influence

Book Summary of Influence by Robert Cialdini

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Influence” explores how we are persuaded to do things and how fixed-action patterns are manipulated to achieve compliance. These patterns are mental shortcuts we use to make decisions based on assumptions, such as braking when other drivers do. They help us make decisions efficiently but can also be exploited to influence our behavior.

Compliance Practitioners

Compliance practitioners, such as salespeople, fundraisers, and politicians, exploit our fixed-action patterns to persuade us to do things we wouldn’t normally do. They manipulate us by using the wrong stimuli to elicit the desired response.

For instance, a store owner may mark up a low-quality item to make it more appealing by triggering our mental shortcut that associates high prices with high quality. This turns our fixed-action advantage into a disadvantage that hinders our judgment and leads us to make poor decisions.

Compliance practitioners commonly apply six psychological principles to persuade people:

  1. Reciprocity
  2. Commitment/Consistency
  3. Social proof
  4. Liking
  5. Authority

Reciprocity

The Reciprocity Principle urges us to repay others when they do something for us, which is commonly seen as basic courtesy. The principle evolved from early human communities that had a better chance of survival by working together and reciprocating favors.

Compliance practitioners use this principle to create a sense of obligation by giving small gifts or making token gestures of kindness before asking for something in return. They may also use a rejection-then-retreat tactic to encourage a reciprocal concession.

To avoid falling for these tactics, it’s crucial to distinguish between genuine acts of kindness and those designed to manipulate us. Socially, we are required to repay a real kindness with a similar one, but we are not required to repay a trick with a trick.

Commitment/Consistency

The Consistency Principle says people feel compelled to stay committed to their beliefs and actions, even when they don’t align. While it’s useful, it can be exploited. Compliance practitioners take advantage by starting with small requests and building to larger ones. Spot the situation and turn the tables by calling out their tactic. Make decisions with a reason, not reason for a decision.

Social Proof

The Social Proof Principle says we tend to follow what others are doing or thinking. It can be useful, as it helps us make decisions quickly and accurately. But it can also be manipulated by those who want to sell us things or influence us. Advertisers may create the illusion of popularity by claiming that a product is the “fastest-growing” or “highest-selling.” To avoid being tricked, you should look beyond the numbers and think critically about why people are behaving in a certain way. Don’t just follow the crowd blindly; use your own judgement.

Liking

The Liking Principle suggests that we are more likely to comply with requests from people we know and like, including family, friends, and attractive or affable individuals who profess to like us. Compliance practitioners take advantage of this by using names of acquaintances or projecting likable qualities to win us over.

However, it’s important to evaluate each situation on its own merits to avoid being manipulated. Don’t let personal feelings cloud your judgement when making decisions.

Authority

The Authority Principle states that we tend to comply with requests from those we perceive as authoritative figures, such as teachers, doctors, and police officers. Symbols of authority like titles and uniforms can also trigger compliance.

While this can be beneficial for society, it can also be exploited by manipulators who use superficial authority to deceive us. For instance, the Milgram experiment showed that people can be easily pressured by an authority figure to perform unethical actions.

To avoid being manipulated, considering a person’s credentials and relevancy is crucial. The mere fact that someone presents themselves as an authoritative person does not imply that they are knowledgeable or reliable.

Scarcity

The Scarcity Principle states that we’re drawn to things that are limited in availability. Scarcity is related to loss aversion, where we’re more afraid of losing something than gaining something of equal value.

Creating a feeling of immediacy through “sales pitches that are “first-come, first-served” or “limited-time only”, compliance professionals take advantage of scarcity to their advantage. The sense of loss aversion is heightened when scarcity occurs through social competition.

To avoid being manipulated, ask yourself if you want something for its intrinsic value or just because it’s rare. Compliance practitioners use various techniques to get us to comply, including free samples, fake social proof, flattery, authority, and fake deadlines. Knowing these tricks can help you resist them.

Book Summary of To Sell Is Human by Daniel H. Pink

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Discover the intrinsic human skill of selling and learn how to utilize it for achieving sales results and success in other areas of life through “To Sell Is Human”. Our guide simplifies and supports the ideas of renowned author Daniel Pink, making them easily applicable to your own life.

Everyone’s a Salesperson

Pink argues that the modern workplace has made sales skills essential for all workers, introducing the concept of non-sales selling or contemporary selling. This involves persuading others to exchange resources, not just money, and includes activities such as negotiating prices, job interviews, and even asking someone on a date.

The Traditional ABCs of Sales

Pink believes that sales was previously seen as deceptive and manipulative, but now there are two sales philosophies: the traditional “buyer beware” and the new “seller beware.” The former prioritizes the seller’s benefit and lacks integrity, while the latter emphasizes serving the buyer and requires integrity. Successful salespeople now operate from a place of integrity, rather than using it as a last resort.

Traditional Sales Philosophy

During the 1900s, when traditional sales dominated the stable and consumer-driven economy, the primary objective was profit, as exemplified by the “ABC” acronym (Always Be Closing). This profit-focused approach led salespeople to disregard the buyers’ needs, creating a negative perception of salespeople. For instance, a traditional car salesperson would misrepresent their vehicle’s quality and overcharge buyers to maximize profits, regardless of the buyers’ interests.

What Changed?

The decline of traditional sales was initiated by two factors. Firstly, economic disruption caused by the Great Recession forced workers to expand their skill sets, making sales a necessary skill for everyone.

Additionally, the rise of entrepreneurs also contributed to the need for flexible skill sets, including sales. Secondly, the technology boom disrupted the power imbalance between buyers and sellers, as the internet provided access to information previously monopolized by sellers. This shift forced sellers to prioritize the needs of buyers over their own profits.

The Modern ABCs of Sales

Pink argues that the economic and technological changes have led to the emergence of a new selling philosophy that replaces the old profit-oriented “ABC” approach. This new approach prioritizes meeting the buyer’s needs and is characterized by three strategies: connection, optimism, and focus.

Contemporary Selling Step 1: Connection

Pink views connection as the ability to synchronize and adjust to individuals, communities, and situations to meet their needs.

Pink proposes three methods for practicing connection.

  1. First, mimicking the buyer’s mannerisms to build trust and camaraderie.
  2. Second, adopting the buyer’s perspective to better understand their needs and offer personalized solutions.
  3. And third, power-shifting by treating the buyer as if they hold the power, creating a service-oriented dynamic.

For example, sitting at an equal level and asking, “What are you looking for, and how can I help?” demonstrates a willingness to serve the buyer’s needs.

Contemporary Selling Step 2: Optimism

Optimism is a key aspect of Pink’s modern sales method as it fosters resilience in the face of rejection. In sales, hearing “no” is more common than “yes,” and an optimistic outlook enables the seller to persist in their efforts or move on to the next customer. For instance, if a door-to-door salesman encounters a prospect who seems uninterested, they can remain positive and demonstrate their belief in their product/service. This mindset allows the seller to bounce back from potential setbacks and approach the next customer.

Prepare: Question Yourself

Pink recommends asking targeted, positive questions to prepare for a sales interaction. This helps focus on sales goals and boosts confidence and motivation, leading to better results over time. Examples of such questions include “How can I be of service to this buyer?” or “How can I demonstrate the value of this purchase?”

Maintain: Communicate Positivity

Pink emphasizes the importance of maintaining a positive environment during a sales interaction for both the buyer and seller. Studies show that a healthy ratio of positive to negative sensations increases receptiveness and likelihood of a positive outcome. Therefore, communicate positive information with a minimum 3 to 1 ratio, while still acknowledging a few negatives. Additionally, speak with conviction about your product and create a friendly atmosphere by smiling often and highlighting its positive aspects.

Evaluate: Reflect With Optimism

Pink suggests reflecting on a sales interaction by assuming that negative experiences are temporary, circumstantial, and not personal. This helps to frame the experience positively and influence how you feel about it.

Contemporary Selling Step 3: Focus

Pink’s modern sales model’s third component is creating focus, which involves identifying problems, bringing them to the customer’s attention, and providing solutions. As an example, imagine you’re a tutor and a life coach working with a 12-year-old boy who’s struggling academically due to a lack of self-discipline. By recognizing the issue and offering life coaching instead of tutoring, you provide an effective solution, resulting in significant academic improvements.

Pink offers four ways to create focus for customers:

  1. Problem Finding: Pink’s method is about helping buyers clarify their needs. By being thorough and asking good questions, you can use the information you discover to help your buyer focus on their needs and decide on a solution.
  2. Creating Contrast: Show buyers multiple potential paths they can compare, or use an unfavorable option to highlight the benefits of a more favorable one.If you’re trying to sell a vehicle, for instance, have several vehicles prepared to display to the customer, including one of inferior quality than the others that you may use to emphasize the advantages of the other vehicles.
  3. Selling Experience: Sell experiences rather than products. Framing a sale through the lens of experience focuses a buyer on how they will benefit and is more likely to get them emotionally invested in making a purchase.
  4. Providing a Path: Provide buyers with a clear path to solving their problem. Giving them clear steps and a clear time frame makes them more likely to commit to working with you.

The New Paradigm: Say Goodbye to Sales and Hello to Service

Pink believes that sales should ultimately be about providing a service to others and improving their lives. He suggests two steps for service-oriented sales.

  • Step #1 is to make it personal by showing your passion for the product and focusing on service rather than profit. This creates a connection with the customer and makes your pitch more credible.
  • Step #2 is to make it purposeful by connecting what you’re selling to a broader purpose and framing it that way to potential buyers. This taps into the innate desire to serve and can improve society as a whole.

For example, a teacher can remind themselves that they are not only improving the lives of their students, but also preparing them to improve the world.

Bonus Step: Enlarge Your Service Mindset

Pink distinguishes between upselling, which benefits the seller, and “up-serving,” which benefits the buyer. Upselling involves convincing customers to buy more expensive products or add-ons to benefit the seller. In contrast, up-serving means helping customers identify their unmet needs and finding the best solution for them. For instance, if you’re selling a phone to an elderly customer, up-serving means recommending a simple and reliable phone instead of a high-tech and expensive one to maximize profit.

Book Summary of Ogilvy On Advertising by David Ogilvy

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David Ogilvy founded his own advertising agency in 1949 after working as a salesman, copywriter, and adman for years. His agency became one of the world’s most successful, and in 1985, he wrote Ogilvy on Advertising, a comprehensive guide to marketing, creating effective ads, and the industry as a whole.

Marketing and Product Development

To increase sales, good products are crucial. Research is important to determine preferences for smells, colors, flavors, features, and packaging. Quality improvement, balancing convention and novelty, and an appropriate price with promotions can also help. A memorable name and successful launch are key. Focus on successes and convince consumers to try the product.

The Craft of Advertising

Advertising aims to increase profit by attracting new customers or encouraging existing customers to buy more. Effective advertising can significantly boost sales, even for products that already sell well. To create good ads, follow these steps:

  1. Learn about the product to generate associations and potential benefits.
  2. Study competitor’s ads, particularly direct-response ads.
  3. Use research to understand your target audience, product promise, promotions, and media.
  4. Choose a brand image.
  5. By researching and allowing your mind to naturally make connections, you may come up with grand, timeless concepts.
  6. Spotlight the product and make it the star, even if it’s not unique.
  7. Stay away from committee work. The final advertisement frequently says nothing significant since committees frequently confuse issues and demand compromise.

Print Advertising

Print ads are ads in magazines, newspapers or on posters. There are five key elements to consider when creating a print ad: headline, imagery, copy, coupon, and layout.

  1. A great headline is essential as most people read only the headline.
  2. Effective imagery makes the reader curious or tells a story.
  3. Good copy should use the second person, be simple, interesting and specific, and include a story or consumer testimonials.
  4. Coupons should contain a small image, the promise, and the brand name.
  5. The layout should be easy to read and resemble an editorial page to increase readership.

TV Advertising

TV advertising is about commercials and there are six key elements to consider when creating them. These include the structure, the brand and product name, visuals, sound, supers (text overlaid on the video), and costs.

Effective commercials have a “slice of life” structure, feature unusual characters, and are funny, sentimental, fact-based, or newsworthy. It’s important to mention the brand name early and often, show someone using the product, and show the product and packaging at the end.

Use sound effects and avoid voiceovers, and add supers to reiterate your message. Finally, reduce costs by cutting unnecessary complications.

Radio Advertising

When the book was published, radio advertising only accounted for 6% of U.S. advertising and its effectiveness was difficult to measure. Based on a pilot study and his own observations, Ogilvy offers five tips for creating effective radio ads:

  1. Capture people’s attention with surprises, humor, or charm.
  2. Speak to the audience in a conversational manner.
  3. Mention the brand name and promise early in the commercial.
  4. Repeat the brand name and promise throughout the commercial.
  5. Create multiple commercials to avoid listener annoyance and maximize exposure.

Specific Types of Advertising

There are challenges specific to certain types of products, services, and companies, including:

  1. Corporate advertising can improve a company’s reputation, recruitment efforts, and more, but requires a longer-term commitment and legislative advertising may not be considered a business expense.
  2. Tourism advertising involves navigating politics and stereotypes about the country being advertised.
  3. Cause advertising may not bring in much money, but can raise awareness and lead to successful personal solicitation.
  4. Commodity products lack uniqueness, so it’s best to differentiate your company rather than the product by offering lower cost, better quality, or service.

Industry Overview

Working in Advertising

To succeed in the competitive advertising industry, one must have passion. Agency work involves various roles such as copywriters, art directors, account executives, researchers, media buyers, creative directors, and CEOs. Copywriters create written content, art directors handle visuals, account executives act as intermediaries, researchers analyze effectiveness, media departments buy ad space, creative directors oversee production, and CEOs manage and attract clients.

Running an Advertising Agency

To run a successful agency, you need: talented and skilled staff, a solid understanding of office politics, high standards of conduct, a payment system, good investments, and clients.

  • To ensure a talented staff, recruit people smarter than you and with different talents.
  • To avoid politics, fire the worst offenders and organize team-building activities. Set high standards of conduct, including client confidentiality and only using clients’ products.
  • Choose a payment system that suits your agency. Good investments include opening new offices or purchasing your office building.
  • Attract new clients by producing good advertising for existing clients, and use successful work to show potential clients.

To attract new clients, Ogilvy recommends the following:

  1. Give presentations to convince clients to hire your agency, and send a follow-up letter summarizing why they should choose you.
  2. Advertise your agency through direct mail or consistent space advertising.
  3. Sign up multinational accounts to potentially gain worldwide opportunities.

However, Ogilvy also advises caution when taking on new clients. Avoid or drop clients who can’t pay, have a different company culture, are failing, or are bullies.

Finding an Agency

To find the right advertising agency, start by reviewing ads in magazines and on TV that you admire. Create a list of agencies responsible for those ads and eliminate those working with your competitors. Meet with the heads and creative directors of the remaining agencies and ask to see their top six print and TV ads. Choose the agency with the most compelling campaigns and offer to pay 1% more than their usual fee and sign a five-year contract to secure their services.

Public Opinion on Advertising

Critics rank adpeople as low as car salespeople in honesty, but Ogilvy argues that advertising is not inherently immoral and can have positive effects.

Ads go through many levels of approval before running, except for political advertising, which can be dishonest. Advertising may only convince someone to buy an inferior product once. Agencies were creating less informative ads and billboards were considered dangerous and ugly at the time of writing.

Book Summary of the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

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Power is a game everyone plays – you’re either a player or a pawn. Robert Greene’s book, The 48 Laws of Power, provides rules and strategies for mastering the game, based on examples from history. The laws increase your power when followed, and decrease it when not.

Deception is essential to the game, and requires an understanding of human behavior, self-control, charm, adaptability, strategic thinking, and deviousness. The 48 laws are listed in brief, and Greene warns that power can be consuming and change your perception of human behavior.

Adopt a Power Mindset

The key takeaway is to be strategic and not emotional, to pursue your goals relentlessly. One instance of this is how the Chinese Emperor Sung used strategic maneuvers to turn an adversary into an ally.

The passage also highlights several laws to follow, such as being wary of friends and using enemies, avoiding miserable people, focusing your efforts, planning through the end, getting the timing right, ignoring small problems, charting your own course, and being elusive.

These laws emphasize the importance of being aware of your surroundings, knowing your opponents, and being flexible and unpredictable to succeed.

Communicate Powerfully

These are the key takeaways and examples from Robert Greene’s “The 48 Laws of Power”. The book provides advice on how to become more powerful and influential in various situations.

The laws discussed include showing rather than telling, attuning to others’ emotions, attracting attention, disarming others by being nice, and creating a cult following. One example given is Michelangelo’s handling of criticism of his statue of David.

Other laws discussed include saying as little as possible, demonstrating your point rather than arguing, showing others what’s in it for them, and mirroring others’ emotions. The book suggests that by following these laws, one can become more successful in various endeavors.

Adopt Behaviors that Enhance Your Power

These laws of power focus on the importance of concealing your intentions and benefiting yourself while ingratiating yourself to others. The examples provided illustrate how this can be done through cunning and manipulation.

Key takeaways:

  • Always hide your true intentions and keep people off balance to prevent them from countering your efforts.
  • Protect and cultivate your reputation as it is a crucial component of your power.
  • Use others to do your work for you and take credit for their efforts.
  • Don’t wear out your welcome and make difficult feats seem effortless.
  • Act like royalty and project supreme confidence.
  • Learn the rules of the society you’re playing in and follow them to avoid attracting unfavorable attention.
  • Make your intended victims feel smarter than you are to avoid suspicion.
  • Go along to get along and avoid making a show of being different.

Examples provided include the con artist Victor Lustig, who pretended to be a count and distracted people with his odd behavior to rob them, and Catherine de Medici, a French regent who manipulated ambitious men by appealing to their passion for women.

Take Decisive Action

The key takeaway of this passage is to be ruthless and exploit others’ weaknesses to achieve your goals. The example given is of Catherine de Medici, who controlled ambitious men by using skilled mistresses to seduce them and report their plans back to her. The following laws are discussed:

  • Law 8: Bait Your Enemy
  • Law 11: Be Needed
  • Law 15: Annihilate Your Enemy
  • Law 22: Surrender to Win
  • Law 28: Act Boldly
  • Law 31: Set Up Phony Choices
  • Law 33: Use Others’ Weaknesses
  • Law 39: Rattle Your Opponents
  • Law 40: Use Money as a Tool
  • Law 42: Squelch the Troublemaker

These laws emphasize tactics such as making your opponent come to you, making your superior dependent on you, crushing your enemy completely, surrendering when weaker, acting boldly, using phony choices, exploiting weaknesses, staying calm while making your enemies angry, using money strategically, and stopping troublemakers.

Avoid These Potential Pitfalls

These laws of power teach us how to maintain control under pressure without taking things to the extreme. Isabella, a ruler of a small Italian city-state, managed to maintain independence by appearing open to other powers without committing to any side.

To remain in control, don’t isolate yourself, don’t take sides, and don’t get your hands dirty. Enact changes slowly, watch for envy, and know when to stop once you’ve achieved your goal. Be cautious of counter-reactions to your success, and don’t let emotions push you past your victory.