Social Proof

Obvious one-time product placement inside

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“Mona, I am drinking my milk right now.”

He pours out a full glass of milk with an ice cube in it. He tops it off with vodka from a Smirnoff bottle. And he drinks it down.

I saw this scene from Mad Men once, probably 15 years ago.

I thought it was great. It still sticks in my mind. But I never did buy a bottle of Smirnoff. And if I were to ever buy vodka, Smirnoff wouldn’t be my first choice.

So product placements — do they work?

Professors in business schools trip over each other to answer this question.

They take real TV shows. They splice in different kinds of product placements. They show them to students. And then they ask, “By the way… what do you happen to think of Smirnoff?”

As a result, these marketing professors come up with conclusions like:

1. If a product placement is subtle, then repeated exposure actually improves attitude towards a brand.

2. If a product placement is obvious, then repeated exposure hurts attitude towards a brand.

Interesting, right? Except you can’t really tell what it means in the real world.

After all, like my Smirnoff story from above shows, a product placement can “work” great. And yet still no sale.

But here’s a surprising bit from the same research, which might be more useful. These marketing professors also asked students, “Oh, and even more by the way… what did you think of the show?”

Same show of course, just different types of product placements spliced in. Result:

1. People liked the TV show the most if it had a SINGLE OBVIOUS product placement…

2. Next came the show with MULTIPLE SUBTLE product placements…

3. Next, the show with a SINGLE SUBTLE product placement…

4. And finally, far down in last place, MULTIPLE OBVIOUS product placements. People really didn’t like the show in this case.

Which fits my beliefs about how we all go through life.

We like buying stuff. We also like shortcuts that cut down our work of making buying decisions. But we want to feel we are in control of those decisions… even when we are not.

Whatever. I thought this might be useful to you, in case you have your own TV show, whether that’s an email newsletter, or a YouTube channel, or your own Facebook group.

It’s not clear that an occasional clear plug will be optimal for your sales. But if your biz is built on relationship first… and sales numbers only second… then the above academic result is something to consider.

And in that spirit, let me say I found out the above while doing research for my upcoming book. It’s called The Gospel of Insight Marketing. And it’s all about the most powerful way to persuade people to buy… even in markets where people are jaded, hostile, or frankly indifferent to your pitch.

The book isn’t out yet. I’m working on it now. But I won’t bring it up again, at least not obviously, until it’s ready for reading. After all, I care my relationship with you… and science says this is the way to go.

Finally:

If you’d like to find out when my Gospel book is ready for reading… sign up for my email newsletter.

Scared of being indoctrinated? Then don’t watch this video

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According to celebritynetworth.com, marketer Greg Renker is worth $600 million. It’s possible that’s lowballing poor Greg.

​​After all, the company Greg cofounded some 30 years ago, Guthy-Renker, does more than $2 billion worth of sales each year.

Guthy-Renker is a big beast. And today, they market in all kinds of channels. But for a long time, their bread and butter was one main medium — infomercials.

They got started by selling the book Think And Grow Rich on TV. They made $10 million from that.

And then they had a much bigger hit – selling a set of self-help audio tapes called Personal Power. The author of Personal Power? A young Tony Robbins.

I heard Greg Renker tell an interesting story about Tony. Greg said there was this secret book that Tony really liked and read and over. Nobody else knew about it. I guess this was around the late 1980s.

So Greg and all his team went out and also bought the book and devoured it. “Aha! That’s the secret to Tony’s charisma and success…”

Well the book is not a secret any more. It’s called Influence, and it was written by Robert Cialdini. I’m sure you’ve heard of it, and you’ve probably read it too.

Like I said, I guess this must have been in the late 1980s. It must have been before the Personal Power infomercial came out in 1990. Because that infomercial is like Cialdini’s Influence come to life on TV.

The infomercial starts out by showing you Hollywood celebrities… world-class athletes… and members of Congress… all lining up to hear what this young guy named Tony has to say.

Then there a bunch of testimonials by ordinary folks. Their finances and family lives and emotional well-being have all been transformed. Just by listening to Tony’s tapes.

Then you see Tony and Hall of Fame NFL quarterback Fran Tarkenton. They’re getting into a helicopter, which Tony pilots himself. They fly from Tony’s castle in San Diego to Tony’s second home, in Palm Springs.

Finally, after about 5 minutes of buildup, you see Tony close up and you hear him speak.

He’s a really good-looking guy. And he flashes you his warm, genuine smile, and he starts to talk in a confident and yet humble tone.

That’s like chapters 4 through 6 of Influence right there.

No wonder Dan Kennedy, who was an advisor for Guthy-Renker from day one, said they could have put anybody in Tony’s place and the tapes would still sell.

Maybe Dan was exaggerating. But not a lot.

Sure, you might not have Guthy-Renker’s resources. And the guru you’re promoting might not have Tony Robbins’s credibility or winning smile.

But all those things from the start of the Personal Power infomercial can be done on a smaller scale. And they will still work to build up anybody, well, almost anybody, into a powerful but benevolent god who needs to be obeyed.

Anyways, if you haven’t watched the Personal Power infomercial, I think it’s worth your time. Just be careful. Because you can get sucked in.

For example, I got sucked in. I listened to the infomercial a few times for the marketing education… and the next thing you know, I have Tony’s actual program on repeat and I re-listen to it from beginning to end, every six months or so.

But if the prospect of getting indoctrinated doesn’t scare you too much… then click below to see Influence in action:

Anatomy of a laugh that didn’t happen

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“I can handle this. Handle is my middle name. Actually, handle is the middle of my first name. [Insert canned laughter]”
– Chandler Bing, Friends

You probably know from Cialdini’s Influence about the power of social proof. That’s why shows like Friends insert canned laughter. We laugh more when we hear other people laughing, even if we know it’s fake.

But:

It turns out to be more tricky than that.

Some scientists in Australia tested this out. They wanted to see if WHO is laughing matters. And the answer is yes.

I won’t burden you with the details of the experiment. In a nutshell, the study subjects (university students) had to listen to audio recordings of a standup comic, with canned laughter and without. But there was a twist:

One group of students was told that the canned laughter was other students from the same university.

A second group of students was told that the canned laughter was sympathizers of Australia’s far-right One Nation party, which apparently would like to build a wall with Mexico, and have Mexico pay for it.

And the results?

When the canned laughter was present, group one laughed four times more than without the canned laughter. Makes sense. Other people like them found the material funny. So Cialdini was right, and so was Friends.

But no such thing happened in group two. The students didn’t laugh any more with the canned laughter than they did without it. How could they? Obviously the comic isn’t very good if those horrible xenophobes find him so funny.

I’m telling you about this because it applies to direct marketing as well.

Just like the producers of corny sitcoms, marketers know about the power of social proof. That’s why we stick tons of testimonials into our sales letters.

And testimonials are good. But:

Testimonials are much better if they come from people like the prospect. (At least that’s what Dan Kennedy says, but he should know.) You want to find testimonials that have the same gender… same race… same age… same ideas about building the wall… as your prospect does.

And what if you don’t have any testimonials like that?

Well, then you can just sweep your arm over your offer and say something like,

“I write a daily email newsletter. Many successful marketers and copywriters find it very valuable. Click here to subscribe.”

Experts are baffled: The magic ingredient that makes a hit

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Back when Jim Morrison and The Doors released their first album, they were a bunch of movie school bums whose biggest ambition was to become as big as the cult LA band Love.

Who remembers Love today? Not many. But hundreds of millions know Jim Morrison and Doors hits like “Light My Fire” and “Hello, I Love You.”

This global success might never have happened. But The Doors, bums that they were, spent weeks calling up the local LA radio station, requesting that cool new song, Light My Fire.

​​The song eventually became a local hit… then a national hit… then the album became a hit… and then The Doors became the next big thing.

Maybe you can do the same. At least that’s one conclusion I drew from a mind-opening article by Duncan Watts.

The article is titled “Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?” You can find it on The New York Times Magazine site, and it’s worth reading from beginning to end. But if you’re pressed for time or attention, let me summarize it for you:

Conventional wisdom says the success of a book or a song or a movie is based on two things. One is the product itself. The other is what the market wants at that time.

And the conclusion, based on this conventional wisdom, is simple. If anybody fails to predict what will become successful, he is either too dumb or too lazy to read the writing on the wall.

Well, Watts had his doubts about this. So he set up a clever experiment to test it out. I won’t rehash the full details of how the experiment ran. The gist was it involved looking at which songs became popular among nine different segments of 14,000 people.

People in one segment had no information about how popular each song already was. People in the other eight segments knew how popular each song was, but only within their own segment.

This setup allowed Watts to test two ideas:

1. The most popular songs will be roughly as popular in the different segments.

2. The same songs will float to the top in the different segments.

Both of these hypotheses turned out to be very false.

First, in the eight “social influence” segments, the most popular songs became way more popular than in the “no social influence” segment. And the losers were more thorough losers.

​​Maybe that’s not so amazing. But get this:

In the different “social influence” segments, different songs became the most popular. And this wasn’t a minor reordering. A song could be no. 1 in one segment and no. 40 in another.

Watts explains this in a blindingly obvious way:

People do not make decisions independently of other people. The world is too complex… we usually don’t know what we want… and we often get more value out of a shared experience than out of the “best” experience.

All this means that small, random differences in initial popularity can have a massive impact in what becomes a hit and what doesn’t. That’s what Watts calls cumulative advantage. The rich get richer. And who gets rich initially? Well, that’s a coin toss.

This explains my Grinch story from yesterday. Chuck Jones had to pitch the Grinch 25 times, not because industry experts are too dumb or closed-minded to see the potential that was there… but because it’s genuinely impossible to predict what will succeed.

Randomness is the magic ingredient that determines a hit.

But what about The Doors? And what about direct response marketing, where decisions are more likely to be independent? And is there anything positive we can conclude from all this?

I believe so. But this post is running long already… so if you’re interested in more on this, I’ll finish it up tomorrow.

Social proof concentration and when not to use it

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It all happened within three or four days. Ben Settle, Brian Kurtz, Abbey Woodcock, Kevin Rogers, and David Deutsch all emailed about the same topic:

Reclusive A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos was finally offering a training. He would reveal his best-kept, most profitable secrets to raise funds for his cousin’s cancer treatment.

The first email I got on the topic, I thought, this is interesting — but I’ve already got plenty of copywriting trainings as is. Second email, I thought, another email about that same thing. Third email, maybe I should get this. Fourth email, I better get this now while I still can.

This experience was an illustration of a persuasion principle I read about in a book called The Catalyst. The principle is called concentration.

In a nutshell, all instances of social proof are not the same. If you can get a bunch of people to independently recommend your thing, and they do it in real quick succession, it’s much more powerful than having it all spread out. If it’s spread out, then your prospect can forget about each individual piece of social proof, or rationalize it away. If it’s concentrated, he cannot.

This idea might might or might not be useful if you’re writing a piece of direct response copy. (You’ll have to think about it and make up your own mind.)

But if you’re interested in persuasion more broadly, then the principle of concentration definitely has immediate application. If you’re marshaling an army of lieutenants who will all fight for your cause, it makes sense to focus their attack on one specific point, at one specific time.

But here’s a question to leave you thinking:

Concentration clearly worked on me and got me to pay Parris some $300 for his very valuable training.

But are there situations where concentrating your message might be a less efficient use of your resources?

​​I personally think so. If you agree with me, and you can name some specific situations, I’d love to hear from you. Write in and let me know.