by Roger Dooley
The Persuasion Slide
The Persuasion Slide. Copyright 2016, Roger Dooley
All rights reserved.
For questions, comments, error reports, speaking engagements, etc. please visit rogerdooley.com.
The Persuasion Slide
A New Way to Market to Your
Customer’s Conscious Needs
and Unconscious Mind
Roger Dooley
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE FOR BRAINFLUENCE
INTRODUCTION: WHY MARKETERS NEED A NEW PERSUASION MODEL
SAD TRUTH: WE ARE LOUSY AT PERSUASION
“DON’T CONFUSE ME WITH FACTS”
SCIENCE TO THE RESCUE?
THE DIVIDE BETWEEN BUSINESS AND ACADEMIA
OUR GOAL
THE PARADOX OF (MARKETING) CHOICE
CHAPTER 1: SLIDE-OLOGY 101
THE ORIGIN OF THE PERSUASION SLIDE
INCLINED TO SLIDE
AND, IN THE OTHER CORNER, FRICTION
OPPOSING FORCES
GETTING LAUNCHED
G – A – N – F
CHAPTER 2: TWO KINDS OF THINKING
RIGHT BRAIN VS. LEFT BRAIN
LIZARDS AND LEMURS
SYSTEM 1 VS. SYSTEM 2
OUR LAZY BRAINS LIKE SHORTCUTS
CONSCIOUS VS. NON-CONSCIOUS
BOTH KINDS OF THINKING ARE IMPORTANT
CHAPTER 3: THE PERSUASION SLIDE
A SIMPLE EXAMPLE
A TERRIBLE SLIDE - DECONSTRUCTED
BUILDING A BETTER SLIDE
CHAPTER 4: WORK WITH GRAVITY, NOT AGAINST IT
ALIGN YOUR MESSAGE
YOU VS. WE
GOT GRAVITY?
CHAPTER 5: THE NUDGE
OVERCOMING INERTIA
THE MOTIVATION COMPONENT OF THE NUDGE
TWO NUDGE EXTREMES
CHAPTER 6: MAKING A STEEPER SLIDE
INITIAL MOTIVATION
DEATH OF THE HARD-SELLING SALESMAN
GO WITH GRAVITY
CONSCIOUS MOTIVATION BOOSTERS
GIFTS AND BRIBES
NON-CONSCIOUS MOTIVATORS
CIALDINI’S SIX PRINCIPLES
MORE NON-CONSCIOUS MOTIVATION: EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
NON-CONSCIOUS MOTIVATOR EXAMPLE: FREE!
MANY MORE NON-CONSCIOUS MOTIVATORS
CHAPTER 7: FIGHTING FRICTION
TYPES OF REAL FRICTION
BLOCKERS
DIFFICULTY AND EFFORT INCREASE FRICTION
FORM FRICTION
CONFUSION AND UNCERTAINTY
OTHER KINDS OF REAL FRICTION
PERCEIVED FRICTION: “IMAGINARY” DIFFICULTY
CHOICE FRICTION
ABANDONED SHOPPING CARTS
LOW CONVERSION
THE FRICTIONLESS ORDER
CHAPTER 8: IF IT’S NOT MOTIVATION, IT’S FRICTION
THE FRICTION HUNT
LANDING PAGES – PURE CONVERSION
OTHER WEBSITE PAGES
CHAPTER 9: SMALL SLIDES
MY NOT-SO-SIMPLE LUGGAGE BUY
MICRO CONVERSIONS
MICRO-COMMITMENTS
TRULY COMPLEX SLIDES
CHAPTER 10: FINAL TAKEAWAY
FREE RESOURCES
APPENDIX: REAL-WORLD SLIDES
EXAMPLE: COMPLIANCE WITH MEDICAL INSTRUCTIONS
GETTING A PATIENT TO TAKE AN ENTIRE COURSE OF ANTIBIOTICS
THE TYPICAL SCENARIO
GRAVITY – THE PATIENT’S MOTIVATION
THE NUDGE
ENHANCED NUDGING
BETTER NUDGES, BETTER RESULTS
THE ANGLE – MOTIVATION FROM HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONALS
CONSCIOUS MOTIVATORS
NON-CONSCIOUS AND EMOTIONAL MOTIVATORS
REDUCING FRICTION
MULTI-STAGE SLIDE EXAMPLE: COLLEGE ENROLLMENT
SLIDE 1 – MAKING THE “LIST”
SLIDE 2 – THE APPLICATION
CUTTING APPLICATION FRICTION
SLIDE 3 – ENROLLMENT
SUB-SLIDES
END NOTES
About The Author
Roger Dooley is the author of Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing (Wiley, 2011), and writes the popular blog Neuromarketing as well as Brainy Marketing at Forbes.com. He is the founder of Dooley Direct, a marketing consultancy, and co-founded College Confidential, the leading college-bound website (now part of Hobsons, a DMGT unit). On Twitter, he can be found at @rogerdooley. For speaking engagements and other information, visit rogerdooley.com.
Praise for Brainfluence
“You can never be too enchanting, so read this book to learn even more ways to change people’s hearts, minds, and actions. It’s always good to have some science behind your tactics.”
— Guy Kawasaki, author of Enchantment and former chief evangelist of Apple
“Roger’s writing is practical and very insightful. His book delivers on its promise: smart ideas supported by science that can help you make more money. A great and profitable read!”
- Christophe Morin, coauthor of Neuromarketing and CEO, SalesBrain
“Using the most modern neuroscience research out there, Roger Dooley’s insightful new book, Brainfluence, will serve as a how-to guide for driving a successful business past its competition.”
- Martin Lindstrom, author of Brandwashed
“For years I’ve turned to Roger Dooley to keep up with the cutting edge of neuromarketing. Now with Brainfluence, Roger gives smart businesspeoplea one-stop unfair advantage. This book is a must-read.”
- Brian Clark, CEO, Copyblogger Media
“Brainfluence strikes a great (and rare) balance between being research-based and academic while still being clear and actionable… I’ve read many of the classics, like Cialdini’s Influence, so I was pleasantly surprised to find not only new data in Brainfluence, but new ways of looking at that data.”
- Dr. Peter Meyers, Marketing Scientist, Moz
“I’ve found this book to be indispensable… I came away from this book with more than a hundred ideas I can test or just put to work in fundraising.”
- Jeff Brooks, Author of The Fundraiser’s Guide to Irresistible Communications
For the latest Persuasion Slide content, including a free workbook to put these ideas into practice right away, visit persuasionslide.com.
Introduction: Why Marketers Need a New Persuasion Model
If you are reading this, it’s likely you are involved in persuading people to do things – buy something, request information, sign up for a subscription, “like” your Facebook page, and so on.
In fact, all of our lives are filled with persuasion tasks. Beyond persuading customers to do our will, we are constantly trying to elicit cooperation from family members, co-workers, and even strangers.
Sad Truth: We Are Lousy at Persuasion
In business, we are usually terrible persuaders. 98 out of 100 sales emails get no response. Similarly, 98 out of 100 direct mail pieces don’t work. Even costly in-person sales calls fail more than nine times out of ten. And, on our websites, we often see many more visitors hitting the “back” button than doing what we’d like them to do.
Why are we so bad at persuasion? For one thing, it’s difficult – just about all people have inertia that makes them reluctant to take any kind of action. Hitting the back button is easier than filling out your subscription form. Moving on is easier than getting out a credit card and completing the order process.
Often, the reason for inaction is simply that making no decision is usually easier than choosing to do something.
“Don’t Confuse Me With Facts”
Another reason for our failure to persuade is that we ignore both
the science of persuasion and well-established business success factors.
Instead of using a structured, scientific approach to creating our website, print advertising, and other marketing content, we have meetings.
At these meetings, creative types throw out ideas they think will attract the customer’s attention. Product managers tout features and benefits. Sales managers complain about the superior marketing efforts of competitors.
Eventually, ideas are filtered, compromises are made, and an ad campaign or website goes into production. Sometimes, this actually works. All too often, though, the results don’t meet expectations.
There has to be a better way.
What we hope to accomplish here is to add structure to the persuasion process. We need a way to incorporate the logical arguments, the creative ideas, as well as proven techniques developed over decades of research in social science and other fields.
The framework in this book forces, or at least encourages, the people who use it to create advertisements, websites, and other kinds of persuasive content to consider both conscious and non-conscious elements.
This structured approach won’t turn a 2% success rate into 100%. But, by ensuring we are appealing to the customer’s conscious and non-conscious decision-making processes, we can hope to do a better job. When success rates are this low, even a modest improvement can have a big impact.
Science to the Rescue?
There’s some good news, though. Scientists have been studying persuasion and decision-making for decades, and actually understand quite a bit about how the process works.
Robert Cialdini, the best-known scientist in the persuasion space, enumerated his now famous six key principles of influence decades ago.
Stanford’s BJ Fogg developed the Fogg Behavior Model as well as the Behavior Wizard, both methods of describing the types of human behavior and how they can be changed.
We get other insights into behavior from a totally different field: evolutionary psychology. Scientists like Geoffey Miller show us that many of the behaviors of modern humans are rooted in our hunter-gatherer ancestry and talk about “mating cues.” So, even though male viewers have about as much chance of “mating” with the sultry model in the fragrance ad as shaking the hand of the man in the moon, her sexy image may still prime them to buy the product.
While Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman doesn’t work directly in the persuasion space, his model for human decision-making is highly relevant. His research showed that we have two kinds of thought processes. System 1 is intuitive, emotional, and fast, while System 2 is conscious, logical, and relies more on reasoning. We’ll get back to Kahneman later in this book.
In addition, we have researchers like Dan Ariely, Adam Alter, and many others who are constantly exposing specific (and often surprising) aspects of human behavior via their research.
The Divide Between Business and Academia
The problem with most academic research is that its fundamental purpose isn’t to help businesses be more profitable. Research scientists have the noble goal of extending human knowledge, as well as the more practical goals of getting published and keeping their research funded.
In addition, university scientists rarely cite business results from real-world testing. If it’s not peer-reviewed and published in a scholarly journal, it’s not real science.
That’s not to say the divide between academia and business is never bridged. Cialdini’s book Influence remains a bestseller in business circles decades after its first edition was published. And, business data collected in a rigorous way does find its way into academic papers from time to time.
Academic disdain for business data isn’t a one-way street. Business decisions are all too often made with little regard to the wealth of knowledge built by academic research. University scientists are often seen as ivory tower theoreticians with little or nothing to contribute to real business issues.
To ignore the potential of academic research to solve real business problems is a huge waste an amazing trove of resources.
Our Goal
For years, I’ve been translating scientific research into practical business strategies in my blogs Neuromarketing and Brainy Marketing (at Forbes.com), as well as in my book Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing.
I’ve always tried to find constructive ways to apply research results, and explain these ideas in a way that makes sense to real-world business people.
In recent years, I’ve seen many more business-oriented writers focusing on applying science like Cialdini’s principles to digital marketing in particular. These days, most web marketers have at least a superficial understanding of topics like social proof and authority, for example.
The Paradox of (Marketing) Choice
The typical marketer may have an awareness of persuasion psychology but is often confronted with a bewildering array of choices. Given that a print ad, landing page, or email can contain a limited number of elements, where does one begin? Product features? Customer benefits? Social Proof? Liking? Mating cues? Emotional imagery?
My purpose with The Persuasion Slide is to give marketers a framework to help make these decisions.
By that I mean I’m not offering a model that contradicts the work of scientists like Fogg and Cialdini, but rather a structure into which their insights can be incorporated.
In other words, The Persuasion Slide doesn’t replace the work of the scientists that have done the heavy lifting in understanding persuasion. Rather, it is a framework that lets you apply well-established science to your real-world problems.
A key part of this framework is that it also addresses the need to explain or describe your product and service while optimizing user (or reader, viewer, etc.) experience.
As we proceed, I’m more than willing to include non-academic data when it sheds light on a problem. The number of experiments performed by businesses every year dwarfs the count of academic studies.
Just one company – Amazon.com – reportedly has hundreds of tests running simultaneously to tweak the performance of its website.
Here’s a quick word of caution. Regardless of the brilliance of a university scientist and the elegant experiments she conducted, you should rely on your own experiments to determine what’s right for your customers.
Even business data collected in the real world isn’t infallible. The call to action that doubled conversions in one situation may decrease conversions in another.
What I’ll do in the pages that follow is give you a way to think about your persuasion efforts and fine-tune your approach.
I think you’ll find this concept simple to understand but also powerful in the way it helps you focus on the key elements of your persuasion process.
Ultimately, if I can explain The Persuasion Slide concept well enough for you to improve your bottom-line results, we’ll both meet our goal for the brief time we’ll spend together here.
Chapter 1: Slide-ology 101
The Origin of The Persuasion Slide
I attend many conferences around the globe each year, and I observed that much of the advice offered marketers was of the form, “do this” or “don’t do that.” Much of this was valid advice, but I could see marketers struggling to turn dozens of suggested approaches, strategies, and tactics into a single effective ad or website.
At the same time, I saw the need to build on the work of scientists like BJ Fogg and others to create a method that was easy-to-understand and results-oriented.
Eventually, I decided that the simple playground slide would be the ideal metaphor for a persuasive process.
As I developed that idea into a more complete framework, my research turned up some validation of the idea.
In his 2009 book, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook, legendary direct marketer Joe Sugarman refers to a well-written sales letter as a “slippery slide.” He describes a sales letter in which,
Every element must be so compelling that you fin
d yourself falling down a slippery slide unable to stop until you reach the end.1
A related metaphor, popularized by the master copywriter Dan Kennedy, is the “greased chute.”2
I was encouraged by the fact that these renowned persuaders found the slide concept useful. The key, I felt, was to turn the metaphor into a specific framework that could be applied to a variety of persuasion tasks.
Inclined to Slide
Figure 1 – A physicist’s inclined plane.
In its simplest form, a slide is merely an angled surface, what physicists call an “inclined plane.” In the perfect world of physics, if you put something on an inclined plane, it will slide downward, gathering speed as it goes. This is because of gravity, which exerts a continuous downward force on everything on Earth.
We’ll skip the force analysis, but suffice it to say that it’s gravity that produces the motion. A steeper slide lets more of the force of gravity work to move the block.
And, in the Other Corner, Friction
Physicists often describe a world where there’s no friction. That may not be realistic, but it makes the math a lot simpler!
One of the most common assumptions in simple calculations is that surfaces are frictionless – give something a shove, and it will keep going forever.
Figure 2 - Friction acts in direct opposition to the force of gravity.
If you’ve ever seen a child get stuck halfway down a slide, you know that in the real world friction actually plays a major role.
