The Power of Because

Part 1 of a 7-part series

Kevin Hogan, author of The Science of Influence, says there are seven "magic words" guaranteed to make you more persuasive.

Because—preceding any reason, no matter how vague—will often persuade people to agree to your request.

They'll do so automatically.

That's because we're conditioned from childhood to comply when offered justification for a request.

Feelings First

Note to B2B marketers: Money isn't everything.

Yes, money informs all business decisions. But emotion propels buying decisions—including the decision to buy your product.

Your product not only has to be the right choice; it has to feel like it. Without that feeling, all options seem pretty much the same.

Leading with the detailed financial arguments needed to seal buying decisions can take the wind out of your sails (pun intended).

So before piling on proof points, rouse your customer. 

Tell attention-grabbing stories of "before and after" transformations experienced by other customers.

Omit those stories and you'll find yourself merely reciting a lot of facts and figures, which feed the brain, but starve the gut.

Sales gurus Erik Peterson and Tim Riesterer, in Conversations That Win the Complex Sale, caution:

"One of the most common mistakes sales professionals make when selling is that they lead too early with proof. They believe that all they need to do is use the brute force of facts and logic in their pitch, and the prospect will buy from them. What you need to understand is that proof has its place. But it should come only after you've created the emotional momentum in your prospect that makes him want to move from where he is to where your solution can take him."

Where's Your Proof?

At a turning point in the novel Great Expectations, the central character is told by his attorney, “Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.”

Are you counting on looks to persuade prospects? Or does your copy provide the proof points they require?

To move prospects from interest to desire, proof points are mandatory. They give prospects the evidence they need to believe what you claim might be true. But in the rush to distinguish their products from competitors', marketers often neglect to provide even the most common ones: 

• Qualifications of the people behind the product
• Specifications
• Performance statistics
• Test results
• Achievements of customers who've used the product
• Testimonials
• Endorsements by experts
• Awards won
• Demonstrations
• Unconditional guarantees

Without question, today's ADD-positive prospects want to learn one thing about your product: how it's different.

That doesn't mean they'll settle for your word on it.

PS: My thanks to Richard Hendrickson for inspiring this post.

Should Your Copy Forgo Good Grammar?

Bad grammar in an ad's headline caught my eye recently. (The ad comes from a company that rents furniture to tradeshow exhibitors.)

YOUR VISION.
OUR FURNISHINGS.
IT GETS YOU NOTICED.

What could the copywriter have been thinking?

• The combination of "Your vision" and "Our furnishings" gets you noticed;
• The two antecedent nouns (one of which itself is plural) don't require use of a plural pronoun; or
• "It gets you noticed" sounds livelier than "They get you noticed."

Should your copy forgo good grammar? The answer's yes if:

• The rules of grammar weaken your argument, and
• You're certain your audience doesn't prize learning.

I'd bet the copywriter thought "It gets you noticed" packed punch, and the rental company knows its customers don't care whether a pronoun disagrees with its antecedents.

Ad man David Ogilvy said, "I don’t know the rules of grammar. If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think."

Watch Your Language

The father of phrases like death tax (a.k.a. estate tax) and climate change (a.k.a. global warming), Republican strategist Frank Luntz employs focus groups to examine words’ emotional content.

His goal is to find words that will change people's visceral reactions to hot-button issues.

In a 2012 speech to the Washington State Chamber of Commerce, Luntz advised business executives to revise some of their pet phrases. He recommended they replace :

• Free enterprise with economic freedom; 
• Middle class with hardworking taxpayers; and 
• Business climate with healthy economy.

Luntz also recommended executives strike understand, accountable and important from their vocabularies, because listeners no longer have faith in these words.

You need not agree with Luntz's politics—I, for example, would replace his death tax with fairness reset and his climate change with planetary meltdown—to agree with his theory.

The emotional content of words makes them powerfully persuasive.

Novelist Joseph Conrad once wrote, "He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense."