Influence
by Robert CialdiniCompliance Professionals
Compliance: doing what someone says. A compliance professional is someone whose job it is to get strangers to do what they want, normally some sort of sales. Compliance professionals therefore must understand how to use levers of influence to their advantage. The thre main levers that Robert Cialdini outlines in Influence are:
- Relationship Cultivation
- Social proof and authority
- Scarcity and consistency
Compliance professionals who infuse their requests with one or another of the levers of influence are more likely to be successful. The use of these levers by practitioners is not necessarily exploitative. It only becomes so when the lever is not a natural feature of the situation but is fabricated by the practitioner.
Relationship Cultivation
Reciprocity: people will go a long to repay a “favour”, even to someone they don’t like. Likeability: it’s easier to accept offers from people you like or people that you think like you. Familiarity: “advice” heard from a friend of a friend seems more trustworthy
It wasn’t guests with an errorless stay who reported the highest satisfaction ratings and future loyalty. Rather, it was those who experienced a service stumble that was immediately put right by the hotel staff.
Because, as we have already seen, the rule allows one person to choose the nature of the indebting first favor and the nature of the debt-canceling return favor, we could easily be manipulated into an unfair exchange by those who might wish to exploit the rule.
Of course, when we make a compliance decision, it is always a good idea to separate our feelings about the requester from the request. Once immersed in even a brief personal and sociable contact with a requester, however, we may easily forget that distinction.
The information that someone fancies us can be a bewitchingly effective means for producing return liking and willing compliance. Therefore, when people flatter or claim affinity for us, they may well want something. If so, they’ll likely get it.
The information that someone fancies us can be a bewitchingly effective means for producing return liking and willing compliance. Therefore, when people flatter or claim affinity for us, they may well want something. If so, they’ll likely get it.
A Nielsen Company survey tells us why the Shaklee Corporation’s “endless chain” technique is so successful: 92 percent of consumers trust product recommendations from someone they know, such as a liked friend, which is far more than any other source and 22 percent more than the next highest source, online reviewers.
Social Proof and Authority
The larger the number of people that seem to believe something, the more likely you are to believe it. “3 people just bought…”, “our most popular…”, “fan favourite…” When there is uncertainty surrounding the right course of action, people “learn” the correct behaviours by subtly observing others. People underestimate the level of compliance engendered by authority in all forms.
The pub placed a sign on the bar stating, truthfully, that the brewery’s most popular beer that week was its porter. Porter sales doubled immediately. Click, run.
Our folly is not that we use others’ behavior to help decide what to do in a situation; that is in keeping with the well-founded principle of social proof. The folly occurs when we do so automatically in response to counterfeit evidence provided by profiteers.
In the case of social proof, there are three main optimizing conditions: when we are unsure of what is best to do (uncertainty); when the evidence of what is best to do comes from numerous others (the many); and when that evidence comes from people like us (similarity).
First, we seem to assume that if a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don’t. Especially when we are uncertain, we are willing to place an enormous amount of trust in the collective knowledge of the crowd.
By establishing their basic truthfulness on relatively minor issues, the compliance professionals who use this practice can then be more believable when stressing the important aspects of their argument.
Scarcity and consistency
Decreasing availability of an opportunity increases value. Consistency of action is a strong signal of one’s reliability. Compliance momentum involves small acts of compliance (e.g. signing a petition) that can then be leveraged into bigger responses as people aim to remain consistent - their identity becomes tied to be someone who performs acts like those previous.
people see a thing as more desirable when it recently has become less available than when it has been scarce all along.
This raises the worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak or unpopular position can get us to agree with the position by arranging to have their message restricted.
Charitable organizations, for instance, will often use progressively escalating commitments to induce individuals to perform major favors. The trivial first commitment of agreeing to be interviewed can begin a “momentum of compliance” that induces such later behaviors as organ or bone-marrow donations.
Once you’ve got a person’s self-image where you want it, that person should comply naturally with a whole range of requests aligned with this new self-view.
Commitments are most effective when they are active, public, effortful, and viewed as internally motivated (voluntary), because each of these elements changes self-image.