Influence

Influence has been the go-to book for marketers since its release in 1984, which delivers six key principles behind human influence and explains them with countless practical examples.

Imagine caveman Grok would have constantly been worried about his tasty beets. He’d never have shared any with Jane, the friendly cavewoman next door, because he didn’t see anything in it for him.

Subsequently, she would have never returned the favor with a late-night cave dinner and neither you, nor I, nor any of us would be here.

So why did Grok share his beets with Jane?

Reciprocity.

He knew that if he gave her food, she would owe him one.

Even though the reciprocity bias is one of the foundational reasons why we’re alive, today it’s often used against us.

We always feel compelled to return a favor, and marketers know this.

Not only that, we’ll usually return a much bigger favor than was made to us.

Consider this study from Cornell University in 1971, where researcher Joe brought some of the participants a 10 cent bottle of Coke (good times).

When asked to buy raffle tickets from Joe shortly afterwards, the people who “owed Joe one” bought 50 cents worth of tickets.

This is not only 5 times as much as the price of the Coke, but also twice as much money spent on tickets as in the scenarios where Joe didn’t bring people the Coke beforehand.

It’s the same trick the Hare Krishna’s have been using for decades by giving people flowers, and marketers often abuse it.

However, you can also flip this around.

Instead of trying to guilt people into reciprocity, why not just do good things without being asked to either way?

Go out of your way to help other people and you’ll naturally build up a massive good karma account. No tricks needed.

Don’t you hate missing out on a good deal? I know I’ve beaten myself up over a few Appsumo deals because I didn’t act fast enough. The fact that you get so angry at yourself for not buying those jeans last week when they were on sale, or got that delicious pizza before they ran out for the day, is the reason why the scarcity bias works. We beat ourselves up a lot for missing opportunities, regret is a powerful feeling. People who were told of a limited time meat sale bought 3 times as much, even more when they learned that only they knew about the sale. It makes me sad to see all this fake scarcity around the web now, where marketers peddle digital products with countdowns, limited edition labels and deadlines, as if they’re rare metals or oil. So pay…