A Merging State of Mind

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

― John Donne

In Pre-Suasion, psychologist Robert Cialdini describes a seventh principle of persuasion: unity.

When customers come and act together, Cialdini says, they become more likely to buy.

"Co-creating" exemplifies the principle in action.

When a new fast-food restaurant asked prospects to assess its business plan, those asked for "advice," rather than "opinions,” or “expectations,” were more likely to eat at the new restaurant.

The use of the word "advice," in effect, invited prospects to co-create the restaurant. That triggered a gratifying sense of tribal togetherness.

"Companies struggle to get consumers to feel bonded with and therefore loyal to their brands," Cialdini says. "It’s a battle they’ve been winning by inviting current and prospective customers to co-create with them novel or updated products and services, most often by providing the company with information as to desirable features.

"However, within such marketing partnerships, consumer input must be framed as advice to the company, not as opinions about or expectations for the company.

"The differential phrasing might seem minor, but it is critical to achieving the company’s unitization goal. Providing advice puts a person in a merging state of mind, which stimulates a linking of one’s own identity with another party’s. Providing an opinion or expectation, on the other hand, puts a person in an introspective state of mind, which involves focusing on oneself. These only slightly different forms of consumer feedback—and the nonetheless vitally different merging-versus-separating mind-sets they produce—can have a significant impact on consumer engagement with a brand.”

Ready to Work Two Jobs?

I often encounter folks who've opted, or been forced, to freelance.

A great many share something in common: they don't want to work two jobs.

Unfortunately, that's what you have to do to succeed.

Because it ain't easy to cultivate "1,000 true fans." Else, we'd all do it.

Editor Kevin Kelly first expressed the idea a decade ago:

You can define a "true fan" as anyone willing to send you $100 a year for your product. Provided your cost of goods is low, a freelancer can get by comfortably with only 1,000 true fans.

And the money need not arrive in lump sums; it can trickle in (fans can subscribe, say, at the price of $8.34 a month for 12 months).

However you're paid, the bar to success is low, Kelly says.

"To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans."

Besides keeping costs low, the challenge freelancers face is difficult enough to put most of them off.

To succeed, you have to cultivate 1,000 solid relationships―both financial ones (no one else can profit from your work) and professional ones (fans must like and trust you).

It's easy to attract 1,000 or more fair-weather fans (just ask Paul Reubens). But you need 1,000 diehards.

And, although digital platforms that enable relationships with diehards abound, nurturing those relationships could kill you.

"The truth is that cultivating a thousand true fans is time consuming, sometimes nerve racking, and not for everyone," Kelly says.

"Done well it can become another full-time job."

The Art of the Real

In the face of historically low approval ratings, President Trump mounted a puzzling charade on Monday.

He opened a Cabinet meeting to the media and filled the hour with a ham-fisted celebration of unearned and imaginary achievements in jobs creation, crime reduction, and national security.

His pathetically amateurish attempt at PR backfired.

Little wonder.

Forget fake: constituents―and customers―want real.

Nine of 10, in fact, told Bonfire Marketing they value real over every other brand attribute.

Customers today back brands they perceive to be honest, and shy from those they don't, says Andrew Reid, author of The Authenticity Handbook. "Authenticity is now a business imperative," Reid says.

I urge President Trump and his handlers to read my whitepaper, Path of Persuasion: Winning Customers in the Age of Suspicion.

It's an Oldy, but Goodly.

Grammar Police

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach;

those who can't teach, police grammar on the Internet.

― Ruadhán J. McElroy

Two psycholinguistics at the University of Michigan have proven the judgmental behavior of grammar policemen reflects a bigger issue: they're annoying people all round.

Tests of 83 subjects revealed a correlation between crabbing about typos and grammatical slips and three of the "Big 5" personality traits.

People who spot and judge others harshly for sloppy typing and grammar, the study showed, are dogmatic, antagonistic, and introverted.

"This is the first study to show that the personality traits of listeners/readers have an effect on the interpretation of language," says lead researcher Julie Boland.

Land of the Living

The basest of all things is to be afraid.

― William Faulkner

When he accepted the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature―the same year Russia exploded its first atom bomb―William Faulkner asked writers to put aside physical fear and choose life over death.

"There are no longer problems of the spirit," Faulkner said. "There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing, because only that is worth writing about."

Until the writer rediscovers "the old verities and truths of the heart," Faulkner said, he "will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man."

Last week―while terror reigned in London, Paris, Melbourne, Kabul and Tehran―Bob Dylan delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a biblio-memoir seven times longer than Faulkner's address.

Where Faulkner was brief, Dylan rambles, Kerouac-style.

But one chord sounds the same.

Midway through, Dylan describes reading All Quiet on the Western Front as a schoolboy:

"This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals. You're stuck in a nightmare. Sucked up into a mysterious whirlpool of death and pain. You're defending yourself from elimination. You're being wiped off the face of the map."

Dylan found the novel's depiction of war exhausting. "I put this book down and closed it up. I never wanted to read another war novel again, and I never did."

He discovered the "old verities and truths of the heart" instead in an adventure tale, The Odyssey, where the hero determinedly chooses life over death.

Dylan describes Odysseus' visit with Achilles in the underworld. Odysseus is shocked to hear the condemned warrior say, "I traded a long life full of peace and contentment for a short one full of honor and glory. I just died, that's all. There was no honor. No immortality."

Were he able, Achilles says, he'd return to the world, even if that meant he'd be some farmer's slave. "Whatever his struggles of life were," Dylan says, "they were preferable to being here in this dead place. That's what songs are too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living."

Songs may not be literature in the same sense novels are, Dylan says, but they come from the same neck of the woods, a country where physical fear is so base it's forgotten.

Or as the evangelist John said, "There is no fear in love."