When you keep on asking for the sale,
your sales will snowball.
And nobody will find you annoying.
In our last post, we looked at the messages that Kate Smith repeated in order to create the belief that her 18-hour radio marathon — raising today’s equivalent of $480 million dollars — was an oustanding or special event:
- This is no ordinary event
- Personal meaning to her (thus special, not ordinary)
- A large corporation recognizes how extraordinary this is
- Day long event like a very long infomercial (rather than the usual unorchestrated appeals like a 30-second TV ad or even the 60-minute informercial)
These repeated messages focused on creating the belief that it was special. But the messages themselves varied in their exact wording.
The marathon provides the opportunity for effective persuasion through continued repetition. Remember that the overall theme for the marathon was: “Your purchase is a sacred act.”
There’s only one way to perform that sacred act: buy a bond. And if you didn’t buy? You were committing a grave and serious spiritual offense.
Kate Smith used one repeated message consistently in the exact same place — at the very end — with the exact same words all 65 times:
“Will you buy a bond?”
In sales, it’s called the “close.” And in sales, you’re taught to close, or ask for the order again and again, in order to increase your chances of your prospect buying. When you ask for the order 65 times, the cumulative snowball effect does what it did for Kate Smith: deliver $480,000,000 in sales.
But, as you can guess, it’s not as simple as repeating the magical words over and over until the other party gives in to your demand. Why?
Simple repetition often makes people bored, irritated, or even moves them to act by leaving (which is the wrong action you want them to take). I lived in the Hawaiian countryside with roosters all over. If you don’t know, roosters crow all day and all night long, not just at the crack of dawn. They never stop! And the first few weeks were hell, and I constantly thought about moving to keep from going bonkers. And if you ever lived next to a major highway or freeway with the constant loud drone of trucks and cars, you know that your initial days were not peaceful.
But, after time you didn’t notice the traffic and I didn’t notice the roosters. Why? Psychologically, you and I build up a repeated pattern of ignoring them and that pattern becomes a powerful habit, to the point where the sounds don’t enter your awareness.
The same thing happens with commercials. If you simply repeat the magician’s words enough times, your audience’s pattern of ignoring them will grow so strong that they literally won’t register the sounds in their consciousness.
Why then were Smith’s 65 sales closes effective? Three reasons:
- The marathon in which they occurred was experienced as a single, continuing, event rather than a collection of unchanging, repeated appeals
- She varied the stories accompanying each close and the way she said the close itself, “Will you buy a bond?”, which even astonished listeners at the tremendous variety she used in saying those words. Each variation finds a new vulnerability in listeners. (“Will you buy a bond?” “Will you buy a bond?” “Will you buy a bond?” “Will you buy a bond?” “Will you buy a bond?”)
- She stood out against the background instead of fading into it as the one consistent element throughout the marathon (which included news, updates, other radio programs, and commercials)
Deeply analyzed in the book’s eye-squinting footnotes, you find the exact answer about repetition with variation:
“What is wanted is something to break down the opposition. So far as propaganda is concerned, the requirement is to repeat with variations each time in the accompanying comment or circumstances, and each time so to shape the accompaniments that some new welcoming tendency stands a chance of being brought into play. So, gradually, the piling up of tendencies favorable to acceptance overcomes the opposition, while yet, a certain quality of opposition being still present, the communication does not lose all interest and become a bore.”
Since that exact answer is in SociologySpeak, let me translate:
Vary the way you close, so that you emphasize something new, just like we did above with “Will you buy a bond?”. Then, your repetition snowballs for you, rather than either ticking them off or boring them to sleep.
And the result of all of this?
We’ve talked about building up tension and how people couldn’t stop listening. The repetition with variety, along with stories of buyer sacrifice (“she made me hock my wedding ring”) built up tremendous feelings of guilt and vicious self-judgment over time. Unable to get away, people’s defenses crumbled. They had to buy to stop the guilt trip and the unhealthy negative voice in their head that Kate Smith was fueling.
Mass Persuasion master tip:
Using repetition effectively
Please read this very closely. It is the Golden Key to using repetition to get people to act rather than ignore you during an event, especially a marathon:
The marathon did not consist of simple repetitions. Instead, the marathon used the classic formula of diversity (variety of stories and tremendous variety in saying the closing words) within unity (“Will you buy a bond?”) within an even greater unity (the marathon itself).
The variety in the repetition exploits the variety in the audience’s psychological weaknesses – like different weapons used on an army: some fall to arrows, others to cannon fire, others to the sword. Eventually, all of their defenses are defeated and they surrender their will to their emotional need to feel free.
When the will and the emotions are in conflict, the emotions always win.
In short, use repetition with variation.
The book quote mentions propaganda, but we’re talking about Mass Persuasion. What’s the difference and is it important? Find out — in our next post covering Mass Persuasion.
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