Mirror Mirror

Happy Friday,

I hope you had a great week, 

Brands try day in and day out to influence consumers to consider and adopt them. A complex mix of many Ps (4 or 7, depending on when you went to school) can make or break any marketing strategy.

In reading the monthly newsletter Captivate (If you haven't discovered it, it's a pretty fun one on the many sides of the art of persuasion.) It made me think back to a Google two-day event I had enjoyed attending, driven by Alex Langshur, called Elevator. 

We had touched on one of these famous P, pricing and the psychology of it with its five pricing strategies: 

- Optionality | Why you should always provide a small number of options

- Anchoring | Providing relative contrast at an overall high price point

- Defined choices ("Ugly Jerry") | Providing options that make it easy to decide with wide price points

- Bundling | Combining services and options to raise the overall value price of services

- The power of 9 | Using product principles in putting a price on services

And how to influence it with 6 basic principles 

- Reciprocity | We give if we have received

- Scarcity | We want what we can't have

- Authority | willingness to believe a credible, recognized expert

- Consistency | desire to act in a manner consistent with previous actions/commitments

- Liking | We prefer those who are similar to us

- Consensus | social proof - we look to others' actions to determine our own

Liking is not just used in pricing, but also in negotiation tactics and my colleague Ben Wise shared in his latest newsletter some valuable links of the art of subtly mirroring the behaviour (mimicry) of others to quickly build a positive vibe discussed across many publications on persuasion. 

- To Sell is Human by Daniel Pink

- Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss 

- The Challenger Sale by Mathew Dixon and Brent Adamson

- Post from Strategy Peak on using mirroring as a persuasion tactic.

I hope you enjoy them; I certainly did

See you next week!