The Levers of Influence: Buying behaviors basics.
Influence : The Psychology Of Persuasion - Chapter 1 Notes
Have you ever experienced this, when you go shopping in a branded cloth store and wanted to buy a shirt or a suit and ended up buying shoes, wallets, and belts or more than a pair of clothes?
Or do you buy the expensive item thinking it is of the best quality and later found out that someone bought the same item from another store for less amount.
Well, these are all the manipulation and influence marketing done by shops and marketing agencies.
The ability to manipulate without the appearance of manipulation.
Let me allow, to explain some principles from the book "Influence: The Psychology Of Persuasion"
Notes from chapter 1, explain the human behavior triggers, the profiteers who take advantage of the behavioral triggers, and how we have been influenced by or our environment and stereotypes. How the shops or sellers manipulate prices to boost their sales.
Click Run Actions
Turkey mothers are good mothers loving, watchful, and protective, mothering is triggered by one thing, the “cheep-cheep” sound of young turkey chicks. Other identifying features of the chicks seem to play minor roles in the mothering process. If a chick makes the cheep-cheep noise, its mother will care for it; if not, the mother will ignore or sometimes kill it.
An experiment was done with a stuffed polecat, when drawn by a string to a mother turkey, received an immediate and furious attack. However, when the same stuffed replica carried inside it a small recorder that played the cheep-cheep sound of baby turkeys, the mother not only accepted the oncoming enemy but gathered it underneath her. When the machine was turned off, the polecat model again drew a vicious attack.
Fixed-action, patterns, can involve intricate sequences of behavior, such as entire courtship or mating rituals. A fundamental characteristic of these patterns is that the behaviors composing them occur in virtually the same fashion and in the same order every time. It is almost as if the patterns were installed as programs within the animals.
A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor, we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have a reason for what they do.
Researcher Dr. Langer demonstrated this unsurprising fact by asking a small favor waiting in line to use a library's copying machine :
"Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the xerox machine, because I'm in a rush?" : 94 percent of people let her skip ahead of them in line.
"Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?" : only 60 percent complied.
At first glance, it appears the crucial difference between the two requests was the additional information provided by the words because I'm in a rush.
Just as the cheep-cheep sound of turkey chicks triggered an automatic response from mother turkeys, even when it emanated from a stuffed polecat, so the word "because" triggered an automatic compliance response from "Langer's" subjects, even when they were given no subsequent reason to comply, Click, run.
“If an expert said so it must be true”
Psychologists have uncovered a number of mental shortcuts we employ in making our everyday judgments. Termed judgmental heuristics.
Consider, for example, the shortcut rule that goes, "If an expert said so it must be true".
There is an unsettling tendency in our society to accept unthinkingly the statements and directions of individuals who appear to be authorities on a topic.
That is rather than thinking about an expert's arguments and being convinced (or not), we frequently ignore the arguments and allow ourselves to be convinced just by the expert's status as "expert". This tendency to react on the basis of a thorough analysis of all of the information can be referred to as controlled responding.
Quite a lot of laboratory research has shown that people are more likely to deal with information in a controlled fashion when they have both the desire and the ability to analyze it carefully; otherwise, they are likely to use the easier click, run approach.
When it comes to the dangerous business of click, run responding, we give ourselves a safety net. We resist the seductive luxury of registering and reacting to just a single(trigger) feature of the available information when an issue is important to us.
The profiteers
Automatic Behavior, despite their current widespread use and future importance, most of us know very little about our automatic behavior patterns. Perhaps that is precise because of the mechanistic, unthinking manner in which they occur. Whatever the reason, it is vital we should clearly recognize the properties of automatic behavior. They make us terribly vulnerable to anyone who does know how they work. And the advantage they took from the vulnerabilities is known as “The Profiteers”.
One group of organisms termed mimics, copy the trigger features of other animals in an attempt to trick the animals into mistakenly playing the right behavior programs at the wrong times. The mimics then exploit this altogether inappropriate action for their own benefit.
In the struggle for survival, nearly every form of life has its mimics - right down to some of the most primitive pathogens. By adopting certain critical features of useful hormones or nutrients, these clever bacteria and viruses can gain entry into the healthy host cell. The result is that the healthy cell eagerly and naively sweeps into itself the causes of such diseases as rabies, mononucleosis, and the common cold.
We, humans too, have profiteers who mimic trigger features for our own brand of automatic responding. Unlike the most instinctive response sequences of nonhumans, our automatic programs usually develop from psychological principles or stereotypes we have learned to accept.
The principles of social proof, which assert that people are inclined to believe or do what they see those around them believing or doing. We act in accord with it whenever we check product reviews site, we have to deal with our brand mimics - individuals who counterfeit genuine reviews and insert the fake reviews.
The Art Of Selling Expensive Item First: The Contrast Principle
A woman employing jujitsu, the Japanese martial art, uses her own strength only minimally against an opponent. Instead, she exploits the power inherent in such naturally present principles as gravity, leverage, momentum, and inertia. If she knows how and where to engage these principles, she can easily defeat a physically stronger rival. And so it is for the exploiter of the levers of automatic influence that exists naturally around us.
The profiteers can commission the power of these principles for use against their targets while exerting little force. The last feature of the ability to manipulate without the appearance of manipulation. Even the victims themselves tend to see their compliance as a result of the action of natural forces rather than the design of the person who profits from that compliance.
There is a principle in human perception, the contrast principle, which affects the way we see the difference between two things that are presented one after another. If the second item is fairly different from the first, we tend to see it as being more different than it actually is.
So if we lift a light object first and then lift a heavy object, we estimate the second object as being heavier than we would have estimated it if we had lifted it without first lifting the light one. The contrast principle is well established in the field of psychophysics and applies to all sorts of perceptions.
For example: In a classroom, each student takes a turn sitting in front of three pails of water - one cold, one at room temperature, and one hot. After placing one hand in the cold water and the other in the hot water, the student is told to place both simultaneously in the room-temperature water.
Even though both the hands are in the same bucket, the hand that was in the cold water feels as if it is in hot water, while the one that was in the hot water feels as if it is in cold water. The point is that the same thing - in this instance, room-temperature water - can be made to seem very different depending on the nature of the event preceding it.
Retail clothiers offer a good example. Suppose a man enters a fashionable men's store to buy a suit and a sweater.
If you were the salesperson, which would you show him first to make him likely to spend the most money?
Clothing stores instruct their sales personnel to sell the costly item first. Common sense might suggest the reverse.
If a man has just spent a lot of money to purchase a suit, he may be reluctant to spend much more on the purchase of a sweater, but the clothiers know better. They behave in accordance with what the contrast principle advises; sell the suit first, because when it comes time to look at sweaters, even expensive ones, their prices will not seem as high in comparison. The same principle applies to a man who wishes to buy the accessories (shirt, shoes, belt) to go along with his new suit. Contrary to the commonsense view, the evidence supports the contrast-principle prediction.
It is more profitable for salespeople to present the expensive item first, to fail to do so not only loses the force of the contrast principle but also causes the principle to work against them. Presenting an inexpensive product first and following it with an expensive one makes the expensive item seem even more costly - hardly a desirable consequence for sales organizations.
So just as it is possible to make the same bucket of water appear to be hotter or colder depending on the temperature of the previously presented bucket of water, it is possible to make the price of the same item seem higher or lower depending on the price of a previously presented item.
If you have the last item in inventory and people will willing to buy it, how would you sell the item for $500, would you start from high price to low price, or start from low price to high price?
A real-life case study from one of the book reader’s perspectives:
While waiting to board a flight at O’hare, I heard a desk agent announce that the flight was overbooked and, that if passengers were willing to take a later plane, they would be compensated with a voucher worth $10,000! of course, this exaggerated amount was a joke. It was supposed to make people laugh. It did. But I noticed that when he then revealed the actual offer (a $200 voucher), there were no takers. In fact, he had to raise the offer twice to $300 and then $500 before he got any volunteers.
Solution: The desk agent should have used the contrast principle to his advantage. He could have started with a $2 joke offer and then revealed the true and now much more attractive sounding $200 amount.
How will you use the contrast principle?