How much is enough?
Whatever you decide:
In our last post, we looked at how to tap into your buyers’ emotions using your overall theme of sacredness by looking at a printing business that declared “Printing is Signficant.”
Many marketers, and especially many sales people, assume that when someone says they already bought, you don’t have a chance of a sale. After all, it’s like coming up to a restaurant diner who’s finishing their dessert, sipping on their capuccino while belching politely into their napkin, and signaling the waiter to bring the check.
How do you get your stuffed-to-the-gills diner to open up the menu and order another plate? By either establishing or shifting the standard of what’s acceptable.
How did the war bond marketers help people
know how much to sacrifice?
They established a standard of social acceptability:
The marketers (the US government) decided that 10% of your income was the expected level you needed to allocate to buying war bonds. And they repeated this expectation for years to make it the standard.
The result was that, in establishing a socially acceptable level of buying, the 10% just felt “right” to people.
But remember: 10% is a somewhat arbitrary number picked out a hat. It could have been 5% or 25%. What felt right to these buyers was that:
- They were doing what was expected — further bond purchases then become extraordinary and beyond the call (extra credit, bonus points, grade of A+) and a great source of fueling their self-esteem
- They measured up to the standard — and reaffirmed their value to society
- Their actions were socially acceptable — which relieved them of their own sense of guilt and selfishness over not sacrificing enough
and, most importantly:
- They legitimately could protect themselves against the fear of social attack and being thrown out of their social circles
IMPORTANT: Some of humankind’s greatest needs are the need to belong (social connection) and the need to be appreciated (love). Establishing a standard that people can measure up to serves to satisfy both of their needs and to protect themselves from losing those.
Once a social standard is set, it becomes a legitimate “objective and outside third-party” measure of each person’s conduct. (And it becomes emotional ammunition in Mass Persuasion to get others to buy more, either through marketer-to-buyer communication or, more effectively, through their peer groups.)
Psychologists, economists, and sociologists — marketing is based on these — have known for a long time that conforming with the norm helps people eliminate anxiety and strain and provide a comfortable sense of security. Marketing uses social standards so people can easily make a “safe” and emotionally comfortable choice, not necessarily the technically and rational best choice.
Remember: people buy emotional experiences.
In general — and Mass Persuasion is about marketing people in general rather one-to-one, which is sales – people readily hand over their freedom, possessions, and responsibility for making decisions for themselves to “authority” in exchange for emotional security, a sense of belonging, and the comfort of following easy directions as part of the herd. (“Just tell me what to do.”)
Creating social standards, then establishing them through repetition, is an important step in getting people to hand over their freedom, possessions, and responsibility for making decisions for themselves — all of which mean money for you.
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 all of this 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.
That was the 1940s, Dude.
Do you have a more recent example?
Sure: we’ve seen this for this decades in the financial markets, through established standards for investing in stocks (although this socially accepted standard is crumbling quicker than a sugar cube in boiling water due to the global financial meltdown).
Generally, this socially acceptable standard for investing goes like this, although my percentages might be off a bit:
- Allocate 50% of your investment portfolio to stocks
- Allocate 40% of your investment portfolio to bonds
- Allocate 10% of your investment portfolio to cash
After decades of hynoptically hearing these percentages repeated from experts through their books, newsletter, radio programs, TV interviews, and on investment company and advisor websites, the masses have been persuaded to follow this as the standard. To do anything else would be to risk catastrophe: to take their investment life into their own ignorant hands.
And like the 10% standard for war bonds, 50% for stocks is a nice, round, easy-to-remember percentage: it’s half. To establish a standard, make sure it’s easy for your buyers.
Even as the stock market has wiped out trillions of dollars of investors’ wealth, the huge mutual fund company Fidelity continues to sing those percentages in their mass persuasion: “half of your portfolio goes into stocks.” And most of the other investment companies and advisors haven’t changed their tune, either.
Why? Because it’s going to take them years to establish a new socially acceptable standard. In the meantime, they continue with what has always worked for them, what already is deeply imbedded in the marketplace, then they just weave in the new theme of the group (“it happened to all of us, and we’re all in this together”) so that you feel comfortable when the fresh money you invest today that loses value tomorrow (“I just followed the standard – it wasn’t my fault that GM went bankrupt, then went bankrupt again”).
Marketing using established standards
to separate customers from their wallets:
Casinos
Most casino games have cold, rational, probabilities for paying out winnings. The casino industry didn’t establish them – they are inherent in the games themselves. That provides the House with more than one edge. They have two:
First, casinos can point to the objective and outside third-party established standards. Sorry, but we didn’t make the odds.
Second, it gives the illusion of hope of winning, because you feel like you’re playing against an established standard: probability.
And that’s the trick:
- Long run illusion: you substitute this seeming rational element for the fact that these odds are calculated over the long run AND over the long run the casino wins (because they build in their sales commission by lowering the payout).
- Short run reality: you’re playing in the short run, where the long term probabilities don’t apply to each roll of the dice or turn of a card: each one is a new event totally or somewhat unconnected with prior dice tosses or card turns.
That’s like making the same mistake of looking at 100 people sitting in prison on Death Row: at any given moment, they’re all winning (since all 100 people are alive). But in the long run, the “Big House” wins: it has the edge.
Social standards guide people in knowing what to do, and give them the promise of social protection for having done so.
By either establishing a social standard of acceptability where there’s none, or shifting the existing standard higher (as Kate Smith did), you can get your stuffed-to-the-gills diners to go back, open up their menus, and order up another plate of food.
How powerful is this? Take a look at her results from those who had no intention of buying whatsoever, which can be yours, too:
- Those suspectible to buying: 38% of all buyers
- Those unwilling to buy: 4%
In short, 42% of her buyers had no intention of buying, but they bought!
In two weeks, I will show you exactly how Kate Smith powerfully got her diners to open up their menus and order again. You will read her exact words, you will see the exact sequence, you will see exactly how she taps into their emotions.
You will quickly see that, in the hands of a morally reprehensible person, it is manipulation on a grand scale.
Mass Persuasion is like a weapon, like a loaded gun. A gun itself is not evil. You need to use it for good and commit no harm.
Therefore, before I reveal the exact step-by-step structure used to get people to buy who had absolutely no intention of buying — 42% of Smith’s buyers — you need to read a “Grave and Important Warning” about Mass Persuasion.
In our next post covering Mass Persuasion.
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