Robert Cialdini

Cialdini and the art of laptop maintenance

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I crossed a Rubicon of sorts yesterday.

I was helping my mom set up her new laptop. She just got the same Macbook as I have.

“My God,” I thought to myself, “it’s so clean.”

I’ve had my laptop for years and I’ve never once bothered cleaning the keyboard or screen. It was gross. So last night, when I got home, I took some wet wipes and spent 15 mins wiping down the screen, polishing the trackpad, getting in between the keys to get the accumulated grime and dust.

That was in the evening, in the dark.

This morning, I got up and saw the laptop in the light of day.

And no, all the scrubbing hadn’t ruined it or scratched it or corroded it.

But I did see it wasn’t perfectly clean still. So I got more wipes, and revisited all the same goddamn keys and the little strip above the keyboard and why won’t this foggy area on right side get polished?

Mind you, I had lived with a filthy laptop for years.

So why get obsessive now?

And why not be happy that my laptop is simply good enough, much cleaner, although not perfect?

I believe there’s a fundamental law of human nature at work here. It underlies my obsessive laptop cleaning… the massive success of companies like the Franklin Mint… and even the behavior of defecting American GI’s in Korean POW camps.

You’ve probably heard of this fundamental rule. It’s one of Robert Cialdini’s 6 pillars of INFLUENCE.

I’m talking about psychological consistency and the need for completeness.

It’s one of the reasons why people who have bought your product are the absolute best prospects for buying even more of your product.

Or buying a very similar, highly substitutable product.

Odds are, even if they don’t absolutely need it… they will want it, in order to be psychologically consistent with themselves.

That’s why, if you’re only selling one product to your customers one time, you’re missing out on a big opportunity.

But here’s some potentially good news.

If you want to find out about a risk-free, guaranteed way to make more sales to such customers at zero cost, you’ll want to read the third and final part of my upcoming book. More info here:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

Are you Joe Hepp to the real con game?

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Yesterday, a friend and I spent a lot of time tracking down the phrase “Joe Hepp.”

It appears in A House of Games, a David Mamet film about con men.

“Are you Joe Hepp?” is apparently an old circus saying that means, “Are you a know-it-all?” It later morphed into, “Are you hep?” — meaning “are you in the know?” — and later hip, hippy, hipster, etc.

But here’s something you might find more interesting.

It’s the etymology of another phrase from A House of Games. It comes up when the main con man, Mike, talks about what a con game really is.

It’s short for confidence game, says Mike.

You might have already known that.

But do you know why it’s called a confidence game?

Not because the con man gains your confidence in order to cheat you. Instead, it’s because he gives you his confidence. And this makes you trust him, and makes you susceptible for manipulation and persuasion.

In other words, it’s the old reciprocity principle from Robert Cialdini’s book Influence.

Except, not as it’s applied in the lame and ineffective way of most marketers (“If I bombard my prospects with free pdfs and hard-teaching emails, then they will feel obliged to eventually buy from me”).

No.

There are much better, more subtle, and more effective ways to apply reciprocity — AKA the con game — to copywriting and marketing.

I won’t lay them out here.

But if you’d like to know what I have in mind, you might find some answers here:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

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.