Robert Cialdini

Green Valley must fire its warehouse manager

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Last week, supplement company Green Valley, which was founded by A-list copywriter Lee Euler, sent out a panicked email that started with:

Dear John,

We discovered somewhat of a sticky situation last week…

So I’m hoping maybe we can help each other out…

You see, late last week our warehouse manager called to let me know that we have NO room for a large shipment that’s already on its way to our fulfillment facility here in Virginia…

That means I now have to get rid of a few pallets worth of one of our top sellers…

So, I’m knocking 70% off Gluco-Secure—a natural breakthrough shown to…

I don’t know who’s at fault here. But I find the warehouse manager’s “not my circus, not my monkeys” attitude contemptible. ​​Particularly since he allowed a similar situation to happen last September. That’s when Green Valley sent out an email that started:

Dear John,

I never do this.

But I have a small problem and I think maybe we can help each other out.

Yesterday afternoon the Green Valley warehouse manager let me know that they have NO room in the warehouse for a truckload shipment of product that’s scheduled for delivery next week.

Somehow wires got crossed but it turns out we have 4 pallets of our top-selling joint pain formula that we need to clear out FAST to make room quickly for new inventory.

So, I’m doing something I never do…

I’m knocking 70% off a powerful joint-healing discovery…

Somehow wires got crossed?

Twice in under one year?

I don’t know what this warehouse manager is doing all day long. He’s clearly not doing his job. That’s why I say Green Valley must fire him, and must do it now.

But one person they shouldn’t fire is their email copywriter. Because that guy obviously knows about the power of reason why marketing.

Reason why is the most widespread and effective click, whirr mechanism in advertising.

​​Click, whirr, by the way, is the useful but somewhat-dated analogy Robert Cialdini used in his book Influence. You press the tape player button click, and whirr goes the automated behavior tape.

The incredible thing is that, just as with canned laughter and obvious flattery, reason why is effective even when it’s blatantly untrue.

I’m not saying you should lie… but you might choose to stretch the truth, until it turns into a reason why.

Because reason why works on you too. So if you ever need to justify why stretching the truth is ok, you can always say, for your own peace of mind and your customer’s,

“I never do this. But I have a small problem and I think maybe we can help each other out…”

Speaking of sticky situations:

I recently had an influx of new subscribers to my email newsletter. And I’m getting really close to a big round number of subscribers that I’ve always coveted.

So I’m going to do something I never do, in the hopes of quickly filling up those extra few newsletter subscriber spots.

For today only, I’m opening up my email newsletter to anybody to subscribe, for free, right here on this page. This opportunity might not come again for a long time. If you’re the type to grab a great opportunity when you see it, click here to subscribe now.

Why gamification fails (and how to use this to create fanatically loyal customers)

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Here’s a riddle for you from the book review I shared yesterday:

You might remember the gamification craze from the beginning of this decade. App creators were convinced that adding badges, randomness, and leveling up to any activity would make it irresistible.

​​And yet, despite following a lot of the same strategies that gambling machine designers did, those app creators never did create an army of self-improvement addicts.

​​If designers optimized gambling machines for addictiveness, why can’t they do the same for these apps? If bad machines can be made addictive, then why can’t good machines?

The anonymous author of the book review gives a few possible answers. But he or she is not happy with any of them.

I don’t know the answer either. But I can tell you the answer to a related riddle, which goes like this:

Why do hazing rituals for college fraternities never involve anything useful or positive?

You know the rituals I’m talking about. A college freshman wants to get into a fraternity. So he’s given a beating by his future fraternity brothers… he’s told to spend the night outside in freezing weather wearing nothing but a loincloth… and he’s forced to eat a pound of raw beef liver.

If he survives all this, he gets into the fraternity.

But why exactly those nasty and humiliating tasks? Why not combine the humiliating with the useful?

Why don’t fraternities make new recruits wash some train station toilets… or change the adult diapers of incontinent senior citizens… or collect litter from the side of a highway on a sweltering August day?

The answer, according to slot machine designer Robert Cialdini, is this:

“They want to make the men own what they have done. No excuses, no ways out are allowed.”

Cialdini claims that the point of hazing rituals is to make new recruits fanatical about their new fraternity membership, once they achieve it.

Hazing rituals work brilliantly for this goal. But there’s a catch:

The ritual tasks HAVE to be pointless.

Otherwise a new member can convince himself that some other good came out of all that humiliation and pain… which takes away from the value of the fraternity.

In other words, whenever we do something because of added motives — whether positive or negative — we don’t end up owning that behavior fully. We don’t make it a part of our identity.

And that I think can be a good answer to why slot machines are so addicting… while your Duo Lingo app is not.

Of course, I also think this ties into running a business. Even though it’s at odds with much direct response wisdom.

I think you can use this insight to create fanatically loyal customers… as opposed to customers who abandon you and forget you at the first turn in the road. Which is exactly what happens to most direct response businesses.

To me, it seems the application is obvious… but if it’s not, sign up for my email newsletter. It’s a topic I might discuss more in the future… or I might not.

Cialdini’s limited hangout

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In chapter 3 of Influence, Robert Cialdini tells the interesting story of a transcendental meditation event he went to.

Cialdini was at the event to study the recruiting methods of the TM organization. He was sitting in the audience with a friend, a professor of statistics and symbolic logic.

The TM presentation started out talking about inner peace and better sleep. But it got progressively weirder and more outlandish. Cialdini says that, by the end, the TM gurus were promising to teach you how to fly through walls.

Eventually, Cialdini’s rational and scientific friend couldn’t take it any more. He stood up, spoke to the whole room, and “gently but surely demolished the presentation.” He showed how the presentation was illogical, contradictory, and groundless.

The TM gurus on stage fell silent. They hung their heads and admitted that Cialdini’s friend raised really good points, and they would have to look deeply into this.

So whaddya think happened? If you’ve read my recent posts about Frank Abagnale and Uri Geller, you probably know exactly what happened:

Once the TM presentation ended, people in the audience rushed to the back of the room. They handed over their money to sign up for TM bootcamps and workshops.

Did they not hear Cialdini’s friend dismantle the whole TM gimmick? Or were they just too dumb to understand what he was saying?

Nope. Neither. They heard him, and they understood perfectly what he was saying. That’s why they were so eager to jump aboard the slow-moving TM train.

“Well, I wasn’t going to put down any money tonight,” said one future TM’er when pressed later by Cialdini. “I’m really quite broke right now. I was going to wait until the next meeting. But when your buddy started talking, I knew I’d better give them my money now, or I’d go home and start thinking about what he said and never sign up.”

I read this story a few days ago. And I was thinking about how you could use this quirk of human nature for intentional marketing. And then, yesterday, I ran across the term limited hangout.

Limited hangout is apparently a term used by politicians’ aides and CIA operatives. It’s when you cover up the full extent of a scandal or secret by an early reveal of some of the damaging stuff. By letting it hang out. Not all of it, of course.

An example of this was Richard Nixon and company’s attempt to cover up how high Watergate went. They were planning to do a “modified limited hangout” and release a report with a lot of damaging information. Of course not implicating the president.

It didn’t work for Nixon. Too little, too late. But apparently limited hangout has worked in lots of other cases.

The thing is, everybody who writes about limited hangout says it is an example of misdirection… or gullibility… or short attention spans.

Perhaps. But perhaps the effectiveness of the limited hangout technique is just what Cialdini writes about.

When we believe something, then information to the contrary actually drives us towards that something. I will leave it at that, and let you use this dangerous material as you see fit.

And on that note:

I’m not sure if you have a strong desire to hear from me again on similar persuasion topics. If you do, I have to tell you that I often write about borderline immoral tactics. Plus there’s no guarantee that any of them will work for you. If that doesn’t deter you, here’s how you can make sure to hear more of my ideas.

Rejection-then-retreat in negotiation, pick up, and sales funnels

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Would you do me a favor real quick? It’s going to be painless and won’t cost you a cent:

​​Would you go on Amazon right now and leave a review for my book The 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters? It doesn’t matter if you’ve read the book or not.

I’m waiting.

What, you’re still here?

No review for me?

That’s too bad. I’m a little saddened to be honest. But then please at least read this article to the end.

I myself have been re-reading Robert Cialdini’s Influence for the past several days. And since I’m a slow reader, I’ve only gotten as far as Chapter 2, Reciprocity.

You know what reciprocity is. It’s when you do somebody a favor… and that way you oblige them to do you a favor in turn. It’s a standard technique of grifters, conmen, and Hare Krishna devotees, because it works even if you force a favor on the other person.

I remembered that much about Cialdini’s book. But I forgot about the other kind of reciprocity Cialdini describes.

Cialdini calls this other method rejection-then-retreat. That’s when, rather than forcing a favor, you force a concession.

It’s simple to do:

You start out with a big first ask. When that’s rejected, you back off to what you really wanted all along. You’ve made a concession… now it’s the other guy’s turn.

Very devious. Very clever. And very familiar, when you think about it.

It’s the standard way people negotiate. “$10k? Oh no, absolutely not. This Miata is worth at least $22k. But I guess I could let it go for 18… 14? No, you’ve gotta be kidding me. 17 and that’s my final offer. 16? Deal.”

It’s also a standard gambit for pickup artists. I won’t give you the salacious details here. You can use your own imagination.

And finally, rejection-and-retreat is in play in every modern sales funnel, which features a front-end offer, some upsells, and inevitably, downsells if you don’t take the upsell:

“All right, so you don’t want the incredibly valuable lifetime subscription to Cat & Mouse Stockpicking Alerts for only $4,999. Will you at least accept a 2-year subscription, for only $387?”

And since you’ve read my post to the end, let me tell you this:

This reciprocity stuff is powerful. Do it right, and you can really manipulate people, even against their own interest. But beware.

Reciprocity is a perfect example of what I wrote about a couple days ago. It’s a technique that can wear out quick if you abuse it. And when it wears out, you won’t just lose that one-time sale. You will also lose the chance to do business with that person, probably for life.

Oh, and if you think I’ve done you any kind of a favor by exposing you to this devious rejection-then retreat stuff… then you know how to repay me. I have an email newsletter. Consider signing up for it. And if you decide you want to, here’s where to go.

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:

Influence 2.0 (your choice)

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“The washing machine cannot be fixed,” my landlady texted me today. “So I don’t know what’s better. To replace it and bother you with the workers coming and going. Or to just have you wash your stuff at my place.”

I considered my options.

It would be nice to have a working washing machine. But I’ll only be in the apartment until the end of the month. The landlady lives downstairs. And she does have a point. Workers coming and going to take out the old machine and set up the new one… it would be a hassle and a distraction.

“No problem,” I texted back, “I’ll do the laundry at your place.”

Only then did it occur to me how this was a clever strategy on her part. Had she said, “The washing machine cannot be fixed. But it’s no problem! Just use mine! It will be easiest for you!” Had she said that, I would have raised all kinds of objections. At least in my mind.

As you might know, what the landlady did is a classic persuasion technique. It’s called giving people a menu. From Jonah Berger’s  book The Catalyst:

Try to convince people to do something, and they spend a lot of time counterarguing. Thinking about all the various reasons why it’s a bad idea or why something else would be better. Why they don’t want to do what was suggested.

But give people multiple options, and suddenly things shift.

Rather than thinking about what is wrong with whatever was suggested, they think about which one is better. Rather than poking holes in whatever was raised, they think about which of the options is best for them. And because they’ve been participating, they’re much more likely to go along with one of them in the end.

Berger gives examples of using menus to persuade your kids to brush their teeth and your clients to accept your plan of action. But here’s a warning:

If you abuse this, it can turn into a standard pushy salesman’s grift. “So Mr. Bejako… do you want that new Miata in red… or in black?”

“Hold on buddy. I never said I want a Miata. Why are you trying to trick me?”

So keeping this in mind, I want to leave you with a couple of choices. Of course, you are perfectly free to ignore both and to take no action.

Choice one is to go and check out Berger’s The Catalyst, which I mentioned above. I really like this book, and I think of it as a kind of 2.0 version of Cialdini’s Influence. If you want to see why, check out this page for more info about The Catalyst:

https://bejakovic.com/catalyst

Choice two is to not bother reading the nearly 300 pages of The Catalyst. Instead you can simply sign up for my email newsletter. That’s where I share the best marketing and persuasion ideas I come across.

In fact, that’s where I already shared some great ideas from The Catalyst, and where I’m sure to share more. Here’s where to click if you’d like to sign up.

Spy thriller persuasion in the real world

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It sounds like a scene out of a Jason Bourne movie:

A man survives a near-fatal assassination attempt. After months of recovery, he decides to figure out exactly who was responsible and how and why.

Being rather clever, he has a hunch of where to start. So he picks up the phone, and starts going down a list of secret service agents who have been trailing him for years.

He calls the first person on the list. No response.

He calls the second person, and introduces himself using a fake name.

There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “I know exactly who you are,” the other man finally says. Click.

The assassination survivor calls the third name on the list.

“Hello?”

“Konstantin Borisovich?”

“Yes, yes!”

“This is Ustinov Maxim Sergeevich, aide to Nikolay Platonovich Patrushev. I received your number from Vladimir Mikhailovich Bogdanov. I apologise for the early hour, but I urgently require 10 minutes of your time.”

“All right.”

50 minutes later, the assassination survivor has milked the secret service agent for the names and methods and dates behind the failed assassination.

Like I said, it sounds like something you would see in a movie. But it was real, and it happened only last week. The assassination survivor was Alexei Navalny, a leading Russian opposition politician, who was poisoned on a plane back in September.

All in all, this was a pretty spectacular piece of persuasion and social engineering. To put it in context, just ask yourself:

How would you go about tricking a trained secret service agent to open up and reveal secret assassination stuff to you on an unsecured line?

It might surprise you that Navalny did it through standard persuasion techniques. Stuff that’s straight out of Robert Cialdini’s Influence.

I won’t list all the techniques Navalny used. But if you like, I will write about one of them in more detail tomorrow. It’s how Navalny finally got poor Konstantin Borisovich to break down and open up… and it also underlies all of direct marketing.

If you’d like to read tomorrow’s article, you might like to subscribe to my email newsletter.

Woody Allen and Mark Ford walk into a library together…

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“I don’t enjoy reading,” Woody Allen said once in an interview. “But it’s necessary for a writer, so I have to do it.”

Preach, Woody.

I’ve always found reading is one of those things I do out of responsibility, not enjoyment.

But do you really have to read to be a successful writer? Or at least a successful copywriter?

I don’t know. But I heard two expert copywriters talking today. And their opinion seems to be yes.

The two copywriters in question were John Forde and Mark Ford. You might know them as the two guys who wrote the book Great Leads, which is up there with Cialdini’s Influence and Gene Schwartz’s Breakthrough Advertising as elementary education for a copywriter.

So John asked Mark, where do you get your big ideas from?

Reading, said Mark.

Not by swiping what worked before. Not by intuition. Not by some magic spark of creativity.

Instead, Mark reads. And when something makes him excited and interested, he takes note, and he uses that idea, in some form, in his own writing.

Which might sound pretty simple. Or even cheap. But hold on. Because here’s a second tip from the same interview:

Mark says Googled reading won’t lead you to a big idea. You’ve got to read books.

Yes, it’s work. Maybe even unenjoyable work. But so what? Read lots of books, carefully, and you can make lots of money as a result. And as Woody Allen will tell you:

“Money is not everything, but it is better than having one’s health.”

But here’s what not to do:

Don’t read my daily email newsletter. It won’t lead to your next big idea. And it’s not enjoyable.

If you don’t believe me, or you want to judge for yourself what my daily emails are like, then click here.

Getting your prospect and yourself to obey

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Over the past 36 hours, I’ve written a 20-page VSL.

It wasn’t completely from scratch — there were a bunch of notes and research and a fairly detailed brief I had written earlier.

But still. Yesterday morning, all that stuff looked like a rotting head of cabbage on the shelf of a Hungarian grocery store.

And as of 3 minutes ago, I have a polished VSL, along with several alternate headline complexes, suitable for handing off to the client.

The point I want to make here is simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful. It goes all the way back to that demi-god of persuasion, Robert Cialdini.

I’m talking about the power of urgency, and specifically, the power of a deadline.

Human beings will do all sorts of things because of a deadline, including writing a 20-page VSL in 36 hours.

But in most cases — certainly in my case yesterday and today — a deadline really doesn’t mean anything.

I’m not sure my client even realized today is the deadline for this project… And if he did, I doubt it would have been any kind of problem to ask for a bit of extra time, say until Monday.

But my brain never treated either of those as options.

“Deadlines are deadlines,” the gray blob said, “and they need to be obeyed.”

Your prospects are the same way.

So invent a deadline. If your deadline is genuine, great. But even if not, people will be moved to obey. And often, they will be moved more than by any inducements or promises or blandishments you could ever make.

Speaking of which, here’s an offer that will expire at the top of the hour:

I write a daily email newsletter. Joining it is free if you do it now. Click here to sign up.

Getting slapped under the table by consistency and commitment

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A few days ago, email marketer Josh Earl went on a rant against “consistency and commitment.”

As you might know, this is one of the principles from Robert Cialdini’s book Influence. According to Cialdini, people will act in ways that are consistent with their previous actions and beliefs.

Many marketers get an involuntary hardon as soon as Cialdini’s name is mentioned.

So it’s no surprise that “consistency and commitment” have been used to sell lots of marketing gimmicks. And that’s what Josh is complaining about:

“Marketers have glommed onto this idea big time. So you’ll hear them geeking out about how you can double your optin rate by hiding your signup form behind a faux survey question, or improve your sales by getting people to reply to an email, because ‘consistency and commitment, man!'”

Josh goes on to say that consistency and commitment mostly don’t work. What’s worse, they can even lead you astray. “Time to kick ‘consistency and commitment’ to the curb,” he concludes.

This argument made me think of a video I’d seen a few weeks back.

A young, skinny guy challenges the Russian slap champion.

(You haven’t seen this sport? Basically, two guys take turns slapping each other until one of them breaks down and goes crying to his mom.)

The young challenger is super confident and cocky, because he’s injected synthol into his biceps to make them look huge.

He thinks his Popeye arms will somehow let him slap harder. So he takes a swing and slaps the champion right on the ear. The champion just shakes it off.

And then it’s the slap champion’s turn.

He carefully measures his swing… pulls his giant arm back… and slaps the synthol challeger clean under the table, so three guys have to help him up.

To my mind, synthol guy is the two-step optin form that Josh is complaining about.

Consistency and commitment are more like the slap champion.

They really are powerful, just like Cialdini says. And they have made many direct marketers rich.

In other words, I don’t agree with Josh. But if you want to read his entire post, so you can make up your own mind, here’s where you can find it:

https://joshuaearl.com/bacon-petition