My new book, Persuasion: The Art Of Getting What You Want is now available in bookstores nationwide as well as Amazon and Barnes and Noble. As A result I've been getting a lot of questions on the topic of persuasion. Questions like:
What is the difference between persuasion and manipulation?
How can I become more persuasive in person?
What is the correlation between being assertive and being persuasive?
What makes advertising persuasive?
What positioning do you do in advance to make persuade someone to buy your product or service?
I'm going to answer a couple of those questions here because I think they are very good questions and then I'm going to do a free teleseminar on persuasion on Monday, September 26th, as part of my worldwide virtual book tour and I'd like to invite you to be there with me. You can sign up for the free teleseminar by going to www.askthepersuader.com and registering. I'll be able to go into much deeper detail in the seminar than I can here.
I started studying persuasion over 25 years ago for a very odd reason. I was raised in a cult from the time I was very young until my late teens. When I finally left home, I simply had to know what made someone as brilliant as my mom decide to pack us up, move us away from family and friends and live in a cult. Who or what could have persuaded her to do that. I found some very interesting answers along the way and have very successfully applied those answers to sales, marketing, advertising, negotiating, and public relations. And, I was able to do it ethically. Let me show you how.
On to the questions.
There is a significant difference between manipulation and persuasion and while the line is razor thin, the distinction is one that anyone can make. In a word the difference is intent. Manipulation is inwardly focused on what you can get another person to do for you regardless of the outcome for them. Manipulation is a short term game, it may work for a while but it ultimately will be discovered and when it is those who were manipulated unethically suffer even more.
Some manipulation however is good and this further exemplifies the intent portion. While I was writing the book I spoke with noted psychologist Angela Dailey who said: If my child gets a bag of cookies from the cupboard and intends to eat them all and I tell her that she can have one cookie or no cookies, I'm manipulating. I'm giving an impression that there is choice where really the only choice that exists is to do what I want, not what they want. But the manipulation is positive because my intent is positive. I don't want the child to go to bed full of sugar and then be unable to sleep restfully.
Persuasion is often confused for manipulation when in fact true persuasion is doing the things that impact people on a subconscious level and gets them to take actions that they are socially programmed to take. And we do it because they've, and this is important, they've raised their hand and asked to be moved from one place (confusion, ambiguity) to another (new homeowner, member of your church).
Much of the advertising that used today has no real persuasive ability. Somewhere along the line agencies and large corporations decided it would be better to entertain or shock you than to actually persuade you. And, in this case, appearances are deceiving. Agencies and corporations say they need to do more of this kind of advertising and customers say (in a recent Yankelovich survey) at a level of 33% of the people surveyed, that they'd accept a slightly lower standard of living to live in a society without advertising. So, the question that now must be asked is how to we bring people back (it will require great persuasion) to believing that advertising serves a purpose for them.
Here's a hint, relevancy will be one of the persuasive tools that will turn the tide.
I'll be talking more about this and answering literally dozens of questions on my worldwide virtual book tour on September 26th, will you join me?
