Sales And Marketing Psychology - Sell Anything To Anyone

The decisions that we make are rarely impartial. Most of us already know that we prefer to take advice from people that we like. We also tend to more easily agree with opinions formed by people we like. The tendency to judge in favor of people and symbols we like is called the bias from liking or loving.

We are more likely to ignore faults and comply with wishes of our friends or lovers rather than random strangers. We favor people, products, and actions associated with our favorite celebrities. Sometimes we even distort facts to facilitate love. The influence that our friends, parents, lovers, and idols exert on us can be enormous.

In general, this is a good thing, a bias that adds on balance rather than subtracts. It helps us form successful relationships, it helps us fall in love (and stay in love), it helps us form attachments with others that give us great happiness.

But we do want to be aware of where this tendency leads us awry.

For example, some people and companies have learned to use this influence to their advantage.

In his bestseller on social psychology Influence, Robert Cialdini tells a story about the successful strategy of Tupperware, which at the time reported sales of over $2.5 million a day.

Contrast Misreaction Tendency is routinely used to cause disadvantge for a customer, making an ordinary price seem low, a vendor will very frequently create a highly artificial price that is much higher than the price always sought, then advertise the standard price as a big reduction from his phony price.

We rarely do things that are inconsistent with our identity, beliefs, and habits. To save energy, we are often reluctant to change our habits, especially bad ones. Such bad habits include biased thinking patterns. These patterns lead to cognitive errors, limiting our choice of actions in life.

We perceive people or things differently depending on who/what they are associated with. Advertisers have long understood this. They link their products to things that will trigger the responses they want you to have. This is also known as classical conditioning.

Sometimes when people receive a favor when they’re in pain (poor, sick, etc.), they associate the person that gave them the favor with the pain. As a result, the favor just reinforces the pain.

The reality is too painful to bear, so one distorts the facts until they become bearable. We all do that to some extent, often causing terrible problems.

Excessive Self-Regard Tendency is the natural tendency to overestimate your own abilities. Excessive Self-Regard Tendency is more pronounced if you don't know much about the subject at hand. The more incompetent people are, the less they realize they are incompetent.

Social proof is a phenomenon where people follow and copy the actions of others in order to display accepted or correct behavior, based on the idea of normative social influence.

Curiosity to learn continuously. We also want to know how the story ends. And that’s why every episode of Game of Thrones ends with you pulling your hair out. You just can’t wait to see what happens next.

Humans often make decisions in stressful situations, for example when the stakes are high and the potential consequences severe, or when the clock is ticking and the task demand is overwhelming. In response, a whole train of biological responses to stress has evolved to allow organisms to make a fight-or-flight response. When under stress, fast and effortless heuristics may dominate over slow and demanding deliberation in making decisions under uncertainty.

Bias from the non-mathematical nature of the human brain in its natural state as it deal with probabilities employing crude heuristics, and is often misled by mere contrast, a tendency to overweigh conveniently available information and other psychologically misrouted thinking tendencies.

Authority bias is the tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure (unrelated to its content) and be more influenced.

The mere exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things or people that are more familiar to them than others.

Anchoring bias describes people's tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information they receive on a topic. Regardless of the accuracy of that information, people use it as a reference point, or anchor, to make subsequent judgments.

Brand Salience is the degree to which your brand is thought of or noticed. Strong brands have high Brand Salience and weak brands have little or none. Without brand salience people would not be choose your brand at the moment of truth.

Named after Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, in psychology the Zeigarnik effect occurs when an activity that has been interrupted may be more readily recalled. It postulates that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.

Fear of missing out is the feeling of apprehension that one is either not in the know or missing out on information, events, experiences, or life decisions that could make one's life better.

The bandwagon effect is the tendency for people to adopt certain behaviors, styles, or attitudes simply because others are doing so. More specifically, it is a cognitive bias by which public opinion or behaviours can alter due to particular actions and beliefs rallying amongst the public.

The IKEA effect, named after everyone's favorite Swedish furniture giant, describes how people tend to value an object more if they make (or assemble) it themselves. More broadly, the IKEA effect speaks to how we tend to like things more if we've expended effort to create them.

Reciprocity bias describes the impulse to reciprocate actions others have done towards us. The desire to return favours, pay back debts and treat others well could have been a decisive evolutionary advantage for humans as it engenders cooperation.