We were pleased, then, to see that software engineer Alex Moskalyuk had placed his own summaries of all 50 secrets on his Website. (Secret #6 is “Giving away the product makes it less desirable;” nonetheless, please check out the link to the book itself as well.)

At Magnificent Publications, we create publications to persuade, so of course we read all 50. Number 8, about the importance of giving specific instructions, is particularly-well- persuasive:

8. If a call to action is motivated by fear, people will block it, unless call to action has specific steps. A group of people received a pamphlet describing the dangers of tetanus infection. It didn’t describe much else. The second group of people got a description of tetanus infection, plus a set of instructions on how to get vaccinated. The second group exhibited much higher sign-up rate for tetanus vaccination than the first one, where many participants tried to block out the high-fear message urging that something as rare as tetanus would never happen to them.

This one is useful in pitch meetings – and also just fun to know:

30. People like the sound of their name, and that defines their vocation. There are three times as many dentists named Dennis as any other names. Number of Florences living in Florida is disproportionately high, same goes for Louises living in Louisiana.

For even more, see The Editorial Advantage’s “persuasion” tag.

(The idea for this post came via The Rumpus.)

But maybe you want your organization to present “most popular” information in a positive way and need some more ammunition. Carl Bialik, “The Numbers Guy” of The Wall Street Journal, recently slammed the growing scourge of “top 10″ news stories on Websites. He went on to cite several well-regarded academic studies explaining why people behave like herd animals.

Here are a few more findings for your collection, from Nudge:

• People who took an easy test and gave the answers on their own were almost always right, but when everyone else gave an incorrect answer, the test subjects made mistakes more than one-third of the time.

• Asked to pick the most important problem facing the country, only 12 percent chose “subversive activities” on their own, but when shown a phony group consensus for that option, the percentage shot up to 48 percent.

• Additional studies in the same vein help to explain the origins of Nazism, in case you’re not depressed enough already.

But there is a silver lining. You can use herd tendencies to achieve socially desirable ends. Suppose you own a hotel and want guests to save water by using their towels for a second day instead of requesting fresh ones. As Carl Bialik reports, it’s simple. Just post a sign saying that towel reuse was the No. 1 choice among other guests. You’ll get 34 percent more compliance than if your sign stresses impact on the environment. Of course, word the sign carefully (”Among the guests we asked, more people said …”) because lying in the interest of social betterment is still lying.

It’s called the contrast principle, and it’s frighteningly simple. If two things are presented one after the other, and the second is different from the first, people tend to see the second as more different from the first than it actually is.

Automobile dealers use the contrast principle by waiting until the price for a new car has been negotiated before suggesting one option after another that might be added. In the wake of a fifteen-thousand-dollar deal, the hundred or so dollars required for a nicety like an FM radio seems almost trivial by comparison. The same will be true of the added expense of accessories like tinted windows, dual side-view mirrors, whitewall tires, or special trim… The trick is to bring up the extras independently of one another, so that each small price will seem petty when compared to the already-determined much larger one.

There are plenty of applications to the world of persuasive publications too.

For example, advocates for a new public program will often compare its cost to existing budget items. They may be tempted to make that comparison to programs that cost about the same but are presumably wasteful or at least silly. (E.g., “We propose only $3 million for this expansion of pre-K education. The state spends $2.8 million on paper clips and pens alone.”) More effective would be to compare the desired amount to a much larger budget item—even if it is not strictly speaking relevant to the new program—and put that larger amount first. (E.g., “The state spends $277 million a year on its prison system. We are requesting only $3 million for pre-K education.”)

As discussed in the last post, Mills suggests different approaches to persuasion depending on the audience’s initial frame of mind. Here are a few more specific persuasion techniques he suggests for each type of audience.

What does it take to persuade an audience? Among other things, Mills says, it requires that you find common ground. That takes knowing their frame of mind in advance and structuring your argument accordingly.

Here is a brief summary of Mills’ approach to different audiences, based on their initial frame of mind:

Mills goes on to recommend specific persuasion techniques for each type of audience. But that’s a topic for another day.

Most developers of persuasive communications appreciate the difference between features—what a thing consists of or how it works—and benefits—how a thing will help users. One feature of a new computer might be the very latest microprocessor. The benefit is that the computer will let the user work faster and use new applications.

Features versus benefits: the distinction applies across the entire spectrum of products, services, ideas, and behaviors.

People care far more about benefits than features, of course. They care about benefits because of:

• Desire for gain
• Fear of loss

As we’ve discussed, research shows fear of loss to be the more powerful motivator. So be sure to emphasize benefits that help people avoid losing something (money, customers, or opportunities, for example) and support your case with evidence.

Some benefits matter more to your target audience than others. To Mills, it is the sum of the most important benefits that constitutes your unique value proposition: “the essence of your idea; what makes your idea unique and better than alternative or competing proposals, and how it will benefit your intended audience.”

If you knew that already, and you’re still agonizing over how to define your organization’s unique value proposition, try Mills’ four steps:

1. List all benefits of your product, service, mission, or idea.
2. Rank the benefits by how well they serve your prospect’s interests.
3. Present evidence showing that the highest-ranked benefits are real.
4. Compare your benefits to your competitors’ and choose those that make you unique.

That’s it. We didn’t say it would be easy. We said try it.

Birthright provides a free peer group educational trip to Israel for Jewish young adults ages 18-26 who have never participated in a peer group program. The program’s purpose is to strengthen participants’ Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish people and to Israel. Funding for this extraordinary program comes equally from leading Jewish philanthropists, Jewish communal institutions and federations, and the Government of Israel. More than 160,000 young people from 52 countries have taken part.

The ten-day program takes participants on a frenetic dash through Israel from top to bottom—from the northern Galilee to the southern Negev desert—with numerous stops at spiritual and historic locations including Jerusalem. From camel-riding to rafting down the Jordan River to interactions with Israelis, the program is filled with adventure.

My tour group was specifically for participants age 25-26, and included many students in law, medical, and business schools, as well as young professionals already involved in their careers.

Birthright’s success has been documented by the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, which finds that participants feel “very much connected” to Israel at a rate nearly three times as high as nonparticipants. One third of recently returned participants said they were likely to return to Israel during the next two years.

But there’s a bigger challenge. How do you sustain enthusiasm among Birthright participants over the years? It’s a problem that all colleges and universities face, as do other organizations with which people are directly affiliated for only a short time.

Birthright has proven adept at inspiring loyalty among its alumni using several techniques:

• Alumni are immediately enrolled in Birthright NEXT, an online resource that connects them via e-mail list and website with ongoing programs and coming events in their communities.
• NEXT promotes new opportunities to return to Israel for study, travel, and work.
• The NEXT portal promotes virtual communities through its online network, blog, video, and photos.

Through techniques like these, which any organization can adapt to its own needs, Birthright offers not only a potentially life-changing experience, but also remains visible to alumni by offering them a wealth of future opportunities.

To read about my Birthright adventure, check out my personal blog, or check out my pictures.

Successful persuasion requires your audience to perform some mental work: to understand what you’re saying, evaluate its merits, and decide if they agree. The more effort you ask from your audience, the less likely they are to meet you halfway.

[The researchers] took a number of rhyming sayings previously unknown to the participants and created parallel but non-rhyming versions of them. For example, they took the relatively obscure saying ‘Caution and measure will win you treasure’ and modified it to say, ‘Caution and measure will win you riches.’…

Participants then read some of these sayings and rated each one for the extent to which it reflected the way the world really works. The researchers found that even though all the participants strongly held the belief that rhyming was in no way an indicator of accuracy, they nonetheless perceived the statements that rhymed as more accurate than those that didn’t.

The researchers explained that rhyming phrases are characterised by greater processing fluency, meaning that they’re mentally processed more easily than non-rhyming phrases. Because people tend to base accuracy evaluations, at least partly, on the perceived fluency of the incoming information, the rhyming statements are judged as more accurate.

The authors offer more examples:

• One group of business students was shown an ad that said “BMW or Mercedes? There are many reasons to choose a BMW. Can you name ten?” Another group was shown an ad asking them to name just one reason. “The results were clear,” write the authors, “the advertising copy that asked readers to name ten reasons to choose a BMW led to lower evaluations of the BMW and higher evaluations of the Mercedes than the copy that asked readers to name just one.”
• People have been shown to feel more positively towards companies whose names they can pronounce easily.
• Handwritten messages have been shown to be more persuasive when the handwriting is clear. Similarly, printed messages are more persuasive when the font is easily read.
• Complex, multisyllable words have been shown to be less persuasive than short, simple ones at conveying the same information.

The lesson is plain. While elegant prose and clean, attractive design do not by themselves guarantee you a persuasive argument, they do remove barriers to persuasion. And that can make all the difference.

How can you get your audience to trust in your strengths? Draw attention to your faults.

Research shows that if you mention a weakness of your own, your audience is more likely to find you honest, and therefore believe you when you start listing all your virtues.

But which faults? We all have plenty to choose from.

First and most obviously, don’t pick a major one, one actually likely to alienate your audience.

Second and less obviously, do pick one intrinsically linked to your strengths.

[Social scientist Gerd] Bohner created three different versions of an advertisement for a restaurant. One message featured only positive attributes, … [for example] the restaurant’s cosy atmosphere. A second message mentioned these positive features in addition to some unrelated negative ones. For example, in addition to mentioning the cosy atmosphere, the advertisement stated that the restaurant couldn’t offer dedicated parking. The third message described certain positive features and added some related positive ones. For instance, the ad described the restaurant as very small, but it also mentioned that it had a cosy atmosphere.

…[A]lthough both types of two-sided messages produced increases in … perceived credibility, the evaluation of the restaurant was highest after the two-sided message in which the positive and negative attributes were related.

Small and intimate, remote but spacious, complex yet rewarding, dated but totally entertaining … who wouldn’t believe claims like these?

If something is rare, difficult to obtain, or disappearing, we value it more highly than otherwise. It follows that your audience is far more likely to do what you want if you tell them they might not get a chance unless they act now.

The authors call this the “scarcity principle,” and cite several examples including the fact that ticket sales for the Concorde shot up in February 2003 after British Airways announced it would be ending the supersonic service.

And in October 2003 the notion of losing something caused many thousands of people to stop their cars and block a major motorway just to see Concorde’s final take-off, a sight, it should be pointed out, that had been visible every single day for the previous thirty years or so.

That last bit of the example points not only to the scarcity principle but a similar impulse as well: loss aversion. People are more likely to take action to avoid a loss than to realize a gain.

[R]esearchers from the University of California found that one group of homeowners were up to 300 per cent more likely to carry out recommended energy efficiency improvements in their home when they were told that they would continue to lose an average of 50 cents a day than homeowners who were told they could save 50 cents a day.

The authors recommend that rather than appealing to your audience’s hopes for growth or savings, then, you should caution them against missed chances and lost opportunities.