Power of Influence and Persuasion: Robert Cialdini

almost everybody said yes 98 of the people said yes just by planning that seed of getting them to focus on where their brain goes and now instead of 30 percent giving them the their email address when they were later told about this new product 75.6 provide that risky chancy thing i am primarily a scholar and a researcher i love finding the answers to things that i'm curious about but the other thing that i strive to do is to link those answers to actionable advice that we can give to people to improve their outcomes in life that way we not only get to scratch our curiosity itch we get to make a contribution at the same time yeah well in in you talk about this in in pre-suasion that you actually at one point in time were a palm reader yes right and how did you go about you know start i mean where at what point did you say i'm going to start studying like you you know an influence i mean you studied everyone who was in the compliance field i guess from televangelists to con artist to sales people to ethical marketers like all across the board where did this curiosity come from and how did it become this life work and this life passion to just figure out things that no one has figured out and then present it to everybody in usable ways like which is what you do with starting with influence and now with pre-suasion yeah for me it involved in making contact with an idea or some experience that i had that wouldn't leave me alone it just wouldn't leave me alone how did that happen how do i account for that how how did that guy get me to say yes to this thing i didn't really want right and yet i did want the money that i gave him but he was walking away with my money and i was standing there with his how did that just happen right and so when things won't leave me alone that's my tell that's my key this is worth spending time on because if it's not leaving you alone it's probably not leaving other people alone they're scratching their heads and wondering the same thing so if we can provide that answer you don't again just scratch your own curiosity itch you get to make a contribution by informing people of how the world works right that is that's a fascinating way to i mean i could go off on a million different tangents on just things not leaving you alone in terms of just interest in terms of passion in terms of where you you spend your time and it's great that this occurred for you in such a way to where you have then taken your skills as a researcher as a scientist however you would describe yourself and literally uncover all of these things that you know many people would never even even know so why did you write pre-suasion you know i had written influence 30 years ago and people have often asked me why did it take you so long to write another soul-authored book and the best way i can explain it is that i didn't want to just plant a bunch of shrubs around the tree that influence had become i wanted to wait until i had the seed for another tree and that didn't come along until uh the idea for pre-suasion hit me and wouldn't leave me alone how would you define selling how would you define marketing i'd be fascinated by robert cialdini's answer to how you view those two things yeah i think the most legitimate form of marketing is a form of education we we inform people into ascent we don't trick them we don't coerce them we educate them into the factors the features of what we have to offer that will better their lives right and if we've done that well storytelling is one way to do that properly then they will resonate with that information they will make themselves available for our offers and our products and services and they will benefit in the bargain not just will will our bottom line benefit their outcomes will benefit that's the most legitimate form of marketing that i can uh define it as yeah and i totally agree one one of the things i learned about marketing starting at being a debra carpet cleaner and everyone was advertising price there was no uh internet back then so i was using direct mail and coupons and phone calls and referrals and word of mouth and that sort of stuff and what i learned is it's all the things that people don't know that they don't know that if you provide them with that information they can make an informed intelligent decision and that all consumers are walking around with this question you know who can i trust and if you show up and build rapport which i would look at as trust with comfort where you just build rapport with people and you educate them on how to make an informed intelligent buying decision they will want to do business with you so in the spirit of what you teach and and with the objective and outcome that i want for you the person either watching this interview or listening is i want to provide them with education and i want the outcome to be that you go out and get this book and the reason i want to do this there's no affiliate thing i'm not getting paid anything to do this i'm wanting to provide useful education to all our friends most of them that live in the results economy where their income is is based on their ability to produce a result and in some cases that means selling people what it is that they're selling offering things i really want people to get the book because there's no way in a short period of time we could do justice to the amount of gold coins that are contained within the pages of these books this is not just a book for entertainment this book will give you specific strategies wisdom methodologies and processes that you have spent literally decades of your life studying and learning and for a few dollars you can get all of that as a road map to help you become more successful and so what we're doing right now is we're providing you with education about this for free so that you can learn about this and using reciprocity if we provide on that you're going to go out and buy his book and tell other people to go buy his book and if you're in a business that has many people that are in the persuasion in influence business you want to give a copy of this to all of the people that work in your organizations because it will just simply make things better so what has changed and what has stayed the same since you wrote influence well you know i wrote influence and described six universal principles of influence if you include one or another of those principles into a communication you significantly increase the likelihood that people will say yes to you so there's reciprocity there's liking there's authority there's scarcity there's commitment and consistency and then there's social proof here's what stayed the same those six principles remain important determinants of when people say yes to a request if it's if one or another of those is in the message it spurs the likelihood of yes here's what's changed one of those principles is dramatically more available to us social proof because of the technology of the internet we now have access to information about what many others like us are doing or have been doing with respect to any given choice a product a service an idea an initiative a cause to support right now like never before we can see in user groups from reviews from various kinds of collections of people that we are members of or just have access to what a lot of others just like us are doing or have been doing which steers us to go in that direction i saw an article a while ago that said 97 of all online buyers check product reviews before they make a purchase now 97 we can't get 97 of the people to believe that the earth is round right but we get 97 percent to go to this place of social proof so if we can master how that occurs how we can channel people into that dimension right that principle and we've got it going for us wow we don't need to go to the internet if we're marketers of information i saw this study from beijing shows you the cross-cultural reach of this if a restaurant owner wants to significantly increase the percent of people who choose an item from the menu right a simple thing they can do they put an asterisk next to those items that says one of our most popular items one of our most popular dishes and each one immediately becomes 13 to 20 percent more popular wow for pointing to something yeah we all have most popular models we have did you hear that did you hear popular options if we don't bring it to consciousness nobody is going to be moved in the direction of a good choice before they even process the information associated with it you know what the was it the you know all humans are secretly wanting to be led just the what you just said i mean the whole asterisk idea there that alone that little in persuasion and influence are filled with like hundreds of those sort of pieces of useful wisdom that are applicable and usable and that one piece of information there for anyone that is a business owner that alone is work could be worth thousands tens of thousands just that but what you just said directing their consciousness towards a certain thing and that's really what it's all about it's you know my favorite definition of selling came from dan sullivan where he said you know selling is getting someone intellectually engaged in a future result that's good for them and then getting them to emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result and when i heard that saying i i thought about that a lot i was like okay the key word is good for them because you can get someone intellectually and emotionally engaged in a future result that kills them eat this crappy food watch this pornography you know guzzle this you know booze i mean there's a smoke this cigarette i mean there's all kinds of ways to utilize influence and persuasion in ways that are destructive and there's all kinds of ways to do it in ways that are beneficial and help humanity as a matter of fact you know the greatest people in the world that have advanced the world were powerful persuaders they got people in into that sort of position and i really think what your knowledge does is it raises people's consciousness i think it really does you know i love that quote that you just stated and i would just say that newest behavioral science offers an addendum to getting people engaged to a future result that will improve their their lives getting people engaged to a few future piece of information that will lead to a future result that will engage there that's what priests was that's what is what is the premise of persuasion so let's go into exp like how does persuasion differ from or enhance persuasion i guess yeah you know in in the book influence i talked about what you should put into a message to increase the likelihood that people would want it would try to um acquire it that thing that's that you're talking about your offer persuasion is about what you should say or do in the moment before you deliver that message to make people attuned to the strengths of that message to make them inclined toward open to receptive to the thing about your message that is its strongest element the thing that will make it wise for them to say yes because that's the essence of what it is that you are offering well that is such an important concept that if someone was able to do that five percent ten percent more effectively not just twice as good but just little incremental things that would make a huge shift but if you did it five or ten times more effectively that would change your life that would change the entire game talk about the scientific research around persuasion so that people realize this is not just you know a really bright professor's opinion about how to you know set up the the the the sale setting up the the request this is like you have done some serious research on it so i think people would really appreciate uh this at a much deeper level if they knew how hard you have worked on this so if you could talk about that well there are some some literatures in academic behavioral science about priming about framing about positioning about um anchoring that all came together for me in terms of what they were implying about how you amplify the effect of your message it's by what you do before you send that message and it involves creating engagement creating a focus in your audience on some aspect that they're yet to it experience they haven't encountered it yet you just make them open and receptive to it before they ever encounter it right that's the idea let me give you an example suppose you want to sell somebody something that's new or you want to bring them in and you know that people hang back when they've got something that's new they haven't yet tried it they're unfamiliar they're they're they don't like getting out of their comfort zone but you've got this thing and it's really great how do you here's a study researchers went up to people on the street said um we have a new soft drink it's untried nobody's ever encountered it before would you be willing to give us your email address right now right and we'll send you the information that will allow you to get this new product now that's a risky thing to do somebody comes up to you unbidden unsolicited right unknown ask for your email address that's a risky thing right only 30 of the people were willing to do that right under those circumstances even that sounds to me like a lot right but there are risk takers among us right for another sample of people the researcher walked up and said excuse me do you consider yourself an adventurous person people thought for a minute and they went on a particular memory track for times that they were adventurous because adventure was the question that they were now engaged in and we've all experienced almost everybody said yes 98 of the people said yes just by planning that seed of getting them to focus on where their brain goes and now instead of 30 percent giving them the their email address when they were later told about this new product 75.6 percent provide that risky chancy thing like the way that i look at that piece of information which is again so incredibly valuable by how you direct the brain to think about something before you then ask them for what you really want is like so if if a single person if a guy was you know afraid of going up to a woman and asking for her email or asking for a phone number if they said you know are you adventurous and just plant that and say oh by the way would you like to go to you've just probably in this case tripled your chances of getting a yes here's a piece of research that shows how you can increase that even more a study done in france researchers had an attractive young man walk up to young women who were by themselves strolling through a sharp a shopping mall and he stopped them and said i wonder if you could give me your phone number so i can call you for a date later another risky thing to do and indeed only 13.5 percent of the time did he get a phone number if he did that this is an attractive guy though they they they got a an actor you know a matinee idol kind of looking guy that's part of persuasion also right right but even that only 13.5 unless he asked in front of a particular kind of shop and it doubled to almost doubled to 24 success a flower shop in the environment of flowers women are put in mind of romance and now romance is more important than risk wow where do you put people first so the environment has everything to do with it can be it can be a word that you use like adventurous it can be a setting that you arrange or it can be an image that you provide on your website right let me give you an example of the image you can talk about these examples for the next week and i would love them all because they're fantastic study done with an online furniture store they sell sofas they sent half of the visitors to their site to a landing page that had as its background wallpaper fluffy clouds the other half they sent to a landing page that had as its background wallpaper coins pennies now they then track what happens to those visitors who were randomly sent to one or the other place with different images the first thing they can counter is an image of clouds or an image of coins those who experience the clouds rated comfort as the most important feature for them to decide on a sofa they then searched the site for information about comfort and they preferred to buy more comfortable sofas those who got pennies rated cost as the most important feature for determining their choice they searched for price related information and they preferred to buy inexpensive furniture and not one of them recognized they were asked afterwards so do you think the clouds made a difference are they not one of them believed that the clouds or the coins made any difference this stuff flies under the radar totally it's almost like people are thinking they know what they're looking for but what you're showing here is no you're helping them right to look this is a great insight joe because there's a old saying tell me what you're paying attention to and i'll tell you who you are in other words if you're always watching espn you're probably a sports fan if you're always getting gourmet magazines you're probably a foodie that sort of thing here's what the newest behavioral science says what you're paying attention to doesn't just reveal who you are it makes you who you are in that moment right the guys in france could make those women romantics in the moment after they passed a flower shop but not a bakery that is because flowers are associated with romance not not cheese danish right there's a croissant get out of your either no right that's why uh if you've got a date you don't send the young woman a box of krispy kreme right right you send flowers all right so you what is the thing that is the essence of your message you create a attention to that concept before you send your message and people are attuned to it that's so good it is honestly so good let me give you another one because i love this one it's one word changing one word persuasively so suppose you want to co-create with your customer base your new line of products or services or you want to ask them about how to best improve uh what you have for new models and so on and this is this co-creation it's the biggest thing right now in in marketing what we typically do is to ask people for their feedback ask for their for that information by saying could you provide us with your opinion on this topic it's a mistake because researchers have found that when you ask for someone's opinion that person takes a half step back from you a separating step and they go inside themselves for the answer interesting if instead of asking for your their opinion you ask for their advice they take a half step towards you wow and you've created a partnership teamwork collaborative frame in their mind and here's what the research shows now when they encounter your products or services or your brand they're more supportive of it because they feel more a part of it they feel a merged identity with it because they've moved into that identity with you by providing advice instead of an opinion i love it i love it so one one method of approach is repelling the other is attracting right and so it reminds me of the quotes people support what they help to create and the others if you let them plan the fight they don't fight the plan and i i utilize that with my team in my own company uh by having everyone do teamwork together but you just gave me a whole nother way of of thinking about it right in fact what i like there's a quote people don't sink the boats they're riding in right yeah yeah if you can get them to see them as part of your enterprise it's your it's it's both of your boat now you're both writing in that book they're not going to torpedo hey i hope you're enjoying this video and i want to let you know that i have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free there's a link below in the description or you can wait till the end of this video or you can simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there yeah sorry because you know one of the one of the things that i have always thought of in marketing and i learned this from studying sales copy and persuasive words when you're when you're not having the advantage of being face to face with someone and you have to use words to persuade and so part of it is the communication how you say it the frequency of it the usefulness of it and i've always thought you know the number one thing to do with clients is to bond and how to bond with them and anything that breaks that bond is not good and alignment is critical like in business the way that i my new marketing book which is coming out currently titled joe's marketing book and we're crowdsourcing different titles although everyone seems to love the title joe's marketing book it'll be out in a few months is it's all about elf you can have an elf business which is easy lucrative and fun or you can have a half business which is hard annoying lame and frustrating and i think learning persuasion is going to give you an elf business because if you don't utilize what you have researched and proven and studied then to do anything other than what you're saying is hard annoying sometimes lucrative and frustrating and so i look at like any sort of thing that i can do that's going to give me a greater advantage that is going to get a better result to not only study it learn it and apply it is just idiotic and now in some cases you can't fix stupid so some people they just don't get it however knowing that there is knowledge out there knowing there is a method that will improve things is critical and i only want to align myself with people that are aligned with me and i think the greatest joy of using persuasion and getting someone into a better position to make their lives better is if they wanted to go along with it it wasn't like trickery it wasn't manipulation although sometimes you persuade people into directions that they don't want to go but it's actually good for them so you can argue that you're doing them a favor however anything that can be set up to just you know i think people love to be sold to hate to be pressured and if you do things in a certain way it doesn't even occur to them that anyone's selling when anyone is really you know conscientious and cares about us and gets us into something to exchange our money or our time our energy for something and it actually helps you and you like it that feels good everyone loves that everybody feels good about that yeah and so they they want to continue to do business the next round in the round after that exactly because you know the the most expensive business cost is client acquisition and once you've already done that everything you know it's it i've i always think of it as it's a it's a lot harder to create momentum than it is to maintain it you know like every once in a while i'll run into you guys at the gym because you work out consistently and the thing is if you just did that oh every three months i'm gonna go work out and do a really great workout it it doesn't work that way and i think what you teach is kind of the same way these are just ongoing practices that if you put them in the place your business your connection your quality of clientele your joy of how you do things just increases so so this is great well you've already covered some of this but i'm going to go a little more uh specific so what specific steps could someone listening to this uh take to better persuade or prepare the moment or moments before the message is delivered that you've not shared so let's take as a step back and and provide a general approach it is to focus your attention on your message what is the strength of your mess what is the strongest element of it the thing that if people say yes to it makes it most wise for them to say yes right so that they will benefit right what is it identify that thing and then reverse engineer the persuasion process to the moment before you describe that thing so that you've aligned people's consciousness and their sense of who they are with the strength of that message we just saw you could make me a comfort oriented buyer you could make me a cost oriented buyer depending on what you put first if you put fluffy clouds or coins in the background of your of your landing page i become that person now if you if you know that and comfort is the strength of your product you've got me right i'm going to rate that is important i'm going to search for it and i'm going to use it to determine how to behave well i'm not sure if it's in the second chapter or third chapter in your book you talk about playing french music or german music ex explain that so there's a reason a study that shows that if a shop a wine shop owner plays german music for a particular time of the day people buy more german vintages if he plays french music they buy more french vids because they're put in a german or a french state of mind right and now they're going to behave in ways that are aligned with that state of mind that's been installed by something as background based as the music that they're hearing on the pa system i always listen for words that you say because it it there it leaves so many strategic clues on what to do installed so if you sit and think like okay how do i want to sell more of my thing here what do i need to install in order to set it up in order to do that so let me give you an example it's just worked for me i've got a colleague who i've worked with for a long time over in the psychology department where i uh i'm housed and uh i needed a big favor from him and i i sent him an email and i said don i'm working on a project i don't have the information i need in my files but i know you have it in your files i'm going to call you later to get that information i really appreciate it you just planted that seed yeah so i called him up he said bob i know why you're calling i can't help you i'm swamped right now i know you've got this project with a time limit but i've got projects with time limits too i'd like to be able to help but i can't this time sorry so i i didn't say to him but don i'd really appreciate it if you could help me with this one it would mean a lot to me i said don you know we've been in the same department now for 10 years i really wish you could help me with this it would mean a lot to me i created a framework of unity i had it i had the information that afternoon [Laughter] so what happened in his head i mean it explained what went down there was something that was true that we had a relationship a long-term relationship but it wasn't at the top of his consciousness yeah it wasn't the thing that was aligning his subsequent behavior until i brought it to top of mind we're relationship partners don for 10 years and inside relationships you say yes to people i just moved it from somewhere at midbrain to top of of mind and it made the difference so what did i ins i didn't install the relationship i installed a focus on that relationship that he was that was now the thing that he was paying attention to and what you're paying attention to in that moment changes who you are he became a relationship oriented respondent not a selfish respondent about his own issues right right you know it's it you you have a real power to where these sort of things could be used in very manipulative ways and for the time that i've known you i mean i i i would like to think in the same way you know our our relation i've never overly asked for anything you've not either you've always approached us you're very cognizant of the ethical use of persuasion and you know this is filled with literally a ninja assassin methodologies if used in the wrong way and incredible human betterment methodologies and the other side what what is your advice for the people out there about the the the proper care and feeding of others utilizing persuasion once you learn what is in persuasion because this is i mean you literally teach people how to get what they want yes it's dynamite and dynamite can be used to build a bridge or blow up a bridge right between people so joe we've been friends for a long time and the reason we've been friends for a long time is what you said that we share values right and the reason i've liked interacting with you over that time is that your ethical approach you take an ethical approach to this so here's why i am recommending that people who understand the persuasive strategies that are available to them only use them in ethical ways we've just completed a research program where we find that those organizations that use influence attempts in dishonest deceptive unethical ways right right produce two big damages to their viability the first is there are some people inside the organization who are just not comfortable with the unethicality right right and they they're stressed by it and they try to leave right they don't do very well on the job because of that stress they try to leave when they do leave you get all these turnover costs that are associated with that big cost but here's the one that was most interesting to me when those people who are stressed by the deception leave who's who remains is those people who are comfortable with dishonesty and cheating right and they're going to cheat you wow they're the ones who are going to steal equipment they're the ones who are going to run these under the table deals with vendors and partners and suppliers they're the ones who are going to pad their expense accounts all right count on it they've been selected for they've been selected for you've pulled the viper under your coat yeah exactly you have really changed i mean tons of people's lives i i have no idea do you have any idea how much impact your book influence and your work has done i mean does it ever occur do you think about like and i'd love to hear a couple of stories that you're most proud of of someone that has done something it could be just building and growing a business it could be a cause i mean you you know have done a lot let me give you an example of an email that came to me maybe three or four days ago a guy whose two sons are boy scouts and they were selling popcorn outside a supermarket you know they had a table right and they were having very little luck he said maybe 10 15 percent of people were because they as people approached and said would you like to buy some popcorn right 10 or 15 percent they had just come out of a out of a supermarket if they wanted popcorn they would have gotten it right he said i read your book he had gotten an early copy of him of persuasion persuasion and he said i thought to myself what's the essence of our message what is it that will make people happiest if they give to us and so we changed the question to do you support the boy scouts and now we get 90 percent of people who either buy popcorn or if they can't buy popcorn they give us some money wow because that's what they want to do they want us what's the frame that you put first and i have to say i've been getting a lot of these kinds of emails and messages back in the old days letters yeah yeah from people about influence yeah those things happen that people who are using this for good causes do improve the outcomes and everybody wins here's the best example i know of how pre-suasion works that made me when i saw this rock back in my chair i had to read this study three times to believe it all right so let's say you want people to be more helpful right okay they do a study in belgium they bring subjects into an experiment and they are shown photographs and in the background of the photograph for a third of the subjects there's an individual figure standing alone for another third of the subjects there are two figures standing apart from one another as a distance a separation between them for a third sample the the figures in the photograph are standing together they're shoulder-to-shoulder they're unitized right now the researcher in all of those instances right at the end of showing the photographs gets up from the table and spills a bunch of items onto the floor accidentally right and the question is which subjects get off of their chairs down on their knees spontaneously and start helping the researcher there's no question those who saw the people standing shoulder to shoulder who were put in a togetherness called collaborative state of mind are three times more likely than anybody else in the study to do that now that's not what rocked me back in my seat here's what it was the subjects in this study were 18 months old they were babies wow that's how fundamental this process is that is fascinating so we've got raw material to work with that's dynamite we just have to be sure that we we channel it in productive ways what do you hope that people take away learn and utilize the most out of persuasion i would say this general idea that the old way of thinking about the influence process right of focusing on your message and how to craft it will get you a long way but if you want to maximize your impact you want to leverage the features of your message you have to think about the moment before you deliver it and structure it as carefully as you structure your message okay i hope you found that video awesome and useful so if you want to get a free copy of my book i want you to click here and if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome click here go ahead they're over here do it now come on thank you watch

Channel: Joe Polish

Views: 4,095

Rating: 4.9285712 out of 5

Keywords: robert cialdini, how to influence people, influence the psychology of persuasion, robert cialdini influence, robert cialdini (author), influence the psychology of persuasion audiobook, how to persuade people, the psychology of persuasion, persuasive speech, science of persuasion, robert cialdini science of persuasion, robert cialdini influence audiobook, robert cialdini interview, robert cialdini pre-suasion, robert cialdini persuasion, joe polish, genius network

Id: 8Cx1XHfQnjU

Length: 42min 13sec (2533 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021