How to sell anything to anyone
Your brain is being controlled-and you don't even know it.
Because if you think the ads you're seeing today are just pretty pictures with nice, creative copy, you're mistaken. Truth is, you are being powerfully influenced by dozens of proven scientific principles of advertising psychology... little-known techniques of consumer persuasion that go completely unnoticed by the buying public. And they're causing you--and millions like you--to spend enormous amounts of money every day on countless products and services.
But what are these principles? How do they work? And how can you use them in your own advertising? Drew Eric Whitman takes you on a wild, roller-coaster ride through the streets of New York's famed Madison Avenue and teaches you the specific psychological techniques that today's top copywriters and designers use to influence the masses... and how you can use them to rapidly increase your sales, no matter what you sell.
Here are a few of our favorite quotes from the book:
There are 8 biological desires we’re programmed to respond to:
Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension.
Enjoyment of food and beverages.
Freedom from fear, pain, and danger.
Sexual companionship.
Comfortable living conditions.
To be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses.
Care and protection of loved ones.
Social approval.
When you create any advert or marketing copy based on any of these 8 things, you tap into the very essence of what motivates people.
People buy because of emotion and justify with logic so as a marketer you have to create an emotional response by eliciting a basic want or need.
We also have secondary or learned wants which are known as “The Nine Learned (Secondary) Wants”
The 9 Learned Wants:
To be informed.
Curiosity.
Cleanliness of body and surroundings.
Efficiency.
Convenience.
Dependability/quality.
Expression of beauty and style.
Economy/profit.
Bargains.
We’re not born with secondary wants. We learn them. They’re still important but you have to realize that because we’re not biologically driven to satisfy these needs they are indeed secondary to the biological drivers listed first.
Reading about how others have satisfied their eight primary desires is as pleasant as satisfying them ourselves.
You have to get people to imagine using your product and service in their minds first. Visual language is important.
The 17 Foundational Principles of Consumer Psychology:
The Fear Factor—Selling the Scare
Ego Morphing—Instant Identification
Transfer—Credibility by Osmosis
The Bandwagon Effect—Give Them Something to Jump On
The Means-End Chain—The Critical Core
The Transtheoretical Model—Persuasion Step-by-Step
The Inoculation Theory—Make Them Prefer You for Life
Belief Re-Ranking—Change Their Reality
The Elaboration Likelihood Model—Adjust Their Attitude
The 6 Weapons of Influence—Shortcuts to Persuasion
Message Organization—Attaining Critical Clarity
Examples vs. Statistics—And the Winner Is…
Message Sideness—Dual-Role Persuasion
Repetition and Redundancy—The Familiarity Factor
Rhetorical Questions—Interesting, Aren’t They?
Evidence—Quick! Sell Me the Facts!
Heuristics—Serving Billions of Lazy Brains Daily
Your goal is not to create new fears, but to tap into existing fears, either those on the forefront of consumers’ minds or those that require a little digging to uncover. Fear can paralyze so it will motivate your prospect to act only if he believes he has the power to change his or her situation. The fear appeal is also more successful if the fears targeted are specific and widely recognized so In order to craft an effective fear appeal, your ad must contain specific, believable recommendations for reducing the threat. A common way fear is used to drive action is through deadlines and scarcity. Phrases and slogans such as limited offer, one-day sale, and while supplies last scare consumers into believing that unless they act now, they’ll miss an opportunity to save money. This taps into Human Secondary Want #9 (Bargains).
Ego identification allows you to create a certain image, or identity, for a product, in order to appeal to a particular section of the audience that feels that their personal image and ego either match it or could be improved by it. Your goal is to cause consumers to become so closely associated with the product’s image that it almost becomes a part of their own identity; thus, you’re “morphing” their ego to fit your product. Appealing to people’s vanity and ego is most successful when it hones in on characteristics that society considers being desirable, such as physical attractiveness, intelligence, economic success, and sexual prowess.
Transfer is a strategy that involves using symbols, images, or ideas—cues, if you will—commonly associated with people, groups, or institutions of authority or respect. The goal is to persuade your prospect that your product or service is in some way acceptably endorsed.
Get a respected institution to provide its official endorsement. Doing so instantly transfers their authority, sanction, and prestige to your product or service.
4) The Bandwagon Effect
Humans are social beings with a powerful psychological need to belong.
There are three primary types of groups, regardless of the group’s purpose:
Aspirational. Groups to which you’d like to belong.
Associative. Groups that share your ideals and values.
Dissociative. Groups to which you do not want to belong.
By linking products and services to any of these three reference groups, you can persuade your prospects to make decisions based upon the group with which they identify, or want to identify.
If you’re seeking aspirational group influence, you must make sure your prospects can easily identify with them.
Successfully gaining associative group influence requires that you link your product to a certain societal group, while often alienating others. This can be done in two ways, either by (1) closely associating your product with the target group through advertising that specifically appeals to the attitudes and values of that group, or by (2) disassociating your product from other groups within society, in order to make it appear more accepted, or, in the cases of younger audiences, simply more “cool.”
Tell your prospects how buying your product makes them (aspirational), keeps them (associative), or helps them show the world that they’re not a part of a particular group (dissociative).
The Means-Ends principle is based on the theory that many consumer decisions are taken not to satisfy an immediate need, but for some future objective. To activate the Means-End Chain, you need to ensure your copy and images always represent the positive end results. In this way your prospect is less likely to critically analyze the pros and cons of the actual product, and base their purchase decision on the ultimate benefit it will provide them. For most products, it’s not the product itself that people want, it’s the bottom-line benefit they’re buying.
The Transtheoretical Model (TTM) divides consumer knowledge and behavior into five stages, and it provides the guidelines for persuading your prospect so they move from complete ignorance of your product (“What the hell is this?”), to making it a regular purchase or an integral part of their lifestyles (“Doesn’t everyone buy this?”).
Here are the stages, in a quick and easy nutshell.
Pre-contemplation. People at this stage are either ignorant of your product’s existence
Contemplation. Prospects at this stage are aware of your product and have thought about using it.
Preparation. This is the planning phase. Your prospect is thinking about buying from you but needs more information about your product’s benefits and advantages.
Action. Success! Your prospect has arrived at the coveted action or purchase phase.
Maintenance. A nice place for your prospects to be. In this phase, your product has become part of their everyday lives.
The aim for advertisers who use this technique is to move the consumer through the stages one at a time until using your product becomes a habit. The challenge? Dealing successfully with consumer groups at different stages of the process. You have two options to tackle this: (1) create ads that address all five stages or (2) create a series of ads that, throughout a period of time, progress from stage one to stage five.
Provide your prospects with enough information and motivation to move them through the five stages at their own pace, until they ultimately become regular customers.
The Inoculation Theory is used to reinforce a consumer’s existing attitudes toward a product or service by presenting a “weak” argument that tricks the consumer into defending his position and therefore strengthening his attitude. The three steps are:
Warn of an impending attack
Make a weak attack
Encourage a strong defense
Consumer psychologists warn that your attack must be weak. Otherwise, you risk having the opposite effect and weakening or changing your prospects’ attitudes.
In order to influence beliefs, advertisers use images and statistics that appeal either to emotions, such as fear, humor, or guilt (affecting the right-hemisphere, creative brain) or, to the consumer’s intellect, through factual evidence and examples. When you do this, you present your audience with an alternative view of reality—one that’s not supported by their currently held beliefs. In other words, you might feel a certain way about a product, but your beliefs can be changed if you’re given new ways to think about it.
Another approach to influencing beliefs is to change the importance of beliefs, rather than the beliefs themselves. That’s because it’s easier to strengthen or weaken an existing belief than it is to change it.
Strengthen your prospects’ current beliefs either by supporting them with factual evidence (stats, reports, studies, testimonials) or, by using everyday examples (e.g. success stories from other users) with which your prospects can identify.
The strategy of manipulating current beliefs, either through reinforcement or undermining, is far easier and more likely to succeed than attempting a wholesale change of basic beliefs. You just have to remove your prospects’ need for cognitive (critical) thinking.
The Elaboration Likelihood Model, or ELM, suggests there are two routes to attitude change: the central route and the peripheral route. The central route involves persuading using logic, reasoning, and deep thinking. The peripheral route involves persuading using the association of pleasant thoughts and positive images, or “cues.”
The peripheral route encourages consumers to consciously—or often unconsciously—focus on superficial images and “cues” in order to influence attitudes and decisions, without any serious consideration of your advertising content. By contrast, the central route encourages your audience to really think about it … to consider the issues and arguments before reaching any decision, especially when making a purchase.
Research has found that attitudes based on central route processing are more resistant to counter-persuasion, and show greater attitude-behavior consistency than attitudes formed by peripheral route thinking.
When you get someone to think deeply about something, and you persuade them to arrive at a conclusion, they will adopt their decision as a result of their own thinking, protect it, and defend it against (competitors’) attacks as if it were their “baby” or “brainchild.”
By using the peripheral route to persuasion, advertisers are relying on the effectiveness of what social psychologists call “cues.” These cues are mental shortcuts that, if used correctly, can convey an ad’s message without the need to engage the consumer in any form of deep thought.
Don’t ever be afraid to tell people why they shouldn’t buy what you’re selling. Not only does it boost your credibility, but if they’re true prospects, it’ll also add fire to their desire.
The aim of all advertising is to create marginal differences in consumer attitudes and perceptions.
By presenting the same message in a different format and slightly different copy, you trick the reader into believing he’s seeing a new ad rather than a recycled version of the one he saw last week. It touches on what’s called multiple sources and multiple arguments.
The more different sources that expose a subject to the same message, the more convinced the subject will become.
A rhetorical question is really a statement disguised as a question.
Some research suggests that using rhetorical questions can sometimes change how people think, and modify their buying behavior.
Questions designed to emphasize a point, rather than to persuade, are likely to cause your audience to remember your message.
People buy from you when they believe what you are selling is of greater value than the money they need to exchange for it so in order to influence our peripheral-thinking friends, make sure you present your evidence in a clear and easy-to-grasp manner.
Heuristics pertain to the process of gaining (or discovering) knowledge, not by critical thinking and reasoning, but by intelligent guesswork.
The Length-Implies-Strength Heuristic is a principle that exerts an influence similar to evidence. It’s based on the assumption that a product or service is more likely to be viewed favorably if the ad is long and contains numerous, credible facts and figures.
The more you ask people to think, the more likely you’ll lose them. Express only one thought in a sentence, no more. Use your next sentence to say the next thing.
Ask a question or make a quick statement, and then answer the question or continue the thought in the next paragraph in just a few words.
By loading your ads with benefits, telling your prospects how and what they gain, how their lives will improve, you’re answering the “WIIFM” (What’s in it for me) question that they’re continually trying to satisfy.
Always put your biggest benefit in your headline.
Always feature deadlines to discourage response-killing human inertia.
There are four important qualities that a good headline may possess:
Self-interest.
News.
Curiosity.
Quick, easy way.
The following 22 tested headline starters can be used for almost any product or service.
Free
New
At Last
This
Announcing
Warning
Just Released
Now
Here’s
Theses
Which Of
Finally
Look
Presenting
Introducing
How
Amazing
Do You
Would You
Can You
If You
Starting Today
Below are 12 ways to lure readers into your copy:
Continue the Thought in the Headline
Ask a Question
Quote a Respected Authority
Give ’Em a Free Taste
Challenge Them to Prove It Works
Start With a Story of Scepticism
Tell What Others Are Saying (Bandwagon Effect)
Play Reporter
Get Personal With You, You, You
Tell a Dramatic Story
Give Super-Detailed Specs.
Lure Them With a Very Short First Sentence
One of the most powerful things you can do is educate your prospects about the specifics of your product or service.
Studies show that up to twice as many people read captions as body copy.
Questions create what’s called an open loop in the reader’s brain. Once the open loop is installed, the brain will continue to search for information in order to close the loop.
The best way to write any advertising is to start by making a list of all the benefits your product or service offers. After you’ve completed your list, rank them in order of importance—to your customer, not to you. Then, take the #1 benefit and work that benefit into the opening of your letter.
The purpose of your first sentence and paragraph is to get people to read your second sentence and paragraph.
Asking a question in your first sentence and following it with an extremely positive benefit, is a great way to keep your prospect reading.
Getting action requires two steps: (1) Make it easy to act, and then (2) ask for action.
People want their lives to be easier so explain to them how easy it is to buy from you.
When people can’t distinguish you from your competition, they have no reason to prefer you. And your goal in business is to have people prefer your product, to choose you over everyone else offering the same or a similar thing.
If you want your ad to stand out from the crowd, say something different.
Constantly ask yourself, “How can I give my customers more, knowing that they’ll reward me with more business?”
Offer the longest, strongest guarantee in your industry. (Your competition will hate you for this.) Such a guarantee conveys your confidence in what you sell, which in turn gives prospects the confidence to give you their money. As a bonus, it causes potential buyers to question your competitors’ weak—or absent—guarantee.
Odd-even pricing theory says that prices ending in odd amounts such as 77, 95, and 99 suggest greater value than prices rounded up to the next whole dollar. £9.77 seems like a better deal than £10.00.
Prestige pricing, by contrast, says that if you want something to be perceived as higher quality, you use only rounded whole numbers when pricing. For example, £1,000.00 suggests higher quality than £999.95, simply because we’ve been conditioned to interpret fractional pricing as suggestive of value.
Psychologists say that (1) fractional pricing suggests that the seller has calculated the lowest possible price, thus the odd number, and (2) we ignore the last digits rather than mentally rounding up. Doing so allows us to justify a purchase that may be teetering on the threshold of affordability.
22 Response Superchargers
Forget style—sell instead!
Scream “Free Information!”
Write short sentences and keep them reading.
Use short, simple words.
Write long copy.
Boil it down; cut out the fluff!
Stir up desire by piling on the benefits.
Show what you’re selling—action shots are best.
Get personal! Say: you, you, you.
Use selling subheads to break up long copy.
Put selling captions under your photos.
Write powerful visual adjectives to create mental movies.
Sell your product, not your competitor’s.
Don’t hold back, give them the full sell now.
Always include testimonials!
Make it ridiculously easy to act.
Include a response coupon to encourage action.
Set a deadline to break inertia.
Offer a free gift for quick replies.
Say the words Order Now!
Offer free shipping.
Boost response 50 percent or more with a “Bill Me” or credit option.
9 Ways to Convey Value
Scream “Sale!”
Give them a coupon.
Diminish the price: “Less than a cup of coffee a day.”
Explain why the price is low: “Our boss ordered too many!”
Amortize it: “Just $1.25 a day.”
Boost the value: Tell what it’s worth, not only what it costs.
Tell how much others have paid (and we’re happy to do so!).
Create a sense of scarcity with deadlines.
Employ psychological pricing.