Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation
LUST creates craving for sensory pleasure. MYSTIQUE lures with unanswered questions. ALARM threatens with negative consequences. PRESTIGE earns respect through symbols of achievement. POWER commands and controls. VICE tempts with "forbidden fruit," causing us to rebel against norms. TRUST comforts us with certainty and reliability.
If you tell a lie big enough, and keep repeating it, and deny any contradicting input, eventually people will come to believe
Once you understand how fascination works, you might realize that your behavior is being driven by something far different from what you think.
Memory, the scientists learned, works whether we realize it or not. All day, we passively take in messages from the world around us, even if we're not overtly conscious of those messages. Enough messages, drilled in over decades,
The traditional advertising model was built upon this principle of passively absorbing information, slowly ingraining and embedding it.
Fascination has little to do with what you say, and everything to do with
what you inspire others to say about your message. The true measure of fascination lives not in your own communication to the world, but in how the world communicates about you. Fascinating companies create more opportunities for people to connect with each other, through the brand.
It's a little too easy to proliferate hype. "We don't stop to think critically about whether a media spectacle is contrived (as in Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah's couch just before a movie in which he plays a crazed guy), or a family celebration is actually a marketing push (Hallmark's new holidays like National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day), or a politician's controversial ‘I'm running' moment is consciously put out on day one of his new book (that's Newt Gingrich).
My team and I developed the F Score to objectively evaluate the level of fascination generated by a product, brand, or idea. Those with a high F Score can sway opinion and action far more effectively than those with a low F Score, because they use triggers with unusual vividness and intensity. They get their message across. People with the highest F Scores often earn our attention with their lack of propriety, values, or common sense. Personalities with a low F Score tend to avoid extremes, and avoid volatility. Because they don't particularly enjoy standing out, low scorers can easily get lost in the crowd, and rarely command a great deal of influence.
It's not enough to have a better product, or better performance, if nobody notices or cares.
Fascinating people generate a lot of curiosity.
Trust is the most powerful trigger in relationships, and the low F Score group often earns more trust than their high F Score counterparts.
Maximize existing strengths and remove barriers to communication.
No matter how important your message, it still must be heard in order to be effective. That's where the seven triggers come in: lust, mystique, alarm, prestige, power, vice, and trust.
Nothing is, in itself, fascinating. When something activates a trigger, we're compelled to focus.
It's not the shoe itself that's fascinating, but the meaning given to the shoe.
Meaningless things fascinate consumers all the time; unsolved mysteries send us on fact-finding missions for resolution.
Each trigger adds a different type of energy to your message. Alarm adds a sense of adventure, or immediacy, or even danger. Mystique adds curiosity. Power adds respect or fear. Vice adds irreverence. And then there's lust. Ah, lust.
Lust captivates our desire for sensory fulfillment. Lust can make people temporarily willing to ignore everything else around,
Rather than the usual PC blinking sleep light, which turns on/off/on, Apple's sleep light resembles the human characteristic of a beating heart.
Lust conquers the rational evaluation process, freeing us to stop thinking, and start feeling.
Albert Mehrabian, who found that within spoken communication, audiences draw percent of communication cues from the visual, percent from the tone of voice, and only a measly percent from the words themselves.
Lust is a promise of pleasure.
"the chase" really can be more exciting than the prize.
Maximum pleasure occurred at the moment of getting the desired object, rather than at the moment of consuming
As a motivator, desire is more powerful than fulfillment.
Lust engages our imagination.
"It seems that sexual appetite causes a greater urgency to consume anything rewarding."
The appetites appear to become intertwined in the brain.
Combined with the vice and prestige triggers, lust compels people to buy products with higher sensory fulfillment, even if they're irrationally expensive.
Lust and mystique are good friends, and often work in tandem. They both revolve around unfulfilled interest, piquing curiosity and the desire for more.
Mystique invites others closer, without giving them what they seek.
Spark curiosity. Withhold information. Build mythology. And limit access.
Spark Curiosity
The answers can't be as interesting as the questions themselves.
Reveal that information very carefully, if at all. Show a glimpse without giving away the money shot. Withholding information, as we know, is vital to mystique. [It allows] others to participate, and draw their own conclusions.
Cultivate legend and lore. When people feel that they're part of the select few, they're more committed.
Demands push us to achieve more.
There are five pillars for instilling alarm: Define consequences, create deadlines, or increase perceived danger. Along the way, we'll also want to focus—not on the risks most likely—but on the ones most feared. And finally, we'll need to use distress to steer positive action.
The more clearly a message points to consequences, and the greater those consequences, the more urgently people focus on the message.
Whether gentle or rigorous, deadlines heighten immediacy.
Diminishing returns : At a certain point, the brain shuts down and we lose the ability to problem solve.
Rather than overcoming our so-called flaws, we should push them into service for our higher purpose.
Focus Not on the Crisis Most Likely, but on the One Most Feared
Generating a sense of urgency often has less to do with rational threats, and more with understanding human behavior.
Managed correctly, creating a sense of crisis can develop immediate motivation, unite groups, and cost-effectively get large numbers of people involved.
Develop emblems, set new standards, limit availability, and earn it.
The need to feel important, respected, and recognized as an achiever.
People inherently compete within their peer group.
A manager can create an environment in which people compare themselves to one another, they often naturally seek to achieve just slightly more than those around them.
Prestige of a different sort: scarcity.
Limiting availability only works when people get something worthwhile,
quality, not quantity.
As the alphas of the pack, powerful people control our behavior in a myriad of ways. Wordlessly, they set the rules.
Powerful people share an ability to both make decisions and influence decisions.
Power offers three paths: dominate, control the environment, and, finally, reward and punish. "people value praise more when it comes from people who don't give it out easily."
Marketers kindle insecurities. The alarm trigger shows that negative consequences prompt action. When people are no longer in charge of basic elements of a situation (such as where they sit, or when they go to the restroom), they must give over some degree of control that they normally use to define their independence, and thus themselves. Many researchers have proven that once people have agreed to let go of small details, they become more willing to submit to the more significant changes.
Destabilization, according to experts, makes people more open to new interpretations.
Praise gains affection but not necessarily respect.
Rules are not often fascinating, but bending them, very much
When we're tempted to push a boundary, or deviate from standard norms, we're in a VICE grip. The word "vice" comes from the Latin vitium, meaning "failing or defect," because vices reveal our weaknesses. We have four pillars of vice at our disposal: Create taboos. Lead others astray. Define absolutes. And give a wink. Banning unhealthy practices, or rejecting negative beliefs, will only spark vice, creating "forbidden fruit."
Every process of vice starts by getting someone to consider what he could have, and desires to have, but doesn't have. Yet. Used wisely, vice can offer a fresh sense of unexpectedness to an otherwise straightforward message.
Rules and policies are an important but can backfire when employees don't understand the reasoning behind them. Enforce rigidly black-and-white behavioral codes. Speak in absolute terms. Develop a strict, authoritative relationship, with punishment that seems unjustifiable. Exaggerate negative consequences. Give a firm "no" without a reasonable reason why. Tell them what not to do, without telling them why they shouldn't do it. To overcome vice, adjust three other triggers: decrease mystique, and increase power and trust.
Make your group feel more powerful, by giving them control of some aspect of their environment.
Allow Your Audience's Imagination to Do the Work for You
With power, studies show, comes an entitlement to break the rules. If power makes people more likely to indulge in unrestrained behavior,
Familiarity and repetition. You can dabble in prestige, or experiment with power, but you can't dip in and out of trust. It must be established consistently. Continuity makes us feel safe. Develop preferences based on pattern repetition.
Trusted brands carefully pay attention to detail, reinforcing consistency between expectations they set and results they deliver.
If you're a propagandist, this presents a real problem. Propagandists don't want opposing viewpoints. That is especially true of a propagandist whose message violates his audience's deeper beliefs. Propagandists use information control to enforce exact consistency.
"The greater the lie, the greater the chance that it will be believed." Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.
The more specific your promise, the more urgent the need to deliver.
Turn around negative habits or beliefs by replacing those beliefs with a new set of trusted experiences.
Pinpoint shared values with your audience, since people bond more quickly with others who
An idea is only as valuable as its ability to solve a problem.*
Fascination lives not in your own communication to the world, but rather in how the world communicates about you.
If you're not generating a negative reaction from someone, you're probably not fascinating anyone.
What opportunities do you create for people to connect with one another?
The degree to which you are willing to step outside your category norms is the degree to which you'll fascinate others.
When customers buy a product, what they're often actually buying is something more than the utility of the item—they're buying a trigger.
People pay more for brands whose beliefs connect with their own.
fascination isn't measured in what you say, but in what others say about you.
Trust, as we know, is confidence based on prior experience.