Harry Mills - Secret Sauce: How to Pack Your Messages with Persuasive Punch

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Secret

SAUCE

Secret

SAUCE

HOW TO

PACK YOUR MESSAGES WITH

PERSUASIVE PUNCH

HARRY MILLS

To Mary Anne

My Secret Sauce

The secret to successful persuasion is knowing how to dissolve and eliminate resistance.

Harry Mills

When it comes to messages, what worked in the past wont work today. Two decades of destabilizing and accelerating change have profoundly changed the psychology of how, when and why customers respond to persuasive messages.

Digital-driven technologies have armed buyers with anytime, anywhere access to the choices and information they need to call the shots.

Once customers gain power, they become increasingly skeptical, pay less attention and become less reverential to those who try to influence and sell to them.

In our Google-driven world the influence brands, marketers and salespeople have over customer decisions is rapidly diminishing.

Trust in business is at an all-time low. Customers increasingly base their decisions on reviews from other users, web accessed expert opinions, and price comparison apps.

Stanford professor Itamar Simonson and best-selling author Emanuel Rosen in their book Absolute Value: What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information write that customers are influenced by two sources of information which they label M and O.

Customers increase their use of O when:

1. A buying decision is important.

2. A buying decision involves increased risk and uncertainty.

Why? Because customers inherently trust O sources more than M sources.

M AND O POWER SHIFT

We live in a world where a phone originally invented as a talking device has become a weapon of personal empowerment.

In her book Decoding the New Consumer Mind, Kit Yarrow says the pervasiveness of digital technology has transformed our lives.

In the new digital world she reports:

We skim and scan rather than read.

Were bombarded and interrupted by a relentless barrage of information.

Were conditioned to want everything faster.

We are increasingly addicted to stimulation and speed.

Were becoming less and less tolerant of anything that requires patience.

In his book iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, Gary Small describes the new mental state we live in as continuous partial attention.

We are drowning in a tsunami of information. Consulting company Excelacom reports 150 million emails are sent every minute across the Internet. In comparison, the U.S. Postal Service processes just 353,000 pieces of mail each minutethats about 0.2 percent the number of emails sent. And thats not all. In the span of just one minute:

347,000 tweets are tweeted.

20.8 million messages are sent on WhatsApp.

527,760 photos are shared.

Shlomo Bernartzi, a professor at UCLAs Anderson School of Management and author with Jonah Lehrer of The Smarter Screen uses the metaphor of a firehose to describe the deluge of data that characterizes our information age.

He tells us in ancient times the flow of data and messages that competed for our attention was more like the drip of water from a leaky faucet. By the middle of the 20th century the flow of information was more like a steady flow of water coming out of a kitchen faucet.

Since the 1980s computers have been increasing the quantity of information exponentially. The magnitude of data is now so great it is as if our kitchen faucet has been replaced by a high pressure firehose which sprays us in the face with a deluge of data.

A firehose unleashes 125 times more gallons per minute than a kitchen faucet. But we cant drink it, because the mouth has fixed constraints. It doesnt matter how much water flows by our facewe will never be able to gulp more than a few sips at a time.