hands of people who had seen a movie in the last week or so.

Many hands.

Does this mean you always have to appeal to brute self-interest when trying to convince people? Not necessarily. This ad certainly doesn’t seem to:

MEN WANTED
for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success.

This was an ad put out by Sir Ernest Shackleton, a polar explorer, and it supposedly drew an enormous response of men interested in accompanying Shackleton into the penguin-infested waters of Antarctica.

The point of all this?

Maslow’s basement can work.

So can Maslow’s penthouse.

But talk is cheap, and what people say is not necessarily what they will do. Even if they themselves wholeheartedly believe it.

So when choosing which appeal to go with in an advertisement, look at what people actually do, rather than what they say they want.