How much mental manipulation is there in marketing?
In this article, I will tell you about the role of mental manipulation in marketing and about the 4 persuasive selling techniques you can use to convert as many potential customers as possible to purchase your products and/or services. Let’s not waste any more time and get right into the subject.
Two very common questions are: “Do marketers manipulate their customers’ minds?” and “how much mental manipulation is there in marketing?”.
The answer to the latter in particular is: a lot. Anything involving a sale involves persuasion. Anyone who argues that for example selling should be ethical and that a person shouldn’t be manipulated doesn’t know how things work and it’s not for nothing that it doesn’t work. Marketing is the most persuasive thing in the world.
Selling is mental manipulation, without it you go nowhere.
The money paradigm
The money paradigm is that being persuaded to buy something is bad. People hate the idea of someone convincing them to buy. True persuasion is done in such a way that the other person does not notice.
People’s organic behavior is to postpone any decisions that include spending money. Usually, it is not normal for a person to buy on impulse, and to get him to do so it is necessary to use advanced techniques.
For example, how many times have you entered a shop with the aim of buying something, and as soon as you were approached by the sales assistant, did you say “I’m just looking“? Obviously, you lied since the goal was to buy and you also had the money but your barrier was raised to remove you from that situation that you perceived as unpleasant.
This happens when you are not used to paying. Like other things, paying is a habit and the less you are used to it, the more you have this protective “armor”.
The organic behavior of people is to postpone the act of paying because they believe that it is bad to do it right away and that otherwise they will be cheated.
Not all rich people are comfortable with money either. In fact, there are people who still feel a sense of inadequacy despite having become rich or having inherited a large sum of money. Many of them have the mental need to always haggle over the price because they can’t accept that the first offer will go well. For them to accept it is equivalent to being screwed.
Persuasive selling techniques
If we want to sell we have to be able to overcome this barrier that most people have. There are many persuasive selling techniques and we are going to look at some of them.
1. Predestination
People have to be led to believe that what happens to them is because someone or something wanted it and that it is their destiny. If you don’t make your prospects believe this, you may find it difficult to sell.
As I explained in my article on the 3 phases of marketing, predestination refers to the phase of Attraction.
For example, if you sell luxury cars, you must be profiled for your prospect (for example a Lamborghini dealer, Rolls Royce, etc.) and at the same time, the prospect must be profiled for you (entrepreneurs, VIPs, basketball players, etc.)
You can’t persuade waiters to buy a Ferrari any more than you can persuade the CEO of a multimillion-dollar company to buy an economical, fuel-efficient Ford.
When you know exactly who your prospects are, you can use this persuasive selling strategy to communicate with them in a very specific way by letting them know that you have exactly the product or service they need and that they were lucky to have found you so that you can sell them the solution.
2. Obtainability
Many of you dwell excessively on describing the beauty, usability, and genuineness of the things you sell.
For example, a personal trainer who sells his weight loss coaching services and uses his fit and well-trained physique as a case study.
The problem is that if we limit ourselves to this alone, it does not prove that such results are obtainable. People tell each other excuses not to buy and justify the success of others (for example it is normal for personal trainer “X” to be slim and fit because his genetics are different, he has more time to train than I do, etc… ) as they don’t believe this could happen to them. For this reason, it is important to get them to believe it.
In the case of personal trainers, one persuasive selling technique that comes into play overwhelmingly is obtainability, commonly by showing before and after photos of their clients who have already achieved the results your prospects want to achieve.
As I said at the beginning of the article we are talking about advanced techniques, obviously, a personal trainer who is a beginner and has to find his first clients has no case studies to show.
In this case, it is right to use yourself as a case study and /or use marketing strategies such as free coaching sessions to build the trust of early customers by showing your skills and at the same time acquire case studies to later persuade more skeptical prospects that you could not convert when you were at the start.
3. Timing
People may agree with you. For example, on the subject of weight loss, you may be convinced that the nutritionist “X” is competent and that his diet works and gives results because you have seen his case studies but then maybe you make excuses like: “it’s too early for me” or “it’s too late” or “I have other more important things to do“.
You need to create a sense of urgency in them.
I’m not talking about fake urgency like those sellers who offer limited-time discounts that never end or fake scarcity of products that are always on the market, these are desperate approaches that will make you look like a failure willing to do anything to do something extra sale (the customers notices it), I’m talking about concrete strategies that convert into sales and don’t make you look like a money grabber.
let’s see together some strategies to persuade the prospect to buy now and not postpone the purchase until a later time.
Create a limited-quantity bonus offer
You can create urgency by simply giving a bonus to a limited number of people.
Example: In addition to the nutritional diet, a supply of protein bars for a week is reserved for the first 10 buyers.
Create a limited-time bonus offer
Another cool idea to create instant urgency is to offer another product or service (new or one you regularly have for sale) as a special bonus to anyone who buys your main product before the offer expires.
Example: Order your first personalized diet from Nutritionist “X” within this month and receive two weeks of free gym admission.
Tell your prospects why they need to buy NOW.
This is my favorite. Unleash every imaginable and plausible reason that justifies buying now, without resorting to any scarcity technique, but taking advantage of the natural propensity to act of your prospects.
It can be done in two ways
1. Explain the benefits of buying now
People like instant gratification. The consequence of not ordering immediately creates a delay in reaching this gratification and therefore triggers a sense of urgency.
This method works very well in every market, but in particular in ‘desperate markets’, i.e. in those markets where people make impulse purchases, motivated by desperate and urgent reasons (almost always linked to the desire to cancel or reduce physical suffering, mental or emotional).
Consider this, people who have urgent and pressing problems to solve, need to get the solution as soon as possible. So show your customers that the sooner they start using your product, the sooner they will ease their pain (or start enjoying the benefits they seek).
2. Show the disadvantage of postponing the purchase
An alternative lever that works very well in these cases is to create a disadvantage (and show the consequences of this disadvantage) if the prospect does not buy immediately.
Then you can show your prospects the consequences of not buying.
You are basically telling them that if they don’t take action, simply nothing will change, or that their situation will even get worse, worse, and that there will be dire consequences (for physical, mental, social, emotional, relationship, etc.).
That said, the truth is that people don’t want to be guided and manipulated. By applying these persuasive selling techniques, you distract and modify the organic path that your prospects usually do to buy your products or services only after several months and not immediately.
4. Gullibility
That is the release of information in a progressive way with which the goal is to overcome the different layers of protection of potential customers and educational marketing or as Dan Kennedy says, info first marketing helps us to do this. You have to give progressive information in order to “demolish” all the objections that are raised.
This is especially important for someone in a network marketing business.
in fact, one of the very common strategies that are used by marketers to recruit new people into their downline is the webinar strategy.
within the webinar, the marketer explains the business model and the earning opportunity of the network marketing company in a long video session (often non-stoppable and at a fixed time pre-programmed by the prospect himself) in which one at a time it goes to answer all the potential doubts and to deny the false beliefs that could make a potential customer desist.
Persuading doesn’t mean cheating!
persuading and cheating are not synonyms.
Persuasive sales techniques are used to make the person on whom the strategy is used carry out an action (the purchase) that at least at that moment he would not do or would postpone. To do this, devices, allegories, metaphors, etc. can be used…
It is useful to have scripts to sell and they must be repeated in such a natural way that it is not understood that they were created to persuade them to buy. Expensive sales are often made without disclosing the details of what you are buying, and people still buy. This is because the customer after all his objections have been snuffed out enters a state of gullibility whereby he will believe anything that is said.
Lying on the other hand is another thing. It’s like saying that 2+2 equals 5. For example, this is what those who use storytelling do to tell a false story instead of the real one. Lying about your earnings is also cheating!
Conclusion
In summary, when you find a potential customer who is in a process that leads him to buy only after several months if you want to close the sale as quickly as possible, you must apply persuasive selling techniques to change the organic behavior of the prospect and lead him to buy immediately.
Marketing is the system that takes money from people and since people tend not to want to give it right away, you have to resort to persuasive selling techniques. For example, if you want me to give 3 but I want 10, if I can get you to give 10, I have managed to change your organic behavior.
