Dear Friend,

This week we’re going to continue with our second in a series of my most valuable marketing and psychology lessons and how I applied them, and this will be week two.

This week, I want to share a couple of things from a book.  It’s become one of my favourite marketing books.  I read this book more than two or three times a year.  Every time I read it I’m fascinated by the stories and the information that I get from reading it.  Every time I read it I have a new application that I can learn and I’ve seen something that this book has been applied to and seen how it works.  And every time I read it it’s an evolution.

So this is a book by a man called Robert Chialdini and the book is called ‘Influence The Psychology of Persuasion’.  And in this book he outlines the ‘Six Weapons of Influence’ is what he calls them.  And these weapons of influence are at work in our everyday activities, they’re going on all around us and a lot of times we don’t even realise that they’re happening.  It’s so funny because when you read the book and you start to see all of the different things that go on in your life that could be explained only by these invisible hidden laws of psychology that you’re going to be fascinated.

The first lesson, the first weapon of influence is something called reciprocation.  And he calls it the old ‘give and take’ and here’s the basics of it.  We in society are completely governed by this sense of propriety and a sense of ‘if I do you a favour that you owe me a favour’ and we’re constantly in our lives, with the people in our relationships, striving to keep that balance, where if we go to Starbucks and I say ‘oh let me get it’ and you say ‘oh no I’ll get it, you got it last time’.  You’ve all been in that kind of situation, you know exactly how that plays out because we’re always kind of looking to kind of keep things in balance.

Now the same thing applies whether you want to be indebted to that or not.  If somebody does a favour for you, even if you didn’t ask for them to do a favour for you, you are still unconsciously bound by this urge to repay that favour.  And so when I talk about this I do it in a sense of making an offer that people are, you know that it’s easy for them to accept your offer than it is for them to refuse your offer.  Because the odd thing about the law or reciprocation is that we are, that it’s almost… it’s impolite to not accept a gift that’s offered to you.  It’s not polite to turn somebody down. So we’re kind of always going along… if somebody offers us something, it’s very difficult for us not to take it.  In the same vein we don’t want to make people go out of their way for us so we’d never ask somebody to do something or to go out of their way for us.

So here’s an example from the book of how this law applies.  There was… and everything… Robert Chialdini is a social psychologist and they constantly study and see how people react in sort of staged situations.  And there’s an experiment where they had three people involved in the experiment.  There was a teacher, or an instructor who was leading a study on art appreciation and there was a student, who would be a subject of this study, and there would be another person, who to the student appeared like somebody who was taking this art appreciation study but was in fact a alliance with the instructor.  So they were both part of the experiment.  So the true subject was the person who was taking the art appreciation study.  And it wasn’t at all about the art appreciation study.  What they were going to study was a situation that they set up throughout this study, and I’m going to explain that to you.

So they would have people come in, they would look at a group of pictures and rate the pictures on their pleasantness, whether they were pleasing to them and they would answer some questions about these paintings and then they would have a break.  And at the break the compatriot student would go and leave the room and he would come back and he would sit down with two Cokes and he would say to the true subject ‘I asked the instructor if I could get a Coke, he said it was okay so I bought you one too’, and he gave it to the student.  Now the student didn’t ask for him to bring him the Coke it was a completely appropriate gesture, it was something he had gone, he had gotten a Coke and it was a thoughtful thing.  It would be very difficult for that student to say ‘no thanks I don’t want the Coke’.  So he would take the Coke and they would then go on with the rest of the study.  Then at the end of the study the compatriot student would turn to the real subject and say ‘I’m selling some raffle tickets and if I sell the most raffle tickets I can win a prize.  They’re 25 cents each, if you could buy some of these that would be great, any would help, the more the better’.  That’s exactly how he would say it to them.  No change in how he would present the offer.  And they would mark down how many raffle tickets the student bought.

In half of the situations, they would have multiple students come in, one at a time, but in half of the cases he would leave the room and come back with no Cokes and in half he would come back with two Cokes and give one to the student.  Now when they added it all up the students who had been given the Coke bought twice as many raffle tickets as the students who were not given the Coke.  And its fascinating because it shows really how that law applies whether we want it or not.  And it’s very interesting because when you start looking at this and you realise yourself that if somebody offers you something nice it’s very difficult for you to refuse that person.

And that’s why when I’m seeing and observing what happens when people are responding to leads who come to their website and ask for a free report or register at the website to search for homes, what often happens is that they will send out a message to people and say ‘thank you for visiting my website, I hope you found it very useful.  We’ve done everything we can to make it a great environment for you to search properties and if there’s anything you need, if you have any questions, I’m available.  Here’s my phone number, give me a call’.

That’s one approach and that’s often the approach that I see when I go and visit people’s websites, do a lot of web critiques or do a lot of coaching and I look at these sites and this is what usually happens.  Now the challenge with that is that we are forcing people into a situation where they are expected to ask us to make the first move, where they are supposed to now call us and say ‘hey would you show me some homes or would you print off some listings for me’ or anything that it is what we’re hoping they will do, is a very out of character thing for people to do because we don’t want people to go out of their way for us.  So when you contrast that… and you know I often tell a story at the Main Event, I’ll say ‘imagine if I brought you into my home and I sat you in my living room and I said to you ‘anything you want, if you’re hungry or thirsty, there’s lots of stuff in the fridge, go ahead and help yourself, I’ll be in the other room here, if you need anything at all just give me a call’.  Now I could say that with all the sincerity in the world, I could mean it from the bottom of my heart that I really would love for you to go to my fridge and get whatever you want or to call me if you need anything, just like the realtors and lenders who are sending out those auto responder messages or the follow up messages that say if you’ve got any questions, if you need anything, you just give me a call.  But what we’re doing is we’re kind of forcing them to make the first move.

Now lets contrast that with me bringing you into my living room, sitting you down, going into the kitchen, coming out into the living room with a plate of freshly baked cookies and bringing the cookies right to you and saying ‘would you like a cookie?’.  Now just picture the difference there.  It would be very difficult for you not to take that cookie, wouldn’t it?  I mean just think about it for yourself, just for a second, just imagine yourself in that situation and wouldn’t you say it would be more difficult for you to not take that cookie than it would for you to take it.

And now once you take that cookie, now you have set that law of reciprocity in place.  And you are now, ‘you owe me a cookie’.  And there’s nothing you can do to shake that societal debt that you’re going to feel… I almost say that you’re burdened with it, that you’re burdened with this desire to repay what ‘I’ve given you’.  So if I ever come to your house you’re going to break out some cookies and you’re going to give me a cookie and that’s… ‘where going to get back to even’.

Now when you look at it that way, if instead of just saying to people ‘hey if you’ve got anything that you need me to do for you, you just give me a call’.  If instead of saying that, invite me to come this Saturday for a tour of home.  Or if you invite me to come next Tuesday to your home buyer workshop where you’re saying things that are already baked, they’re already happening.  You’re not saying ‘hey you call me up and ask me anything you want’, you’re saying ‘hey I’m doing this, would you like one’.  ‘I’m having a home buyer workshop, would you like one’.  ‘We’re having a Saturday tour of homes, would you like to come’.  ‘We have a home finder service, would you like to part of it’.

Anytime that you can make a very specific offer to a specific person you’re very far ahead of the game because now it’s easy for people to take advantage of your offers and once they take advantage of your offer, once they accept your offer it’s very easy to continue with additional offers, and that’s going to be the subject of next week’s marketing Monday.  I’m going to continue with some of the lessons from ‘Influence, the Science of Persuasion’ by Robert Chialdini.  So tune in next time and we’ll talk about even more ways to get listings, to find buyers and convert leads.

Have a great week and I’ll talk to you next time.