Seizing the emotional high ground:
“Your purchase uplifts mankind”
In our last post, we looked at the mystical power of trust and sincerity that even gets people to say:
“Even her commercials are interesting and she’s sincere about them”
Remember, Kate Smith sold $480 million dollars in today’s money in 18 hours — in 65 short messages. But she didn’t do it by shouting, “Buy Now! 50% off everything! Sale ends soon.”
Instead of using simple repetition –
which often makes people bored or irritated, or moves them to act by leaving instead of buying, or even trains them to consciously ignore the message so they literally don’t hear it anymore –
– she tapped into their emotions.
I know you may probably heard or already know very well that in selling a product, you can discuss the features (power lock windows) and the benefits (easily roll up your windows and keep your children safe).
And you can help the prospect project themselves into currently owning your product with sensory language, such as:
“Just see yourself as you roll into the supermarket parking lot and in a mere five seconds, silently roll up and lock all four car windows airtight with the gentlest tap on one master button built in your left armrest. You’re in control, and your new 2009 GM BankRuptor awaits your every command.”
Ultimately, whether buyers are looking at products or services, everyone wants to have an emotional experience. Why do people go to the movies or hop on theme park rides?
To experience emotions.
And you tap into these emotions using themes, using an overall theme of sacredness.
Sacredness? In selling frosty-cold financial products like stocks and bonds? Can you imagine: “When you buy US Treasury bills today, you are restoring mankind’s hope and faith that there will be a greater future. That the collective efforts of billions of people over centuries will mean something significant. Have you done your part today to restore hope and faith: Will you buy a T-bill today?”
So, let’s make sure you can tap into your buyers’ emotions by using themes:
How to tap into emotions using Mass Persuasion:
Start with your overall theme and work to find two things:
- The emotional high ground: Kate Smith’s scriptwriters made bond buying a sacred act. How do you do this with your products or services? (We cover this below.)
- The emotions of suspicion and distrust behind the face of every buyer: they are afraid they are being manipulated and exploited for commercial purposes. How do you acknowledge their suspicion and distrust, and turn that into believing and trusting you? (We cover this below and in prior posts: What is Credibility and Credibility: how to build yours.)
The emotional high ground:
Kate Smith’s scriptwriters made bond buying a sacred act. How do you do this with your products or services?
- You remove your own benefit from the picture by not mentioning it
- Instead, you talk about how your buyer’s purchase supports a higher purpose (buying is a sacred act. Take a look at the Treasury bill example above.)
- That higher purpose can be anything, such as:
- themselves: personal or spiritual growth
- their families
- communities – business, social, physical
- industries, activities, and organizations – you can elevate something, such as engineering or mathematics, to mystical levels above the common human experience
Let’s now jump into our example:
“Your printing purchase changes the future for the better”
Instead of looking at an obvious example that uses sacredness — fund-raising for religious or humanitarian purposes — let’s bring it into the commercial, profit-oriented world, at the fictional SynthaPress Printing Corporation.
First, you remove your own benefit by not mentioning it. This means you don’t even have the “I’m doing good” self-congratulating tie-in with a charity which gets a percentage of your sales; the benefit to you as a good person is much too obvious.
Second, you introduce the higher purpose in your overall theme: the great significance of printing to improving mankind through change. You can do this in an informative yet entertaining historical series.
Third, within your overall theme of “Printing is Significant,” you introduce your specific themes and focus only the positive aspects, such as how printing:
- increased communication speed and quality
- freed hundreds of millions worldwide from the tyranny and slavery of ignorance through improved education worldwide
- upheld fair and just governments and leaders while overthrowing the unjust ones
- remains even more powerful and impacting today to bring about change, as the online world sees fewer physically printed documents — those few remaining printed documents carry a tremendous impact and effect by being physical
Over time, as you build your credibility and trust, the overall theme changes in your audience’s mind. It began as “printing is significant.” It transforms into “my printing supports an important activity to everyone. My purchase helps determine the future direction of mankind. My purchase can change the future for the better.”
You can use this series for generating leads, providing printed high quality versions of the series to interested prospects, perhaps as a booklet or as series of postcards or small posters.
Be extremely careful here: remain on the sacred high ground by keeping your light touch: don’t shift into overaggressive lead data collection that dims your angelic glow and tarnishes your saintly halo (such as a field that effectively says, “When’s the best time for our super-salesperson to call you and make you feel uncomfortable when they ask you for your order”) or follow-up techniques and all the other things that scream, “The series was a trick to eventually separate me from my dollars!”
Why is the light touch — rather than heavy-handed sales technique — so important?
The emotions of suspicion and distrust:
turn that into believing and trusting you
You saw before how buyers, like abused dogs, feel suspicious of sellers who approach them.
And you got a deep understanding of how to turn that into belief and trust in you.
But it’s important to point out some of it now, since you want to keep yourself firmly planted on the high ground in selling your SynthaPress printing products.
Mass Persuasion focuses on creating trust from believability, which only happens over time like a solid, close friendship that began with two total strangers.
Recognize that behind the face of every buyer lies the emotions of suspicion and distrust of this vague aching and dull pain: they are being manipulated and exploited for commercial purposes.
Manipulation and exploitation are like the polluted air we breathe: it’s everywhere and unavoidable.
Governments manipulate and exploit us constantly. (All of them except our own, of course.)
Big companies do it, too, especially with incredible-sounding promotions backed by fine print conditions that often break the very laws put into place to protect us because these same companies pulled off fast ones in the past and got caught red-handed.
Small businesses and their owners and representatives do it — especially when they are extensions of big companies, such as franchises — and sometimes those small business owners are contractually obligated to refrain from doing the right thing, even if they feel morally obligated.
Even those we consider friends or close acquaintances take advantage of us, if they know our vulnerabilities and especially when they themselves are seasoned in the practice of the dark arts of manipulation and exploitation.
The answer to all of this: build trust through credibility, and take action to prove you are sincere.
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 — eliminate your obvious self-interest by proving you’re interested 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 it does the same thing 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.
With this diference, you can even get people to come back and buy again, like stuffed-to-the-gills diners who open up the menu and order another plate.
We’re talking about the people who claim they already did their part for the cause, that they “already gave at the office” and don’t want to buy anymore.
Next time, let’s look at how exactly to get your customers to order again — by shifting the standards of acceptability.
In our next post covering Mass Persuasion.
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