They only stopped contrast from working against them. And that alone produced a 34.4% recovery of sales.
We’re now talking about a simple concept that can dramatically impact the possible success of all our communication and the compounding effect each step has on the next. Needless to say, important to get this right.
Contrast amplifies the impact of the principles of persuasion. Not just two or three, but it can do that for all seven of
the universal principles of persuasion.
When it comes to perception, listen closely and decide if this is something that is of value to you. Through the use of contrast, we can change the way someone experiences anything. For example, the way that people experience your price, your value, your level of authority,
the amount of effort it will take for them to perform a task that you’re requesting, the level of commitment or loyalty that you’re asking for, would that be of value to you as an individual? I’d imagine so. Now, imagine the value if everyone in your team knew how to use this. Would that be of even greater value?
or disappointed with how hard it is to close proposals, to get compliance or cooperation within your team, and to get results. And you’d like to communicate in a way that brings results easier without compromising your ethics, then listen up and start implementing this immediately so you can see the results that were yours to have, but have been wasted unnecessarily up to now.
Let me give you a rule or definition for contrast. There are various ways to describe what it does, but this is one from Dr. Cialdini that I found very helpful. We can change the way people perceive anything by what we present to them immediately before we present that thing.
Actually, when I was writing what I was going to share with you in this episode, I was at the gym. I was doing chest exercises on a machine and you might be familiar with that, you have to put a pin in a stack of weights to select the amount of weight that you want to work with. On the first go, I had not realised that I had put the pin by accident at a weight that was nearly double of what I wanted and had used before.
I thought I had selected the same weight now, but instead of 12 repetitions that I had achieved last time at that weight, I found the exercise a lot harder than last time and only managed 5 repetitions, which surprised me.
I immediately decided that I would take 5 kg or 11 lbs off for the next go. When then I realised that I had been trying to move nearly twice as much by accidentally selecting the incorrect weight, I of course set the correct and maximum amount of weight from days ago.
The exercise and the weight that seemed the most I could muster last time. Now, at my second attempt, seemed light work.
While the week before, this maximum weight of mine seemed very heavy, my initial experience this week with nearly double the weight made me experience the weight I thought was heavy last week as much lighter. This is an example of how contrast affected my perception of weight.
In schools, teachers sometimes do an exercise with students involving three buckets of water. The middle bucket is filled with room temperature water. The buckets to the side of it are filled with hot and cold water. The students are asked to put one hand in the cold and one hand in the hot water for a minute or so. Then they should put both hands in the middle room temperature bucket of water
and students can’t believe what they’re experiencing. While both hands are now in the same bucket, the hand that was in hot water now feels like it’s in cold water. And the hand that was in cold water now feels like it’s in hot…
As I said, it works on all stimuli. What comes before affects how we experience what comes after.
I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you’re sitting down, okay?
Well then, I’m getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out of the window of my dormitory when it caught fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in hospital and now I can almost see normally and I only get those sick headaches once a day.
Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory and my jump was witnessed by the attendant at the gas station near the dorm. And he was the one that called the fire department and the ambulance. He also visited me in hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burned out dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute.
He’s a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to be married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, mother and dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you’re looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care that you gave me as a child.
The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. Now that I’ve brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire. I did not have a concussion or a skull fracture. I was not in hospital. I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I’m not infected and there is no boyfriend.
However, I am getting a D in American history and an F in chemistry and I wanted you to see those marks in their proper perspective. Your loving daughter Sharon.” As Dr. Cialdini commented, Sharon might be failing chemistry, but she gets an A in psychology.
Or worse, and in my experience, far more likely, contrast will use its awesome power actively against you. Actively and effectively reducing your success.
Forget about failing to benefit there’s a large chance that this is right now very effectively reducing your sales teams conversion rates and forcing them to waste time, waste resources and lose more competitive advantage. But of course, persuasion science affects a lot more than the outcomes of sales teams.
Then there is advertising, marketing, HR, PR, customer service, and other departments all trying to move towards their goals in the most efficient way, but are all dependent on their ability to convince or persuade other people.
Let’s circle back to how this affects your team in practical terms. Let’s look at a situation where you have multiple options to present that your audience needs to choose from or you hope they will choose from. There’s a good chance that just because you have to share multiple options or elements with your audience, you will put them in an order that will cost you success and compliance.
We see this go wrong so often. Even when messages have been put together by experienced sales and advertising departments or agencies. It seems it is often counterintuitive to put the options we need to present in the order that they should be if we want contrast to work for us and not
against us. That’s why I say you’re likely to get this wrong. In fact, it’s safe bet that when you inspect your offerings, your advertising, your proposals, your requests that team members are making or you’re making of your team members, if you look at your website, your brochures, that you will now discover
that you’ve made this exceedingly costly mistake for years. But you’ll be able to fix it after this episode.
All the principles of persuasion impact many facets in business. Lead generation, sales conversion rates, average purchase, repeat purchase in the future, and profit margins. If we don’t know how to effectively use the principles of persuasion, it costs us at every level. But each level also has a compounding effect on the others.
Meaning an underperformance of 10% in lead generating investments has a flow on effect to our total conversions, total purchase value, total repurchases, etc. Now add to that the fact that contrast is an amplifier of all the principles that we could be using.
We’re now talking about a simple concept that can dramatically impact the possible success of all our communication and the compounding effect each step has on the next. Needless to say, important to get this right.
Which advocates for and creates positive change in mental health, grief and suicide prevention, while encouraging people to seek support and talk openly about their struggles. We were in the last month of our financial year. So the gentleman made a funny appeal to business owners to make a donation to the charity before the financial year ended. He said something like this.
“We’re at the end of the financial year, and if you’ve got any spare money, then we would be happy to take it off your hands. If you’ve got $5, give it to us. If you have $10, we’ll be happy to take it. If you have $50, we would be delighted. $100, $500, or $1,000, or maybe $5,000, or $50,000. We would be happy to take it off your hands.”
He got a nice laugh.
Now, what did he do wrong? It’s all in the wrong order.
By suggesting 5 dollars first, it made the 10 dollars seem like more money than it was. 50 dollars seemed more than it is. And so did 100 dollars and 500 dollars. 1000 dollars seemed like a lot of money, and 5000 and 50,000 dollars seemed like much larger amounts of money than they actually were.
If he was going to be successful with that message and get some businesses to make a donation, he would have likely achieved a lower average donation than was possible.
What should you have done?
Go from large to small. Which would have sounded something like this. “We’re at the end of the financial year and if you’ve got any spare money, then we’d be happy to take it over your hands. If you’ve got $50,000, give it to us. If you have $5,000, we’d be happy to take it. If you have $1,000, we would be delighted. $500, $100, $50,
or maybe just $10 or $5, we would be happy to take it off your hands.” He would have gotten the same laugh, but at the same time, the $50,000 as an initial amount would have made the 50,000 seem less than it is. The $1,000 suggestion would have started to feel small, and the $500, $100, $50,
$10 and $5 even more so.
They displayed the cheapest at the top of the list. Then the middle package of phone calls and data followed underneath it by the top of the line service, which offered the most amount of calls and data included. Just like the board member of ‘It’s Okay Not To Be Okay’, and many other businesses, perhaps yours included, they had put them in the wrong order. The cheap package
made the middle package seem more costly than it actually was. And the top of the line package felt even more costly. T-Mobile then turned it around. They put the most costly package on the top, followed by the middle priced package, and then the cheapest at the bottom. The results were that their top of the line package
saw sales increase by 34.4%.
Now, be a detective of influence and answer me this.
Did they, in this new order of the options, use contrast to have their audience experience the price of the top-of-the-line option as smaller than it actually was?
The answer is no. With this new order, contrast wasn’t actually affecting how the price of the top-of-the-line package was experienced, because it became the first thing people saw now. This means that contrast didn’t actually actively work to make the top-of-the-line package seem cheaper than it was.
By now changing the order in which they were presented, they only stopped contrast from making the top-of-the-line offer feel more expensive. They only stopped contrast from working against them. And that alone produced a 34.4% recovery of sales.
How could they use contrast to make the top-of-the-line offer seem cheaper than it is?
Well, that is something that we’ll leave for formal training.
Let’s consider formal training in ethical persuasion for a single individual, either privately in a one-on-one course that costs X or in one of my public courses that anyone can join, which would only cost Z. Combining online self-learning with live online calls where we focus on building that application skill and confidence. To learn persuasion properly,
in our flagship course, you won’t have to invest a year or hundreds of hours. It is just a 20 hour investment over eight weeks. Approximately an hour a week, watching pre-recorded training videos teaching you, combined with an online video call of normally an hour per week. That can fit into the busiest schedules, I’d hope.
Did you pick up on it?
The cost X of a private one-on-one tuition is of course higher than the cost Z for a public course. The higher cost X makes the cost Z of the public course seem less costly. Then I touched on the time it took to do the course.
By bringing up the genuine comparison that some courses take a year and hundreds of hours to complete and that our program is just 20 hours over 8 weeks, it puts the time investment in perspective.
for a single year, or it wouldn’t be unfair to realise the wages paid to a team member throughout their career, the investment now in some formal training that will make them more productive and happier in their role is rather insignificant”.
Did you pick it here? It’s getting easier to recognise, right? But believe me, it is not easy to recognise when and where to use it.
In this paragraph, I used the thought of wages to make the investment in formal persuasion training seem small and insignificant, which it is. I mean, if you’re investing $65,000 in annual wages for a sales team member and you’re hoping that they will add $150,000 or more to your turnover or profits.
Why wouldn’t you want to make sure that for a small investment, they were able to use the science to reach the goals that you would like them to achieve?
But I did something else in that paragraph and I doubt you picked up on it. Let me repeat it.
“If we think about the cost of wages for a single year, or it wouldn’t be unfair to realise the wages paid to a team member throughout their career, the investment now in some formal training that will make them more productive and happier in their role is rather insignificant”.
I first made you think about a year of wages. To make the thought of total wages over the duration of a 5, 10, 20 year career seem even larger. After that, I mentioned the investment in a course.
So yes, I contrasted the multiple years of wages against the course, but not before I made you realise how much larger the investment in a person over their career is compared to a single year. Making the investment in the course feel even more insignificant. As it really is.
You have many goals ahead of you in life, business and private goals. Considering the value of all of that combined, you really owe it to yourself and to those who depend on you to make this skill your own. It took you years to learn to read and write and communicate. Now invest just a fraction of time to learn what matters most.
If I can be of assistance, I’d love to hear from you. And if you’ve liked how I’ve introduced this topic to you so far, with all these complimentary lessons and insights, then you probably already know that you’d have a good experience learning this skill with me, as so many others have done so far. Don’t keep struggling with ineffective communication.
You should have learned this years ago. Let’s not delay any longer.
