Mass Persuasion (part 19): Sincerity: Build up trust and they’ll believe

mass persuasion large crowd rock concert

How powerful is trust?

“Even her commercials are interesting and
she’s sincere about them”

In our last post, we looked at the strategy of how to get around the important need for testimonials, showing buyers happily using your product, and other forms of “proof.” How? By having your audience come through people you already know and have a close trusting relationship, and they in turn have the same relationship with their audience that comes to you.

As you discovered, this is exactly how my partners and I raised money by selling stock in one of our high-tech ventures to investors who did not understand the advanced technology behind what we were doing. They gladly bought although they didn’t know what they were buying.

And you saw how one of your fellow readers accidentally unveiled the near-magical power contained in a relationship: it instantly converted a Suspicious Skeptic into a True Believer.

By being introduced by a friend (that is, someone who trusts you mightily), you don’t need to provide proof to build up trust. You’ve already been pre-sold to your new customer and start with a high level of trust that is simply transferred through existing relationships.

Today, we dig how you build up that trust so they believe you . . .

If you have any doubt that anything from the 1940s has any relevance to our high-tech online world of today, take a peek at this quote:

“I don’t believe all the stuff I hear over the radio. That’s for commercial purposes. You might be able to fool the country people and the backwoods people, but not the city people.”

Sound familiar?

In a world of over-the-top advertising claims today (and back in the 1940s, this was just as a big factor for buyers as it is today), audiences are skeptical.

The solution . . .

Sincerity: Build up trust and they will believe

You need to be a credible seller. World War II bond seller Kate Smith was credible; she was like a mother figure. In the same way that you’d believe your father, mother, brother, or sister, a personality who you have a trusting relationship with cuts through this skepticism you read in that quote above, if they bring credibility and sincerity. Through the years of building up trust, audiences will believe them specifically when the same masterful words uttered by someone else will fall on deaf ears.

Her listeners agreed:

“You know what she says is true.”
“Even her commercials are interesting and she’s sincere about them, too.”

Her commercials?! That’s how powerful trust is.

In an audience that was insecure and ticked off by the deceit, double-dealing, and distrust of sellers (just like audiences today), Smith was a spiritual oasis. They were willing to believe.

In short, it will you take a bit of time of consistent, ongoing work to build that credibility that automatically turns into trust, but it’s definitely worth the effort.

But wait! That’s not all! You also get another way to build sincerity:

Eliminate obvious self-interest

Kate Smith furthered convinced them of her sincerity and lack of ulterior motives by doing her sales marathons without pay, a huge symbolic statement in a country that is based on commercialism. Working without pay translated into working for what was deeply important to her, and her words therefore were coming from the heart.

The result? Like a master alchemist who knew the mystical secret, she turned lead into gold:

She changed a monetary transaction (cash for a financial instrument called a bond) that went to support a good cause into the good cause itself.

And as you learned four posts ago, you can seriously eliminate any sense of obvious self-interest by simply giving something valuable away for free. Kate Smith was giving her time and her heart for something she cared about, like a volunteer at an NGO (non-profit).

Yet, I haven’t even gotten to the biggest, baddest, greatest factor of all – the Mother of all factors that singlehandedly — and without extra effort — built the iron-clad proof for all segments of her radio audience (regular, occasional, and non-listeners) that Kate Smith was sincere and not motivated by any self-interest whatsoever:

By merely doing the marathon – by merely participating – by merely taking action — Kate Smith devoured the seeds of doubts her regular radio show listeners had about her sincerity like a swarm of locusts.

In fact, we can even see the marathon’s effect on sincerity over time — through the before-and-after photography of buyer surveys:

“Was she interested in publicity for herself?” Drops like a stone just by doing the marathon:
	Did not hear marathon	Heard marathon
Regular listeners Occasional listeners Non-listeners	24% 21% 34%	4% 17% 21%

Previously, you learned about the importance of action and how “action speaks louder than words.” That’s what you’re seeing in the change in sincerity above: the action itself — rather than marketing and copywriting and testimonials and all of that — is what does the work.

IMPORTANT: Notice that in these posts on Mass Persuasion, we keep on coming back to:

how credibility consistently built up over time automatically leads to trust
how you need people to believe you, which they will if they trust you, and
how you can build that trust by eliminate your obvious self-interest by proving you’re interesting in your audience: by taking the specific action of consistently and continuously giving away something valuable for free.

Can you start to see how powerful Mass Persuasion truly is?

Can you see how you can easily build the same kind of relationship with your audience that you have with your family, significant other, and closest friends — a relationship based on rock-solid trust?

Can you see how this rock-solid trust eliminates the need to always give testimonials, show your product in action, a mountain of bonuses just for ordering today, all backed by an extremely detailed risk-free money back guarantee?

This is the same way my partners and I sold shares of stock in one of our high-tech ventures, getting investors who didn’t even know how to check their email to hand over hundreds of thousands of dollars when they didn’t have the slightest clue what the company did and didn’t even want to know because it was too technically confusing.

Sure, you’ll recognize familiar marketing terms like: testimonial, product demonstration, risk-free offer, money-back guarantee, ask for the order, relationship marketing, bonuses, and more.

It’s not what Mass Persuasion does, since what it does the same as everyone else.

It’s how Mass Persuasion masterfully orchestrates these to tap into buyers’ existing dominant emotions and let buyers come to their conclusion that they can trust you because without a doubt they know you are sincere.

Mass Persuasion creates an orchestrated symphony of marketing. And that makes all the difference.

We’ve talked harnessing the nearly omnipotent power of themes before: the importance of your overall theme of sacredness and your specific themes like sacrifice, participation, and competition.

Next time, let’s dig into exactly how to tap into your buyers’ emotions using Mass Persuasion. As an example to drive the point home, we’ll use a definitely necessary but definitely not sexy product: printing.

In our next post covering Mass Persuasion.

C O M I N G S O O N :
it’s get better, way better

And in several months or so, we’ll do a mini-marathon post series to help you really exploit this first finding — trust through credibility — to your advantage — from building trust to getting people in pain to suspend their suspicions and believe in you — when we examine another rare first edition book from my private library: The True Believer: thoughts on the nature of mass movements, written in 1951 by Eric Hoffer, a longshoreman, who examined Islam and Christianity, Adolph Hitler, and Joseph Stalin. And it will give you insight into how financial bad boys like Bernard Madoff can get people in charge of tens of billions of bank and investment fund dollars to place their bets with them. And if you’re in online internet marketing (or multilevel marketing before that), have you ever noticed the near-religious fervor that some organizations or marketing gurus are able to create in their downline, affiliates, or list names (their believers)? Amway has been called a secular religion for good reason. You’ll find out the exact reasons why.

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