So here’s a quick rundown of seven things every scholar should know about copywriting.

Get Over It

First, though, I need to have a private word with you scholars. For pretty much all of my adult life, I’ve been a scholar and a researcher. Until I discovered Seth Godin, I thought “marketing” was a dirty word. It’s not. Whether you are trying to sell soap, yourself, your cause or your religion, knowing some basic marketing and copywriting principles will help you down the road. It all boils down to a simple question: would you rather have your ideas rejected or ignored because they are misunderstood as a result of poor presentation or rejected on their merits?

A good copywriter focuses on one thing: getting the reader to take the desired action, whether that’s buying a product, donating to the Sierra Club, voting for their candidate, joining their religion or signing up for their newsletter. There is both a pull and a push at work:

• Push: all the reasons that the reader would benefit from taking the desired action (look younger, save the planet, save your soul)
• Pull: moving all obstacles out of the way (money-back guarantee, simple and secure payment, free trial).

Good copywriting demonstrates benefits and removes obstacles. Applications for fellowships or grants need to meet those same goals, but most scholars are woefully bad at it. I’m not saying I’m particularly good, but here are a few things you might learn.

WIIFM — What’s in it for me?

Copywriters know that their prospect always has one question in mind: what’s in it for me? I was shocked to get a letter of recommendation that suggested that the course would be good for a student’s curriculum vitae. What vested interest do I have in padding someone’s resumé? More particularly, why would I want to pad that particular student’s resumé? What I want to hear is that the applicant can do the work and there is a very high probability that the student will actually take those skills and put them into practice. I think that’s fairly obvious for any similar course, especially one that offers a stipend to all participants as ours does.

Always stay focused on the benefit to the institution, grant agency or hiring committee. The benefit to the applicant is only relevant insofar as it also furthers the mission of the institution. In this case, the Meeter Center and I want to train researchers, so saying it will benefit the student by preparing her to conduct archival research is a benefit to both of us, but saying it will make the student look better or improve the student as a person is not relevant.

As an applicant, the key is to ask yourself “Why are these people taking applicants and offering money? What do they get out of it?” Before anything else, try to answer that question. You may not be able to answer it perfectly. You may see multiple reasons. You may see the wrong reasons, but at least you’ve figured out some reason. Anything in the application that does not specifically demonstrate that the course won’t be wasted on you, can be cut.

Features and benefits

This is the oldest saw in copywriting: focus on benefits, not features. Let’s say we’re talking about a car.

• Feature: rear-seat side impact airbags.
• Benefit: keep your children safe.

It is important to mention the feature, obviously. Not to do so would leave you with vague, vapid promises — “Keep the kiddies safe. Drive a SomeCar.” The more common error, though, is to list off features without saying why anyone should care. It’s essential to avoid that in grant and fellowship applications.

• Features:
  • Person: smart, well-read, engaging, excellent language skills, good writer, hard-working, drop-dead good looking and smells good too
  • Project: never been done before, studies the interaction of X and Y, examines the Blank Protocols.
• Benefits:
  • Person: will do valuable work, will put the money/class to good use, will make your institution look good
  • Project: will solve the long-standing question/problem of X, will allow future scholars to answer long-standing question, etc.

If you find yourself listing a “feature” and it doesn’t have a “benefit” to follow up on it, then either don’t list the feature, or figure out what the benefit is and make sure you highlight the benefit. Features only exist in copywriting to make your benefit claim credible. If you’re listing a feature that isn’t necessary to make the benefit claim credible, you’re wasting paper, ink and time.

Be Specific and Concrete

Every writing teacher, whether teaching copyrwriting or fiction, will say to be specific. How specific? This is where copywriters have an advantage. They can test two different ads, one that says “resulted in a 104% gain in efficiency” against “more than doubled efficiency” and see which one performs better. We can’t do that for grant and fellowship applications, but we know that in general, specificity beats generality and I’m surprised at how vague and general many applications are.

Let’s say you’re answering the question “Why do you want to take this course?” Consider three applicants. They each answer the question like this:

1. I’m hoping to do research for my dissertation on the price evolution of poker chips and that research will likely require use of manuscript sources.
2. My dissertation research on the price evolution of poker chips in Lyon from 1500-1800 will require me to read council registers and account books in the S series in the Archives départementales in Lyon
3. During my preliminary research for my project on the price evolution of poker chips, I came across many key documents the archives in Lyon that I was unable to read. In order to finish the project, I need better paleography skills.

Number one is actually already a lot better than many of the applications I got. I understand that from grad students who may not have refined their research area yet, but a faculty member sent in an application basically saying he was a nice guy who thought the course would be interesting. Not good enough. But even considering the pretty good choices above, who seems more likely to put the course to good use? Who is more likely to work really hard?

If you are one of those younger scholars who may not have carved out a research area yet, you can still mention work that you admire and plan to emulate.

Avoiding Doubt

The first example above also sows doubt (only “hoping”?). It’s not by accident I gave that as an example. One applicant, by all appearances an excellent candidate with an MA and some teaching experience to her credit, wrote: “I am wanting to pursue a doctorate degrees in hopes of studying….” Any writing teacher would see the problem there. The average copywriter would grab his chest and gasp for breath.

Sadly, there is no worse training for dynamic writing than academia. Academia is perhaps the only domain where there is no penalty for being boring, but there is a harsh penalty for being imprecise. Academic writing demands attenuation and hedges — “We believe that in some cases it appears possible for a limited number of quatloos to transform into looquats given the right conditions.” A sentence like that would hardly raise an eyebrow in academia, whereas you would get attacked from all sides if you said “Quatloos transform into looquats.”

Copywriters, however, are always thinking about how the reader will respond and what possible interpretations and emotional reactions the reader might have. “I’m wanting… in hopes of” and other hedges make a very serious applicant appear risky, uncertain and hesitant. Is this person really committed to learning what I’m teaching? Do we really want to give a stipend to someone who is “hoping” to use the course knowledge?

Be Honest

One thing that surprised me when I started reading marketers and copywriters is the value they place on honesty. The calculation is simple:

1. Every item returned costs enough to negate 5–10 sales. Making claims that you can’t back up will cost too much.
2. It’s usually cheaper to make a second sale to an existing satisfied customer than to go out and find a new customer,  and nothing creates dissatisfaction like being lied to.

Those two things being true, deceiving the customer ends up being costly for anyone except fly-by-night outfits that want to make a quick buck and get out. All that to say that you shouldn’t claim to have come across key documents in the archives if you haven’t actually been there. Credibility matters and a single manifest exaggeration raises questions about the credibility of everything else.

Most of our applicants say their French is “fluent”. I have to say, the question is very poorly worded on the application, so I don’t blame them for answering that way. That said, it does raise questions when someone says that his French is fluent and then lists four semesters of college French as the sum total of his French training. What else is exaggerated? Again, this makes accepting the applicant seem like a risk.

Risk Reversal

The classic example of risk reversal in marketing is the guarantee. I’m afraid of spending all that money on a new car and taking the risk that I’ll be stuck with a dud. So the manufacturer says “You’re right. That’s a lot of risk for you, an individual. Let me take on the risk. You buy that car, and I’ll take care of all repairs for the first 5 years or 60,000 miles, whichever comes first. Will you buy it now?”

Obviously, scholars can’t fully reverse a risk in that way — you can’t offer to pay back your fellowship if you haven’t successfully completed your dissertation within six years. But you can address risk. We had one first-year grad student some years ago who had a mixed letter of recommendation. The faculty member had good things to say about the applicant, but had some reservations about specific weaknesses. The professor was honest with us and with the student, though, so he was able to say “I know that professor X has doubts about my ability in this area. I will, however, commit to work extra hard in order to make up for that deficiency”.

We took him. The course was hard for him, as expected, but he seemed to get a fair bit out of it and is now an advanced PhD candidate studying under one of the top scholars in the field. The result is that the professor retained her credibility. Next time I see a letter from her, I’ll know it means exactly what it says (see “Be Honest” above). But she gave the student a fighting chance to state how he would compensate for weaknesses. Not exactly a classic risk reversal, but it gave us a lot more to go on than a vague application with all the usual platitudes. I’m fairly sure that some better-qualified people were rejected that year, but the combination of specificity, honesty and risk mitigation in the application got that candidate through the door, even though we tend to accept students with stronger language skills than that particular student.

What’s Your Story?

Seth Godin says in All Marketers Are Liars that he really wanted to call it All Marketers Are Storytellers, because he believes that effective marketing requires a compelling and authentic story. The story is a lie only in the sense that any story, whether about events that actually happened or a work of fiction, is a lie — all stories leave things out and tell the tale selectively. Not surprisingly, the second edition is called All Marketers Tell Stories… Why Authenticity Is the Best Marketing of All.

A grant application should also tell a story. That story is not your biography or a prose version of your resume. Notice that under “Be Specific”, example three is a story. There’s an arc to it. “Young student goes to Lyon, excited about research project on poker chips. Confronted with documents he can’t decipher, he looks for help and finds my course, just the thing he needs in his quest for arcane knowledge and scholarly bliss. If only there’s a spot for him.” A story need not be quite as personal as that, but you need a story that helps answer the question why you?

A Last Word

It’s not like getting into my class is a super rough competition. The financial award is only $500 for the two weeks and we accept over half the applicants, most of them in the summer after the second or third year of grad school (though we often admit one undergrad and one or two faculty members). Most of these students are soon going to be facing much stiffer competitions, like applying for Fulbright grants to do research in France, which this year had 25 slots for 197 applicants (12.7%). That’s a lot better than the 13 slots for 405 applicants for the UK (3.2%), but I would say it’s a fair bet that out of 200 PhD candidates, it’s fairly likely that 25 will have decent natural or acquired copywriting skills. If you’re not one of them, you’re not going to France on a Fulbright no matter how good you are. Simple as that.

The Audience Problem

Like I say, not sure how much my thoughts are worth, since clearly they’re aiming at another audience. As in: I don’t do chat, IM, text messaging or any of that. I have long since trained my friends that I don’t often answer emails the same day I receive them (and long before I heard of Tim Ferris). The only immediate response thing I do is phone and skype and I only give my skype address out to family and a few friends and try to limit that. So it’s a bit hard for me to see how I would participate in Aardvark.

Conceptual level. The Big Idea level….

Here’s where they fail to make the sale to me and once they fail to make this sale, it’s an uphill battle for them to build trust through the rest of the process. The thing that is difficult for me to get around is that in my view there are personal and impersonal channels of communication.

• Personal: email, chat, skype, Facebook personal messaging, Twitter direct messagings. These are all messages from someone to me specifically and nobody else.
• Impersonal: Twitter posts, forums, Facebook wall, etc. These are messages that go from someone to the wide wide world. They’re not to me personally and uniquely.

I try to keep my personal channels free from impersonal messages. I have spamcatcher email addresses I use for things that blur the line, such as newsletters, mailing lists, signing up for accounts with BestBuy, Amazon and such. It strikes me that Aardvark is trying to use a personal channel (chat, email) to deliver an impersonal message. Yes, it is personalized — I only get messages that are supposed to be appropriate to me — but not personal, that is only to me. So that’s an adoption hurdle for me just as a concept.

The Registration Problem

They could overcome the personal/impersonal problem by using the registration process to allay fears and make the sale, but in my opinion, they do the opposite. Aardvark actually asks for quite a bit of information just to get started. I’m always skeptical of that and if I’m going to give away a lot of personal information about where I live and what I like, information that marketers will kill for (or worse yet, pay for). To give away all that information, it needs to meet one of two conditions, and preferably both:

• I need it. I may be a little uneasy about a site, but they have something that I absolutely need. I can’t do without it or I don’t want to do without it. They’re asking for personal details, but they’re offering something of great value.
• I trust them. There are a few sites that I trust implicitly with my information. I don’t give Amazon more than I have to, and they have only my spam catcher email address, but over the years they’ve built up great trust by not abusing my information. Often not-for-profits ask me to trust them because they have a great mission and are inherently good. Just like the government, if you catch my meaning. And if you don’t, that is to say that the government has been a poor steward of my privacy lately.

Typically, when I sign up for a new service that I don’t necessarily trust, I start by giving a spam catcher address and often a fake name (and almost always a fake birth date). If they want personally identifiable information,they need to build my trust either before, during or after the registration process.

I actually went all the way through the Aardvark registration process because I was asked by a friend to test it. I found it much too intrusive for a site that I had never heard of and knew little about. They have detailed information on how it works in theory, but nothing at all on what happens with my data, who can see it, and what control I would have over contact from people I know and don’t know.

An example

And then there are parts that I didn’t do anyway, even if invited by my friend…. Example: in general, I block all Facebook apps. I find all those snowballs fights, mafia, pirate stuff absurd and just a distraction to keeping in touch with family and friends. And I don’t collect Facebook friends. I try to keep it a personal channel as much as possible. If you we don’t have personal history together, you’re not on my Facebook list. When Aardvark offers to connect to Facebook, it’s still not clear to me exactly what’s going to happen, how it’s going to show up on Facebook, what my friends will see, and what exactly my benefit is. Ideally, exactly next to the Facebook connect button there should be a "what’s this?" or "how this works" link to a video that shows how it shows up in Facebook, what my friends will see, what benefits it offers and what hassles, if any, it imposes on my life. For me Facebook is a semi-personal channel and and I don’t want to annoy my friends and family that I keep in touch with via Facebook. Before I connect other data, I need to know that it won’t annoy my friends or affect my reputation.

A Broken Interface Erodes Trust

If I start setup, I can’t get to the welcome/home page any more or at least I couldn’t figure out how. It always brings me to the last spot I was in during setup like a pitbull that won’t let go. Clicking on the Aardvark at the top should always take me to the home page (a web interface standard that must not be broken), but it took me to the Facebook Connect page. So I’m not on Facebook (though I am) and it took me to the Add Categories page. But do I want to add categories? Again, are my categories and demographic info being shared with marketers? This type of behavior once again erodes trust. It makes the user feel trapped.

A recommendation

Think about every possible hesitation and catch me exactly at my hesitation point, like the suggestion to have an explanation about effects on privacy and such right next to the Facebook Connect button. I know of marketers who say they get much higher conversions when they have a popup link to their privacy policy right on the registration or order form, for example. That would help a lot.

Aardvark needs to think a bit more about the registration process if they want easy adoption beyond social networking true believers: what trust and social proof barriers might people perceive, figure out what the choke points are by keeping track of exactly where people abandon the process, figure out why, and take steps to fix it.

Online, trust is everything. In person, we have the idea that if something goes truly bad, we can go down to the business or local animal shelter or whatever and picket, protest, call the police, walk in with a lawyer. It doesn’t mean I trust those businesses. They often ask for a phone number at transaction time and I simply say no. But I do have the assurance that I can come down and find these people.

Trust is harder to build online and must be cultivated carefully and persistently at every possible occasion. There is no such thing as paying to much attention to building trust, and Aardvark needs to pay more attention.

Broadcast Mode

This is the "you" mode, meaning that when I tweet in broadcast mode, it’s about you and when you tweet in broadcast mode it’s about me. If you want lots of followers, you need to be in broadcast mode, which means your updates are for me, and in return you get a soapbox that matters. But if your updates are for you, you’ll never get that soapbox and that’s where most people trying to use Twitter for marketing mess up. They think they’re in broadcast mode, but really they’re in a me mode, which can’t be broadcast mode. Think of it like this: if the major TV networks ran nothing but ads, they wouldn’t really be broadcasting, except in the technical physcial sense of sending their waves out indiscriminantly in hopes that some intelligent alien civilization would receive their message and decide that earthlings should be easy to conquer, because few if any actual earthlings would be watching that drivel. People like me can’t even stand to watch network TV because I find a 7::1 ratio of "you" programming to "me" programming (ads) too low, but it seems to be good enough to draw a large audience. 1::7 is not, yet time and again I see Twitterers attempt to use it that way.

If I’m in broadcast mode, the tweet should be for your benefit seven times out of eight if I want to match the ratio of network television, which is aiming pretty damn low. One time in eight, it can be about "me", but that’s a maximum. If you’re in broadcast mode, you have to ask yourself three questions:

• Am I being interesting and helpful rather than self-promotional?
• Is this update for people who don’t know me except through Twitter?
• Am I really a big enough deal to be in broadcast mode?

Only a few people can meet the last criterion. Oprah is in broadcast mode no matter what, because people will follow her no matter what. Oprah could burp and post "Whoa! Onion rings for lunch. Biggest belch of my life!" and people would be around the photocopier saying "Did you hear about Oprah’s burp?"
"No, where’d you hear about that."
"It was on Twitter. You should follow her."

Everyone else with aspirations of broadcasting should try to meet the first two criteria in 90% of their posts. Badbanana is a good example of a broadcaster. My friend Rand posts a quote or two each day. That’s a perfect broadcast mode usage — he’s offering content that I want. I see this person regularly, but we aren’t networking via Twitter. I’m a consumer of his content and he’s a broadcaster.

Network Mode

Networking is the us mode and it sits between journal and broadcast. It’s not so much to get your word out there, but to get yourself out there and to connect with other people. You can test for network mode with a couple of questions:

• Can I think of a specific person other than myself whom this is for?
• Would I welcome @replies and reply back?

You might have one or six dozen people that you hope will enjoy this particular update, but if it’s six dozen, you can think of one right away who is among the six dozen. If you try to pull one name from your list of followers and draw a blank, you’re probably not in network mode. If you’re not reading and replying to your @replies, you’re definitely not in network mode, you’re broadcasting. Did you mean to broadcast? Is it interesting enough to broadcast? Most often, I’m in network mode, but a huge proportion of my network mode posts are for my wife.

Journal Mode

Journal mode is the opposite of broadcast mode. It’s the me mode. Sometimes I’m in journal mode. I just want to remember something so I tweet it and then mark it as a favorite. When I first started on Twitter, I was in journal mode most of the time, but I’ve been kind of surprised at how quickly this diminshed and how I was soon mostly in network mode and mostly writing for my first two followers (a friend and my wife). If you’re in journal mode, write what you want, when you want. Just don’t expect any followers. Unless you’re an astoundingly interesting person, if you spend too much time in journal mode, even your best friends will abandon you. If what interests you turns out to interest tons of other people, you may get lots of followers, but you may still be in journal mode. You can figure this out easily enough with these two questions:

• If I had no followers, would I write this anyway?
• Am I okay with everyone unfollowing me, even my spouse and best friend, because I’m so fricken boring?

If the answer is yes, you’re in journal mode. Why does it matter? A lot of people spend a lot of time in journal mode, but they would be disappointed if everyone quit following them. Their Twitter stream looks like this:

8:24: having my morning coffee
8:39: threw in a load of laundry. Decided to just mix whites and colors.
8:55: hmm. ruined my white shirt.
9:26: going out shopping for new white shirt.

If you plan to mostly use Twitter in journal mode, updates like that are just fine, but it strikes me that most people with streams like that can’t answer yes to both tests questions. That means they’ve mistaken which mode they’re in. In fact, they want to be in broadcast mode or network mode and they have to think about their updates in those terms.

Sometimes it’s not that different. Today, I tweeted about my morning tea, but I tweeted because I had made my morning tea on my new Trail Designs Ti-Tri stove, which might interest backpackers who care about ultralight camp stoves (significant number of my followers) and I wanted to thank Rand for the stove. So really this was mostly network mode. To some extent it’s also a broadcast mode, since I want to tell everyone about this stove, but realistically, I was looking to tell people I know about the stove and perhaps engage them in discussion about it. So that’s more network than broadcast or journal mode.

Listen Mode

This is an interesting one. In listen mode, you’re reading your stream to see what people you follow have to say, you’re doing searches for stuff that interests you, or you’re actively soliciting opinions. In other words, you might be posting updates in listen mode. So listen mode is not the opposite of broadcast, but might be a complement. Ultimately, though, it’s a better complement to network mode. In many if not most cases, the point of listening is to make contact with others. I might just tweet out "Does anybody know a good cobbler in Berkeley?" A merchant like Zappos with tons of followers might write an update actively soliciting feedback about a change on the website. So it might be conversational, but it’s not social per se. The goal isn’t to make personal connections to people, it’s to get their opinions. But the logical result of listen mode is often to make a connection as a secondary consequence. The test for listen mode is simple:

• Am I trying to gather information or opinions?

A yes answer means you’re in listen mode, even if you’re sending out an update.

Why It Matters

So who cares? Well, if you’re in journal mode, you may be holding yourself back on what you really want to say and record because you think you’re in broadcast mode. More commonly, though, people want to use Twitter for connecting with old friends, connecting with new people who share some interest, or marketing of some sort. In the first case, you’ll likely want to stay mostly in network mode, with some journal mode because your old friends actually care. In the second case, you want to be mostly in network mode. If you’re marketing, be clear on whether you’re trying to really connect with your customers, or just broadcast to them. It may evolve over time. When you first start, maybe you can connect with all of your customers, but over time, you’ll be forced into broadcast mode because you can’t really network with 20,000 people. But remember that broadcast mode is not advertising mode. There is no advertising mode on Twitter yet, but I see so many marketers who mistake broadcast mode for advertising mode, and think that broadcast is the me mode, not the you mode, which is why Twitter does nothing for them except waste everyone’s time.

This is the third part of the series on Weapons of Influence, based on Robert Cialdini’s book Influence, Part 1 discussed the principle of reciprocation; Part 2 covered the principle of commitment and consistency.

Social Proof

Birds of a feather, flock together. Or so we’ve been told. In other words, we like to be around people like us and we like to be like them. We also look to others for cues as to how to act. This explains a famous incident in New York where 38 witnesses heard a woman’s scream for help and did nothing. The failure of others to respond is a clue to us that the situation is not serious, we don’t need to respond either. Unfortunately, that cue, often reliable, cost the woman her life in this case. It turns out that you’re much better off if one person sees you being attacked or sees smoke coming from under a door than if a crowd of people do. If you do find yourself in a bad situation and there’s a crowd, use the word "help", look someone in the eye, point at that person and say "You, sir, in the red shirt, please help." General pleas to a crowd tend to go unanswered until one person responds, then the social proof works in the other direction and others will jump in to help.

The effects of social proof go beyond what I would have guessed. For example, in the months after a highly publicized suicide, the rate of airplane and automobile fatalities goes up significantly. This has been observed over long periods in large numbers and with numerous controls. Furthermore, if it’s a murder-suicide, it is more likely for multi-passenger airplane and multiple vehicle automobile fatalities to occur. If it’s a simple suicide, it correlated with single-victim crashes. After adding in numerous controls to the data, researchers were forced to conclude that these increased crashes were secret suicides. In a similar vein, after a heavyweight boxing championship bout, murder rates briefly rise around the country.

Back to how this is typically employed specifically to influence you, Cialdini looks at laugh tracks. Everyone polled says he or she hates canned laughter soundtracks on television shows. And yet, research shows that even though the canned laughter is obviously fake and we say we hate it, we find shows funnier if they include a laugh track because our subconscious mind can’t escape the fact that "others" are laughing so it must be funny. Similarly testimonials, even when it is obviously not a "natural" unsolicited testimonial, influences our decision to buy (and someday I have to tell the story of the Hansen’s soda lady trying to elicit a testimonial from me. I didn’t end up famous).

There are some crazy variations on the influence of social proof. For example, in a study by Kimberlee Weaver of Virginia Polytechnic University, the researchers created two conditions: one where people heard several people express a given opinion once each and one where one person expressed an opinion several times. It turns out, that in both cases, respondents judged opinions to be popular based on the number of times they had heard the opinion, but did not adjust for the fact that in some cases it was actually an opinion expressed repeatedly by one person [1]. So strangely, we sometimes perceive social proof when what we’re really seeing is one persistent loudmouth. That’s a good lesson if you really want to get something done in your community, but it’s not so good if someone just has a big enough budget to broadcast that message at you 12 times per day.

How to Say No. First, remind yourself that the testimonial you’re seeing is quite possibly faked. Large numbers of review sites on the web are laden with fake reviews. If you don’t have a reason to trust the testimonial, don’t. Second, don’t assume that if a lot of people are doing something, they must have information that you don’t (that’s not a person in a diabetic coma who needs help, but a drunk sleeping it off in the gutter). I must say, I don’t think Cialdini has read Kierkegaard, because he grappled with this question over 150 years ago with his famous ruminations on Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac, knowing that this was a solitary and unjustifiable act. Kierkegaard believed that only "the crowd" could have executed Christ and that if each person had had to face Christ alone, one at a time, he would never have been crucified. Kierkegaard argued that truth is subjectivity, not objectivity and that when you side with the crowd, you cannot know if your decisions are moral
or true. It doesn’t make them immoral, it’s just that you don’t know. So Kierkegaard’s philosophy implies a simple question: what would I do if I had to make this decision with nobody else around? What would I do if everyone else were doing the opposite of what they are doing now? In other words, if everyone wanted to honor Christ, would I still vote to crucify? If everyone was rushing around in a panic because there was smoke coming from under a door, would I calmly walk past? Are my actions conditioned by the crowd, or by my sense of what I should do in this situation? I think Cialdini finds it impractical to pose such questions every minute of the day and that may be why he doesn’t invoke Kierkegaard. I cite Kierkegaard because I like to pretend I’ve actually read Kierkegaard instead of just heard about him on Jeopardy. Don’t tell Alex Trebeck.

[1]"Everyone Agrees", but Melinda Warner, Scientific American Mind, Aug/Sept 2007 (vol. 18, no. 4), p. 13.

This is the second part of the series on Weapons of Influence, based on Robert Cialdini’s book Influence, Part 1 discussed the principle of reciprocation.

Commitment and Consistency

We like to be consistent and honor our commitments. As with reciprocity, under normal social circumstances, these are good traits, but they can be used against us. The famous experiment in this vein was the one where a research accomplice goes to the beach, lays down a blanket and puts out some personal items, including a radio. The accomplice then goes away. A few minutes later, another accomplice comes up and "steals" the radio. The experiment varies between two conditions. In one condition, the original accomplice gets up and leaves without saying anything. In the other condition, that orginal person specifically asks someone to watch his or her stuff. In the first case, four in twenty times the second accomplice could "steal" the radio without challenge. In the second condition, the "thief" was stopped and challenged nineteen out of twenty times. So the challenge rate went from 20% to 95% (p. 59). In other words, people had an overwhelming desire to be consistent with
their prior commitment.

These techniques can be remarkably subtle. For example, when a telemarketer calls it makes a huge difference whether that person says "How are you feeling tonight?" and gets an answer or says "I hope you’re feeling well tonight". The difference is that in the first case, the target has committed publicly to having a good evening (because the response is typically Fine, thanks"). Having publicly committed to doing "fine", it is very hard for the target to shirk on giving money to the earthquake victims in wherever who are so unfine and so in need of help. In the case where the caller simply says "I hope you’re feeling well this evening" no such commitment was extracted and the response rate was less than half (15 vs 33 percent) what it was when the caller asks a question.

Or how about this one. Toy companies advertise items in the runup to Christmas that they have no intention of stocking in sufficient numbers to meet demand. The unwitting parent commits to the present for the pleading child. Since the gift isn’t available, dad buys something of equivalent value for Christmas. But two months later, well there’s that item miraculously on sale. Dad goes and buys it because he feels a commitment to his kid. The toy companies know this and use this technique to prop up sales in January and February.

Companies use essay contests to make you feel good about them. Something as simple as copying out a message in your own handwriting can make you want to follow through on all the nice things you’ve said about that company. Public utilities have gotten people to save lots of energy simply by getting people to commit to saving energy.

It turns out that internalizing the commitment is key. When utilities hold a contest and say that those who save a certain amount of energy will be recognized, people do cut down on energy usage. But when they then call to renege and say the contest is cancelled, it turns out that energy usage falls even further. It seems that this is because people are actually less motivated when they feel they’re doing it for external reasons, and more motivated when they feel they are doing it for themselves. Being the kind of person who likes to be energy efficient is more powerful than being the kind of person who will reduce electricity usage in order to save $5.

There’s one further usage of the commitment and consistency principle that is worth noting. I’ve been taken in by subtler forms of this on many occasions. It’s called the lowball. Essentially, your sleazy used car salesman offers you a price that he knows he can’t really honor. You agree. When it comes time to sign the final papers, the accounting department finds an arithematic "error" or the sales manager notes an "error" in the trade-in value and the salesman sheepishly fesses up to his "mistake". But here’s the thing, you’ve committed to buying the car, and at this point it’s psychologically hard to turn that around, and you buy it anyway, rather than going down the street to where they have it for real at the initial price the salesman offered. The subtler version that takes me in is deciding to buy something that’s on sale. But then I drag my feet and miss the sale. Two months later, I miraculously own it anyway.

How to Say No. When we get caught in these situations, we typically know in our gut that we’ve been had. If the spidey sense starts tingling, ask yourself a simple question: "Knowing what I know now, would I make the same decision as if I had not committed myself?" So in other words, ask yourself, "If I had not shaken the hand of the sleazy used car salesman on the deal, would I buy the car at this price?" "If I had never seen that Marmot Precip jacket on sale, would I still be buying it today at full price?" The key here is to focus in on how you feel in the microsecond after you pose the question, before the rationalizations kick in. That is when you’re most honest with yourself or, as Cialdini says (p. 110): "Accumulating psychological evidence indicates that we experience our feelings toward something a split second before we can intellectualize it."

So here’s a rundown on the most potent weapons of influence.

Reciprocation

Someone offers me a gift and I want to offer a gift back. Someone does me a favor and I want to return it. That’s a good thing. When my neighbor Bruce offers to take me to the Fresno airport, two hours away, that makes me feel not just a bit obligated, but also like I must be a a pretty good person because why else would he offer? So that’s an obvious gain for me. But when he needs to go to Fresno and pick up his car and I help him out, I not only feel I’ve repaid my obligation, but I again feel like I must be a prett good person, because I’m doing something nice for a friend. I don’t think this is some atypical egomania, but rather pretty normal, though 99% of the time subconscious. We like to do for others and have others do for us and that makes our lives richer. So far so good.

But savvy salesmen and fund raisers will use that against us. The salesman offers us a free gift and we feel like we need to reciprocate by helping him out. So we buy something. You would be surprised how effective this is. When the Disabled American Veterans asked for money, they got an 18% response rate. When they sent out the same appeal with the "free gift" of address labels, they got a 35% response rate (p. 31). The Hare Krishna’s used giving a flower away to similar effect.

Even more subtle, someone asks something onerous of us: "Would you commit to spending one night per week at the homeless shelter for two years?" We say no, and the person then makes a concession: "Could you help out for three hours on Wednesday night?" Studies show that the concession tends to make us feel obligated and the compliance rate soars compared to a direct request to help out for three hours on Wednesday night. Another version is where you go in to buy a camera lens, pool table or an appliance and say you’re looking for a basic version. The salesman starts you off with the most expensive, premium version just to show you what real quality is. Then he backs off to the mid-priced version to show you something more in line with what you want. In this scenario, which invokes both the reciprocal concession and the contrast rule ($500 now seems cheap compared to the $5000 lens). This has commonly been shown to dramatically increase sales (p. 47).

So the truly savvy ask for something they never really expect to get anyway, and then "settle" for what is really their true goal in the first place.

How to Say No. Recognize these practices for what they are — neither gracious nor nefarious, but simple sales techniques employed for the purpose of making a profit. Consider the "free gift" like any other form of advertising. Just because a company spent 26 million dollars to show you an ad during the Super Bowl doesn’t obligate you to anything. Nor does a free home inspection or a free trial of hand lotion. It’s just business. Ask yourself, what would I do if I had not received the free home inspection from them? You would call around and get prices around town, and so you still should.

You’ve been receiving killer deals on great SmartWool gear. Now it’s time to return the favor. We need you, our pros, to share the wool with the world. The submitters of the TEN BEST Testiomonials (with photos) will each win a pair of Spring Gloves!

I recently wrote about how Dan Ariely says that you must not mix social norms and market norms. Within social norms, reciprocation is important, but you have to be careful not to turn it into a transaction. Once you’ve said “If you do this for me, I’ll do this for you,” you’ve essentially entered into a market exchange. Now that you’ve entered into an exchange, the question you naturally ask, is “Is this a good deal for me?” My first reaction to this come-on was “No.”

Why? The Smartwool appeal starts out by explicitly trying not just to obligate me, but by literally saying: “We did this for you, and now you have to do do this for us and this is how much we’ll pay you.” So they set it up as an exchange. But that’s a deal made after the fact — the original deal was they give pros great deals and pros who love the stuff naturally tell their clients that they are the most comfortable articles of outdoor clothing they’ve every worn (which they are). Then they get to my “pay” and when I saw the offer from Smartwool, my first thought was “All I get for giving one of the ten best Testiomonials (with photos!) is a pair of wool gloves?” I mean, the best writing skills out of thousands of people is worth a $30 pair of gloves?

Turns out the gloves sell for $70, but it was too late by the time I read that. For not much more money, they could have offered any one product except the Banff jacket and their worst case payout would have been a $130 product. I personally would have taken a $70 or $90 shirt. More importantly, though, it was just wrong-headed to approach it this way.

What should they have done? I would propose something like this:

Do you love Smartwool products? We need our Smartwool pros to go to our website and leave testimonials and tell the world how great Smartwool products are. Please take a minute and go to our website and leave a testimonial.

Does that work better? It could be hipper or funnier, but I think this is an improvement because if I break it down, here’s how I read it:

• “love Smartwool” — you don’t want anyone else leaving testimonials anyway, right?
• “We need our Smartwool pros” — i.e. we have a relationship, we’ve done something for you; invoke the reciprocity principle, but without turning it into a commercial exchange.
• “Please” — remember, this is a social norm, not a market norm, so we ask for a favor, we don’t offer a bribe.
• “take a minute” — this will be easy. We’re not asking for much considering that your one of our pros.
• “go to our website and leave a testimonial” — tell people what you want them to do. It’s the best way to get them to do it!

Maybe I flatter myself to think I can do better. They have, after all, gotten a lot of testimonials, but they didn’t get mine. Assuming I’m right, it saddens me to see an amazing company like Smartwool shoot themselves in the foot like that. I give testimonials all the time to Amazon Marketplace sellers simply for the asking, and I don’t love those products. I love Smartwool products and would happily give them a testimonial, but I couldn’t help but think “Is that all they’re offering?”

And by the way, go buy some Smartwool stuff. If you do outdoor sports, I’m confident it will be your favorite shirt, socks or whatever. It really is that good and I’m happy to say so here without any reward whatsoever.

In Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, Dan Ariely (from whom I cribbed the title this post) says that the allure of “free” is probably due to the fact that humans tend to make decisions based on avoiding loss and minimizing downside risk. Since “free” apparently has not potential for loss, it is overwhelmingly attractive, so much so that it blinds us to downsides that may be inherent in choosing the “free” option in a given situation.

A common downside of “free” is that it can be a collossal waste of time. When I lived in Berkeley, it astounded me every year when I would see students, full professors and dotcom professionals (this was pre-bust) line up around the block for a free ice cream cone. One year, I checked the line on my way to lunch and again on the way back, making note of how much progress the last people in line had made. I estimated that claiming the free cone took about two hours overall, possibly more if people walked any distance specifically for that purpose. Not counting the students, most people in that line were making over $30 per hour at their jobs but devoting two hours to “earn” a $3 cone. And even the poorest work-study student makes a lot more than $1.50 per hour. I haven’t tested my hypothesis, but I bet that if I offered those people $3 to walk downtown and stand on a sidewalk for two hours in return for $3, they would universally refuse. And yet, it is the exact same exchange, with the added bonus that they could buy coffee instead of ice cream with their $3 if that was their mood. So in fact, it’s actually a better deal. But who would take it? Probably nobody, though as I say, I haven’t tested it. Ariely has, though, in other circumstances and it seems likely that my instinct is correct. They would rightly think that they could do much better things with two hours and that $3 is a poor pay to give up that freedom. Yet there they are, every year, like lemmings.

Dan Ariely mentions another example of the high cost of free that has always galled me when I see it in use and when I see people fall for it. He mentions how marketers were, at one point, selling HD-DVD players by bundling in seven “free” HD format movies (not BluRay). The HD format was at the time already on the ropes and a bad buy at any price, but “free” brings in buyers. I’ve never understood this definition of free though and it used to get me sidelong looks from my boss when I delivered pizzas for Domino’s between college and grad school back in the mid-1980s. Customers would call and ask whether delivery was “free”. I just couldn’t bring myself to say yes, but answered by saying “It’s included in the price.” That invariably begged a follow-up: “Is it cheaper if I come pick it up?” Answer: “No, delivery is included in the price whether you take advantage of it or not.” But it’s not “free”, that is having no cost. At least I couldn’t see it as such, but my obstinance on that point confused customers and amused my boss. That sort of obstinancy on my part is the kind of thing that, if you ask my wife, makes me at turns difficult and exasperating, but occasionally interesting as well. On my good days.

One last story. At the height of the dotcom boom, I was at a job fair talking to the owner of a startup. She was telling me what a great work environment they had. “We celebrate your birthday with a cake and after six months you get a ‘free’ DVD player.” When asked about quality of life issues, she said “Well, we’re a startup. We work long hours and don’t take much vacation.” So after about 30 seconds I knew this woman was an idiot hoping to hire people who didn’t know how to multiply. Let’s assume they work 50 hours per week 50 weeks per year for a total of 2500 hours. So after 1250 hours, you get a DVD player worth, at the absolute most, $125. Probably half of that. So over 6 months, your bonus is worth about $0.10/hr. If you stay for a whole year, though, it means it’s only worth $0.05/hr. Apparently, some people are impressed with this. It made me think they were idiots, but I did take their “free” coffee mug.

My long-suffering wife laughs at me when I pull my Jethro Bodine routine and start cipherin’, but I always reply that I can’t figure out if something is a good deal until I run the numbers. But running the numbers, of course, only lets me compare one thing to another and, as I mentioned earlier, the contrast principle can be used against you too.

The most common scenario is where genius #1 pulls a gun and points it at genius #2.

Genius #2 says “You don’t have the balls. I dare you. Go ahead and shoot.” And genius #1 does.

Guess what? When you tell someone to do something, they often do it. Go Away. Get Lost. Go Ahead and Shoot. That’s today’s Mind Control Secret.

Sometimes getting people to do what you want is as easy as asking. Forward psychology is usually more effective than reverse psychology.

Please help. Click Here to Order. Buy Now. Put The Gun Down. Don’t Shoot.

P.S. Please take a moment to comment on this post!

We as humans tend to key on contrast and judge value by the relationship of one thing to another. If we can find a comparable, we always do. The way Starbucks got us to buy $4 cups of coffee (er, you, anyway, since I have never bought a coffee a Starbucks, but I have bought a double chocolate cream frappucino) was to make the experience difficult to compare to Dunkin Donuts. Euro-style tables, funny names, funky music, soft lighting, all contributed to an ambiance sufficiently different to make the comparison difficult. Tough economic times, have made people more willing to see coffee as coffee and refuse to pay for the experience (that and, of course, the fact that the Starbucks experience has become mundane itself, just like Dunkin’ Donuts).

We all know that from personal experience, but I have been seeing it a lot more clearly since reading Dan Ariely’s fun book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions and the interesting, though a bit more stodgy Robert Cialdini book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. So here’s where it gets interesting. Savvy marketers know that we judge value by contrast and relationship. So the Economist offers subscriptions for the following rates (or did when Ariely did his study):

1. $59 for the online-only subscription.
2. $125 for the print-only subscription.
3. $125 for the print and online subscription combined.

What’s going on there? Why even bother to offer option 2? Simple. It isn’t clear which is the better deal between $59 for the online subscription or $125 for the print subscription, but there’s no question which is the better deal between the print-only and the print and online option. Because of that and because those two are obviously comparable — different offers at the same cost — we key in on those two options. When Ariely showed the offer to MBA students at MIT, only 16% went for the online-only subscription, none went for the print-only option and a whopping 84% signed on for the combo. The deal was too good to pass up. But, and this is where it gets really really interesting, what if you eliminate the print-only subscription? After all, not a single person wants it anyway, so it’s not really an important part of the offer, right? Well when he offered only two choices, the online version and the combo (options 1 and 3 in other words) to MBA students, with no “decoy” offer, 68% opted for the internet-only option. So in other words, by focusing the comparison on the $125 option, they shifted from a measly 32% willing to pony up $125 to a whopping 84%. That’s the power of contrast! We are just not wired as humans to think in absolutes, which is usually a good shortcut as historically, evolutionarily (and in most life-threatening situations) we have very few choices and choosing quickly has advantages. In the modern marketplace, though, it’s a different story.

Cialdini has all sorts of examples where the contrast principle is used to influence our decisions. Brunswick pool tables instructed salesmen to start by showing the most expensive pool tables “just to see what the high-end features are” and then bring people down the price ladder. Result: a big increase in the amount people were willing to spend because the mid-range tables now seemed cheap. Some clothing retailer figured out that if a man comes in to buy a suit, always sell the suit first and the accessories second. After making the big purchase, what’s another $20 for a tie? But if they choose the tie first, they’ll go for the $10 tie instead.

This is also why discounts, coupons, MSRPs on cars that nobody pays, and “$97 value, yours for only $27″ work even if nobody in the history of humanity would consider paying $97 for the piece of junk that really isn’t even worth $27. Even though in our rational mind we know with certitude that the list prices are absurd and nobody pays them, they anchor us on high prices and we compare the sales price to the high price put in our mind because we are wired to compare. This is so subtle and so powerful that if you simply ask people what the last two digits of their social security number are, this will actually influence how much they are willing to pay for something later. Those with higher numbers are actually willing to pay more because the higher number is still stuck in their mind and that provides the mental anchor at that moment. In the absence of a meaningful comparison, they are simply comparing the last two numbers they have heard and that makes a price seem reasonable or unreasonable depending on what has become set as their anchor.

So as a consumer, you need to really think about what comparisons you make implicitly, without thinking about it. And as a merchant, of course, you need to think about what comparisons your customer is making.

Without hesitation any child can tell you that it’s please. But in fact there is another magic word. Consider this study reported in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (p. 4). People standing in line were asked in three different ways whether or not the person asking the question could cut in line. Here is the question, followed by the response rate in each case.

Frankly, I find it sort of surprising that 94% of the people said yes to because I’m in a rush which is barely a reason ("I’m in a rush because my plane leaves in one hour and I need to get this copied before I get to the airport" is a reason). But the amazing thing is that there’s such a huge difference between no because at all and one that adds no information whatsoever (obviously the person wanted to make copies).

It occurred to me that I should subtitle pages "Please read this because I wrote it" as in "The Magic Word (please read this because I wrote it)."