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Mastering the Art of Sales and Persuasion: Frame Ideas Carefully with Dan Pink, Author, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Label with care
One way to clarify things is to put them into a frame, to reframe them so people can see the essence of it more clearly. And there are a lot of interesting frames that the social science evidence gives us to become more persuasive and effective. One of them is simply how we label things, the label frame. There’s a great study of the very, very famous prisoners dilemma where at the risk of reciting the whole thing basically the idea is you have two people. If they both cooperate they’re going to be – they’re gonna be fine. But if one cooperates and the other doesn’t, the one who doesn’t cooperate is in bad shape.
Some scholars did a study of this where they essentially presented that prisoners dilemma problem. To one group they called it the Wall Street Game – it had to do with sharing money. One group they called it the Wall Street Game. And the idea was that if you shared and the other person shared, you both would get the money. But if one person shared and the other person did not, the person who was selfish actually gained. And if neither one of you shared, both of you were out of luck. So basically, when they called this the Wall Street Game nobody shared. When they presented the exact same game and called it the Community Game a lot of people shared. So it’s the exact same endeavor but how you labeled it created people’s expectations and actually dramatically affected their behavior. So be very careful what you label things. And if you’re looking to lead people in a different direction, the label you put on it itself offers a frame that guides people’s eyes and hearts and minds in the way that they look at it.
Reveal a blemish
Our tendency is to hide bad news. Hide things that aren’t so good. And there’s a great piece of research out of Stanford that went like this. They gave participants – a group of participants, divided the participants into two groups. To one group they presented hiking boots and they had a huge list of positive attributes of the hiking boots. These hiking boots are waterproof, they have a huge warranty, they’ve been endorsed by a hiking magazine. Huge list of positive attributes. To the second group they presented that same long list of positive attributes, but at the bottom had a very small negative. So it was something like, unfortunately they only come in two colors or unfortunately they only come in two styles. Our tendency is to say well, why even talk about the negative, let’s actually sort of hide those things. But it turned out that people were more likely to buy the hiking boots when the blemish was revealed rather than when it was concealed. Why is that? Lots of reasons, one of which, the main one of which is this – The most important question in any kind of persuasive effort, Robert Cialdini, the great Robert Cialdini calls this the contrast principle.
The most important question is, compared to what? When you have a long list of attributes there’s no compared to what question. When you have a long list of attributes followed by the small negative there’s a compare to what question. That what happens is that small negative actually increases the salience of the long list of positives. It operates like a little flashlight shining a light on those positives. So people look at the small negatives and say, well that’s nothing. Look at this long list of positives. So in a kind of counterintuitive way the small blemish increases the salience of the positives in a way that didn’t happen when you presented only the positives. Now, there’s some caution here. One, it has to be a small negative, not a big negative. And two, it has to follow the long list of positives. Our tendency in many ways is to when we have an offering that isn’t entirely perfect that has a blemish or two is to hide those blemishes and hope they never get found out. But there is an argument based on this research from Stanford showing that actually revealing small, again small honest blemishes in otherwise strong offerings can actually increase their attractiveness.
Pivot to potential
Let’s say you’re interviewing for a job. You’re trying to sell yourself. What should you emphasize – your experience or your potential? Most people, most job counselors would say talk about your experience, talk about your experience. And I’m here to tell you that there’s some very, very interesting research showing, you should talk about your potential. That in many cases the framing things in terms of potential is more persuasive to people. Ideally, you want to use them both. Ideally you want to talk about your experience and then pivot to your potential. But when people look at potential they actually have a more expansive view.
They have a wider view of your possibilities and there’s some great research showing, estimating where people had to estimate what they would pay an NBA basketball player with this record or with this set of statistics versus an NBA – a new rookie NBA player who had high potential. And even though you had veterans who had very strong statistics and would deserve a lot of money, people ended up paying the rookie with potential more because we look at potential a little bit differently.