The Catalyst

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.

Bump your order form bump 15% without changing the offer

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Two days ago, I watched an interview with a successful marketer who currently has several million-dollar funnels. He broke down his most recent success and shared some tricks and tips. Here’s one that got me, about an order form bump.

You probably know what an order form bump is. It’s an impulse buy you can tack onto your order form that doesn’t need a lot of explaining. If you haven’t seen one of these before, you can think of it as asking, “Do you want fries with that?” This can often substantially increase your average order value.

So this marketer discovered (by accident) how to increase his order form bump take rate by 15%, even for order form bumps that cost as much as the front-end offer. The breakdown:

1. The customer goes on the order page

2. He sees an initial two-sentence description of the oder form bump, along with a checkbox that says “Yes, add this to my order!”

3. If the customer clicks the checkbox, the 2-sentence description expands into a slightly more detailed description, which also includes the price.

This marketer’s accidental discovery was leaving out the price out of the initial two-sentence description. All his offers used to show the price there… but he forgot to put it in one time. The take on that no-price order form bump was 15% higher. And once he took out the price out of the initial description in other funnels, he saw similar increases.

Just in case you’re wondering about the legality or ethics of this:

The price is perfectly revealed once you click the checkbox. And for anybody who decides he doesn’t want the order form bump, another click on the same checkbox will remove the order form bump from your offer.

In other words, this is just of one of those human quirks. You might attribute it to the endowment effect or consistency or whatever you like. The fact is some portion of those extra 15% of people find it easier to convince themselves they actually want something they don’t really want… than to click on the checkbox a second time.

And that’s my point for you for today.

Because I don’t normally share these kinds of funnel hacks (though this one is worthwhile). Rather, I’m more interested in fundamental human traits and how we can use them for influence and persuasion.

Well, the trait here is how even tiny obstacles, particularly phyiscal obstacles, can have big effects on human behavior. Like in the example above, you can use tiny obstacles to reinforce the behavior you want. And vice versa.

Because right now, there are sure to be tiny obstacles that are hindering the behavior you want from people. It makes sense to hunt down those obstacles and terminate them with extreme prejudice. As Jonah Berger wrote in his book The Catalyst:

“Instead of asking what would encourage change, ask why things haven’t changed already.”

For example, I have an email newsletter. I could probably help get my optins up by offering some small gift for signing up, besides the pleasure of hearing from me each day.

I should work out what would make a good gift… but in the meantime, I can offer you the following, a special report called Copywriters Hero. It’s my collection of the best free and paid resources for discovering the world of copywriting and direct marketing. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/copywriters-hero/

Tall Chinese boys and the Zappos case study

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I often wonder why teens seem to be getting taller, even in countries that are not famous for tallness — like Italy or China. Today I found a potential answer.

According to a study published this month in The Lancet, it comes down to nutrition. Improving nutrition is why Chinese boys became 4 inches taller in 35 years, and went from 150th tallest on the list to 65th. Meanwhile, boys in the UK got only one inch taller during that time, which dropped them from 28th place to 39th.

Dr Andrea Rodriguez Martinez, the lead author of this study, concluded by saying:

“Our findings should motivate policies that increase the availability and reduce the cost of nutritious foods, as this will help children grow taller without gaining excessive weight for their height.”

It was the bit about “increasing availability” and “reducing cost” that got my attention. It reminded me of a case study reported in Jonah Berger’s book the Catalyst, about the online shoe retailer Zappos.

In their early days, Zappos was limited in how low they could cut their prices — Nike didn’t want their cool new sneakers being sold cheap.

But even if Zappos could offer lower prices than in retail stores, people would still be wary of buying shoes online.

So what Zappos did instead was remove roadblocks to buying. They offered free shipping instead of lowering prices.

It could have been disastrous for the company… but it was not. Zappos went from struggling ecomm startup to a $1.2 billion buyout from Amazon.

So my message to Dr Rodriguez is, instead of pushing for food voucher programs… advocate for more vending machines selling expensive but delicious dehydrated zucchini chips. And watch those kids shoot up in height rather than width.

But it’s unlikely Dr Rodriguez will listen to me. Maybe you will.

So my message for you is that free shipping makes any offer more enticing… and that price is often not the main objection that you need to address. Rather than trying to compete on price, ask yourself why your prospects are not buying already — and then remove that roadblock directly.

Let me give you an example:

I write a daily email newsletter. It’s free, so I can’t cut its price any lower without paying you to sign up. But the fact is, you can subscribe to it and if it’s not right for you… you can unsubscribe any time with just one click. No risk. No hassle. So why not try it out? Click here to sign up now.

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.

Opening the impossible sale

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A few days ago, after reading a terrible article in The New Yorker, I decided to stop drinking coffee. At least for the next month.

It’s not a giant sacrifice. I was never a coffee snob, and coffee doesn’t do much for my flat-lining productivity.

But I do enjoy getting up in the morning, brewing some cheap coffee on the stove, and then thinning it to hell with cow milk. It’s a small pleasure, but in my life, that means a lot.

Even so, no coffee for the next month. That article spoiled it for me. It told the history of coffee, and it explained how the powers-that-be tricked society into getting addicted to coffee for their own evil ends.

To paraphrase Dave Chappelle, “And all these years, I thought I liked coffee because it’s delicious. Turns out, I got no say in the matter.”

Besides The New Yorker, I’m also reading a book called The Catalyst. The first chapter is all about reactance, which is what happened with me and coffee and that article. But the book gives another and better example of it:

Apparently, back in the 90s, the state of Florida ran one of the rare successful anti-smoking campaigns targeting teens. The ads didn’t tell teens about the harms of smoking. They didn’t tell teens to stop.

​​All the campaign did was highlight the devious ways the tobacco industry used to manipulate kids into getting hooked. As the campaign ran, teen smoking rates dropped by something like a million percent. Eventually, tobacco companies sued the state to get the campaign to stop.

Elie Wiesel said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” Something similar happens in persuasion and marketing and sales. The opposite of making the sale is usually not objections. It’s simply indifference.

Of course, the best way to deal with indifferent, ambivalent prospects is to never face them. Selling those kinds of people is almost impossible. At least that’s what I thought until I read that stuff about reactance.

People want to have a feeling of control and agency in their lives. If they feel that’s been violated, they get very motivated to change. Even to the point of doing the exact opposite of what they were doing up to now.

​​That’s reactance.

I’d still rather not face indifferent prospects. But if I do have to face them, I know what I’ll do to open the sale. I’ll simply show them how choosing the status quo is not actually their decision, but the work of some puppet master behind the scenes.

Maybe you can try the same. If you so choose, of course.

Finally, here’s some facts that are not designed to persuade you in any way. I write a daily email newsletter. It deals with topics like the one you’ve just read about. The way to get it is here. And I in no way encourage you to sign up for it.