Library Required reading Why people say yes
Why the Turquoise Sold at Twice the Price
Robert Cialdini spent nearly three years inside sales and advertising training to learn why people say yes. His principles explain a lot of marketing, and a few of his stories explain a lot about signals and quotas.
Robert B. Cialdini · Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion · 1984
What it is
A psychologist’s account of why people comply. Alongside his experiments, Cialdini went undercover:
“For nearly three years, then, I combined my experimental studies with a decidedly more entertaining program of systematic immersion into the world of compliance professionals—sales operators, fund-raisers, recruiters, advertisers, and others.” Introduction
What he found sorted into six principles, one per chapter: reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority and scarcity. Those six come from the original edition (1984, revised since). The 2021 edition, Influence, New and Expanded, adds a seventh, unity.
What you’ll take from it
The principles are useful on their own. The part worth holding onto, though, is the idea underneath them, which is that people take shortcuts. A single feature stands in for the whole decision, and the response fires automatically. Cialdini’s name for it is “click, whirr.”
His first example is a jewelry store in Arizona whose turquoise wouldn’t sell. Before a buying trip, the owner left a note to cut the price in half, and her head saleswoman read the “½” as a “2”. The whole lot sold out at twice the original price. Why? The buyers, mostly tourists who knew little about turquoise, were using a rule, and the rule was expensive equals good.
“Price alone had become a trigger feature for quality” Chapter 1, “Weapons of Influence”
Where it shows up in your numbers
Price standing in for quality is a signal, and signals are what Power Law Performance is about. Economists worked out when advertising and price can honestly signal quality. Cialdini shows how readily buyers act on them, honest or not. That cuts both ways, because the same shortcuts that let a good signal work are the ones a cheap imitation exploits.
He also prints a reader’s report that could be an article on this site. A former TV and stereo salesperson had a quota for service contracts, and “a one-year contract counted just as much toward my quota as a three-year contract did.” So the pitch led with the expensive three-year plan, let the customer turn it down, and then closed the cheap one-year plan. The hit rate was about seventy percent, against roughly forty for the rest of the department (Chapter 2). That’s a volume-based KPI at work. Every contract counted the same toward the quota, so the cheap one-year plan is what got sold.
Next on the shelf Seth Godin, All Marketers Are Liars, and his blog