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How and why people get influenced to do what they do has always fascinated me. I’d always heard about the book Influence by Robert Cialdini and it was always one of those books that I wanted to pick up at some point. That point came at the start of this year when I picked it up on Audible and thought right lets give this a go. Robert Ciladini for years immersed himself into the world of compliance and influence wanting to understand how various levers were used. He ended up coming to 7 levers these are:
In today’s post I’ll be discussing 5 of these levers, these are the ones which resonated with me the most when reading and I feel I can apply to my everyday and work life.
The first principle he discussed in Influence by Robert Cialdini is that of Reciprocity. This is the human need to want to repay favours that are given to us. This can be extremely powerful when you look at the pure statistics behind it. One example of this I found particularly interesting in the book was with a restaurant. In the study they found that just by leaving a mint with the bill for the customer increased tips by 3.3%. Even more fascinating, if 2 mints were left with the bill, tips went up 14%! Just a simple favour of giving someone a mint makes someone want to repay you for what you’ve provided.
When explaining reciprocity, Robert Cialdini also discussed an interesting technique called Rejection-Then-Retreat. This technique works particularly well for those in sales. Say you want someone to agree to a certain request or price. You should first make a larger request/price point and if you get rejected, then make a concession down to the request/price you actually want. This has a greater chance of acceptance due to reciprocation. Where you are doing them a favour by reducing the price, they will want to do you a favour by accepting.
The next principle discussed in Influence by Robert Cialdini is Liking. We are more drawn to people who we like or are like us. When you see someone who is like you, you are much more likely to project yourself onto them. You see yourself as them and are more likely to be influenced by them. This can be extremely powerful in influence. If we can relate to people and make them feel like we are like them or they relate us to something good and positive, they are much more likely to be influenced by you. Remember people always buy from someone they like and feel they can trust.
Following on Robert Cialdini talks about social proof and how this is a lever of influence. Nothing draws a crowd quite like a crowd. Think about in your life, how many times when you have been walking through a city and seen a crowd? What’s your natural tendency to do when you see it? Walk over and see what’s going on. If you stand in a crowd long enough, people are a lot more likely to turn up and gather around to see why others are gathering around. If we see other people are interested in something, we are much more likely to be interested.
Let’s look at this from the perspective of social media. Say there are 2 pages advertising a product say a protein shake bottle. Which page are we more likely to go to and buy from, the page with 200 followers or 20,000 followers. Of course the page with 20,000 followers. When we see more people interested in something and following something, we are much more likely to follow. That’s why in the case of influencers when they start to grow larger, their rate of growth accelerates. People see more people following and subscribing to them and they become more likely to subscriber too and then be influenced by them.
Next up in Influence by Robert Cialdini, we are introduced to the principle of authority. This is simply that that the more authority you have the more likely people are to comply with you. Let’s look at our own lives, we automatically trust a doctor to deal with our health. Why is that? It’s because of the perceived authority of them. You automatically trust and are easily influenced by a doctor because of their perceived authority in the subject of medicine. Another example of authority in use is with Tony Robbins. When ever you go to one of his seminars he starts of with a video talking about all these people he’s helped and influenced. This creates the aura of authority around him and automatically makes people more likely to listen and be influenced by what he says.
The last lever I found interesting in Influence by Robert Cialdini was Scarcity. This can be extremely powerful when used correctly. People are influenced to buy much more when scarcity is associated with an item. That fear of missing out comes in to play. People are extremely concerned with what they could be missing out on in their life and will do what they have to, to avoid it. Just look at Amazon, they use scarcity all time when they sell items e.g. when your buying an item it will say something like ‘3 left in stock’. This makes the buyer thank right I’ve got to buy this asap before I miss out.
So there it is my lessons from Influence by Robert Cialdini, if you enjoyed it wand to give the book a read yourself be sure to buy