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Why You're Addicted To Shopping - Psychology Of Persuasion - FutureIQ

4,073 views Wait, is this logic right? • Nov 01, 2024
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Slog Reference: Psychological tricks of sales and marketing: 2

Description

Marketing & Sales often use really strong psychological tricks in order to rope you in to buy more than you need. Indicating scarcity, inciting a fear of missing out and evoking a need for social validation are some such tricks used by Marketers. In this episode, we explain these tricks with the help of real-life examples.

Loss aversion & endowment effect are some other psychological tactics that are connected to these tricks used by sales & marketing professionals to manipulate you. Robert Cialdini, a professor and renowned psychologist within the field of Marketing & Business has written a book called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion where he pens down 6 principles of Influence. A must-read if you want to understand psychological tricks of sales & marketing better. We have referred to this book along with giving some tips on how one can avoid falling for such persuasion tactics.

Click below to buy the book Influence: Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini:
https://tapthe.link/-zbiG0F4V_

More Episodes You May Enjoy:
Sunk Cost Fallacy, Loss Aversion and Endowment Effect: https://youtu.be/pgH79XsGlo4
Group Conformity in Sociology: https://youtu.be/_XhIECCt_P8
System 1 vs System 2: https://youtu.be/DIVTMooO7o4
Are you Baloo Or Bagheera: https://youtu.be/Zj4IlAtCwok

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS
Watch other episodes of The FutureIQ podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAppTB0r5_TaYueZ0adD42Wiw5X-wTE4v

Sources Cited in this episode:
Byju's Sales Pitch: https://the-ken.com/blog/byjus-and-the-art-of-the-deal/
Many examples of decoy effect: https://arpitsrivastava.com/marketing-examples-of-the-decoy-effect/
Are you a System 1 or System 2 thinker? https://www.psytoolkit.org/survey-library/thinking-style-rei.html

Chapters:
00:00 Is there REALLY Only 1 Item Left?
04:05 Fear of Missing Out
07:36 Trap of Social Validation
09:58 Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
11:45 How to be Wary of These Tricks?

#futureiq #marketing #psychology #salesstrategy

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Psychological tricks of sales and marketing: 2

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Transcript

have you ever been in a situation where you're trying to book or buy something and you notice that only two are left in stock and you're going to run out of it and now you're a little stressed out because uh you're not ready to take a decision but you don't want to let this deal slip through your fingers and happens happens all the time happens every week that's a dirty psychological trick that websites play on you and you got con plain and simple okay this I know it's a dirty psychological trick and still get conned that is how gullible I can be so I I mean just you know uh to prepare for this episode I
went on booking.com okay and I searched for places to stay uh next weekend and sure enough like first one said you know only two left in stock only one room left in stock and so on and this typically happens when you open a particular hotel or Resort or a product any kind of product multiple times so if you're looking for flights and you're clicking on one particular flight more times than the others then suddenly the seats available for that flight start going down or the bookings available for that hotel room start you know decreasing yeah so uh we will talk about that also why it happens uh when you have clicked on something multiple times okay that's loss aversion and
endowment effect we'll come to that but to prepare I said okay let's see what happens if it was not just next weekend if it was 3 months later so I picked a date in August and I searched and sure enough only two items left only one left then I said you know what the hell I put in June of next year right okay so that is more than year ahead 12 months away and I still I have I took a screenshot there is still only one room left at this price on our site one whole year in advance okay clearly they are just making it up okay of course there I think somebody actually did a Twitter
thread where they went and looked into the uh developer tools of that website and realize that the number of how many people were looking at this product right now was basically a random number generated yeah yeah I mean so they you know in a website you can look up the code of the JavaScript if you just uh go in there right and they saw that the number of people who are looking at it right now was a random number generated by the JavaScript code right here is the even more tricky SL Evil part the website updated the code but now the random number was generated server side not correct exactly yeah and I mean you
know you'll start looking you will see pretty much everyone does this right on Amazon every order is like order now within the next 4 hour and 35 minutes and then something something something or this thing is on sale only for today something something something limited time offer offer and soon introductory price there's another variation on this right after you have chosen something they will uh but you're not yet buying they will throw in a extra discount if you buy today or an extra item they will send along if you buy today right all of these are variations flip cart sends an email if you put an item in the cart and don't complete the purchase it sends are
items are waiting in your cart so I don't want to buy it flip cart stop sending me emails it is my choice to keep items in the cart or not who are you to tell me most people get agitated in a different way they feel that okay they'll actually lose a good deal and uh go ahead and buy it in the window right so and there are enough psychological experiments done to show that there is a significant fraction of people who fall for this right uh you think you don't fall for it but when it is important enough you say you know what I'm not going to take a chance absolutely abolutely uh it happens right I bought
my printer for more than I should have yeah exactly this is basically the websites or the companies trying to create either scarcity or urgency uh to give you four more basically to make you think that you're going to lose a good deal the fear of missing out for more and this ties into something we talked about in a previous episode the concept of loss aversion yeah okay uh and just to remind people what loss aversion is right you feel much worse about losing 100 rupees than the amount of happiness you feel on gaining 100 rupees right our happiness at gains versus sadness at losses are very asymmetric again there have been psychological experiments which show
that this is roughly 2 and half times and uh the episode we mentioned the loss of where we refer to loss of verion loss of verion was basically a small part of the episode but do check out the entire episode we'll put a link in the show notes how is that related to uh psychological sales and marketing tricks okay let me explain properly with an important example okay okay there is an educational edtech company in India we'll not by we will name it by okay and what byj do okay A salesperson comes and gives your kid a little test and your kid does it very well in that test all kids do very well in that test then all
this while the salesperson is talking looking around your house to take get aob judgement of how much money you can afford so that uh you know uh they can know how much to pitch you but next part right now he gives the kid a harder problem okay and watches the kid struggle okay and uh then after a while the kid is sent out of the room now the real sales pitch starts where the salesperson and now I am quoting okay she's a smart girl but you see how long it took her to answer some questions she needs some guidance and it's best to start now else her marks may drop and she may have to take Humanities or
Commerce which would be a shame since Anushka wants to become a doctor tell me what's going on here huh what is going on is that instead of selling the benefits of the product the salese are taught to sell to point out to you what you would lose if you don't basically to pray on my insecurities I'm a different I mean the psychological way of saying it is that whatever benefits you get from my product are not going to be feel that impressive to you but if instead I talk about all the things you will lose if you don't take my product loss AV verion kicks in remember two and a half times oh yeah right this is what is happening
I mean this is one of the things sale people salese are taught that try to convert your pitch into what will you lose if you don't take my product salesperson is trying to generate fomo in you right and the F of fomo fear of missing out is fear what every salesperson knows and what is known even better to politicians is that fear is a great driver okay rather than feel good and this is your benefits and this is how things will get better nobody cares right fear is the thing that you want to use right those guys will come and take your jobs right those guys population will increase and you will become a minority they will focus on fears trying
to make you afraid related concept again they use right called social validation okay because um the way we evolved is that we want to be in groups right we did an episode on group Conformity we saw how powerful a concept that is that if a group is doing X you really want to do X you will do X even if you originally didn't want want to do X right uh the the major experiment we did in that episode we talked about was how a line which is clearly shorter than the other line but because the entire group was saying it's a long line the person ended up saying long line 70% of the times also called peer pressure also
called group conformance Conformity also called uh uh keeping up with the Joneses to some extent so the way salese use this is by creating an impression that what sales people every every uh e-commerce site uses it every uh the reviews that you see are essentially a form of this validation only no right I mean but it is sometimes even more blatant right uh if ever anybody has come to your house to collect a donation for ganpati or something like this right you'll notice that the half of that will be filled yes or if it is filled and most of the people have given 500 you also going to give 500 if it was empty you might not even have given or you
would have given just 100 so and the smart salese know this and they will fill out fake entries above right the number of famous startups which did things like this there is a much more famous example of a social validation that you have experienced oh yeah right when you watch a comedy show huh the there is a laugh track right every time there is a joke everyone is laughing and you find it more funny because well if everyone is laughing it must be a funny joke right laugh track didn't exist I don't know like 50 years back but then somebody invented laugh tracks and they have been so popular that now everyone uses laugh tracks right that is
social validation that is tricking you into laughing on a show that is not so funny so these are three examples that you gave yeah uh there was social validation there was for more or scarcity uh and scarcity rather so three things right so I I think of it as one thing right there is basically fear of either losing something or fear of missing out what your friends are enjoying or fear of uh missing a deadline right all of these just Fe are these the only tricks though no there is a long list we will do other episodes on this we'll make this an entire series okay right so there is a book called influence by Robert calini and very
famous books all salese read it as a Bible and what happened was that this guy was a professor of psychology and one day he went to a car sales uh man and ended up buying a car that he didn't intend to buy and he asked what happened there I am a professor of psychology and I I think I've been played by the salesperson and he realized that the salesperson knows better psychology than he does so he went and took a job as a car salesman and what he would do is notice the tricks of the trade and then go back to his uh University and use those tricks and do psychological research and publish papers and he did this back and
forth until he came up with six principles of influence right so that book called influence you should check out very interesting book it's a Bible in this field and later on an entire field of Behavioral psychology has also uh come along and consumer psychology and media psychology and a lot of other psychologies but here's my question I am not a psychology Professor yes so if I have to be wary of these things are there any patterns I can recognize most simple is to slow down okay don't take hisory decisions there are almost no deals which are going to two rooms left na no there is never right very rarely does that happen right ask yourself is there a strong reason
for there to only be two rooms yeah I mean sure if there was like uh you know a world cup of cricket happening and everybody is descending on that place sure but if it was just you know regular um travel time then maybe not so ask yourself is there a good reason for this uh second thing is just recognize if is one of these tricks uh being used more importantly figure out your preferences and precise needs ahead of time right don't let some of these tricks increase the level of investment you are willing to make right if you go to buy a maruti don't come back with an Audi not knocking either maruti or Audi
for this example but there is a clear price difference between the cars that marui sells and Audi sells and he's talking about the price difference not the quality all the examples that you give basically what is happening is that the sales tricks are trying to hijack your system one into making bad decisions what you have to do is slow down and involve your system to correct and this is especially true of people who are system one thinkers so we have a link you can check that out to find out if you are a system one thinker or a system two thinker and if you're system one then be extra careful find a friend who system to and take advice from her okay
and basically any friend that you find just tell them to be rational and not listen to the salesperson and think their own thing I think the most important advice is start using these tricks yourself for good yeah what finally worked for me is realizing that sales happen literally every single week on all of these e-commerce sit like there is there is there is no week when there are no sales there is always a sale and everything is always marked up and then down so what's the point of missing out on this sale there will always be another sale coming out yeah yeah if it's if it's a Once in a year sale then it would have mattered but
it's not anymore like every days right now there are two sales going on very literally as we speak and I'm not even talking about the date of recording I'm talking about I'm talking about the date when you are watching it and that date is going to be different for everyone and still I can say with confidence that there is a sale going on that is how many sales are going on so don't fall for these psychological tricks we'll tell you more psychological tricks that you don't want to fall for in a bit in another episode of future IQ sh na thank you