The Science and Practice of Persuasion - Robert Cialdini

1 MARKETING Persuasion TECHNIQUES40 Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration QuarterlyAPRIL 2002 2002, CORNELL UNIVERSITYThe Science and Practiceof PersuasionFrom business owners to busboys, the ability to harness the power of Persuasion is often anessential component of success in the hospitality Robert B. Cialdini AND NOAH J. GOLDSTEINS imply put, in general people are inclined to favor and tocomply with those whom they like. A good illustration of thisfundamental principle of influence in action is the Tupperwareparty, in which salespeople invite their friends and neighborsto their homes to pitch useful household plastic products. Astudy done by Frenzen and Davis confirmed what theTupperware Corporation knew all along: guests liking for theirhostess was twice as important as was their opinion of theproducts in influencing their purchase the case of the Tupperware party, the seller is not just alikeable person, but is probably a friend and respected com-munity member as well.

2 The power of the liking principle1 See also: Harsha E. Chacko, Upward Influence: How AdministratorsGet Their Way, Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly,Vol. 29, No. 2 (August 1988), pp. 48 Jonathan K. Frenzen and Harry L. Davis, Purchasing Behavior in Em-bedded Markets, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 17 (1990), pp. 1 reveals that there are six basic principles thatgovern how one person might influence principles can be labeled as: liking, reciproca-tion, consistency, scarcity, social validation, and the pages that follow we elaborate on each of those sixprinciples and highlight some of their applications in thehospitality industry for instance, how a restaurant managermight reduce the reservation no-show rate by two-thirds; howto influence the size of the gratuity patrons leave for theirservers; how to encourage customers to order additional foodwhen they do not really want it.

3 And how to get customers tocomply with employees reasonable 2002 Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly 41 Persuasion TECHNIQUES MARKETINGis so pervasive, however, that even perfect strang-ers can recognize whether there is any affinitybetween them within a relatively short time. Re-searchers have identified four primary determi-nants of our fondness for another person: physi-cal attractiveness, similarity, cooperation, and theextent to which we feel the person likes good. Most of us acknowledge thatthose who are physically attractive have a social ad-vantage held by few others, but evidence suggeststhat we have grossly underestimated the degree towhich that is true. For example, good-looking can-didates received more than two-and-a-half timesas many votes as did unattractive candidates in the1974 Canadian federal elections, despite the factthat most voters adamantly denied that attrac-tiveness had any influence on their possible explanation for such findings isthat we tend to view attractive individuals aspossessing numerous other positive qualities thatwould be considered relevant to our likingthem such as talent, kindness, honesty, One practical (and unfortunate)result of the attractiveness principle is that less-attractive individuals who rely heavily on tips forincome may have to work especially hard to gaincustomers affection, approval, and social and monetary rewards that beauti-ful people garner extend far beyond those ben-efits; they are also more successful at elicitingcompliance with their requests.

4 Reingen andKernen found that an attractive fundraiser forthe American Heart Association collected almosttwice as many donations as did That finding suggests that train-ing programs in the hospitality industry couldincrease the effectiveness of trainees by includ-ing, for instance, grooming Similarity is another importantfactor that affects our liking for others. The ef-fects of similarity however superficial can bequite astounding because of the instant bond thatsimilarity can create between two people. Con-sider that in one study a fundraiser on a collegecampus more than doubled the contributionsreceived by simply adding the phrase I m a stu-dent, too to the Just as salespeople aretrained to find or even manufacture links betweenthemselves and their prospective clients, individu-als whose livelihoods depend on quick-formingrapport with their customers such as food serv-ers or valets may enhance their earnings sim-ply by pointing out a connection between them-selves and their guests.

5 Hold the mayonnaise?Yeah, I don t eat it very often myself, and Wow,you re from Chicago? My wife is from just southof there. She sure doesn t miss the winters areexamples of commonplace attempts to create sucha need not be overtly called to theother individual s attention to obtain the desiredcompliance. Researchers found that a person wassignificantly more likely to receive a requesteddime from a stranger when the two were dressedsimilarly than when they were Since themajority of workers in the restaurant and hospi-tality industry wear uniforms, this subtle formThe six basic principles that govern howone person might influence another are:liking, reciprocation, consistency, scarcity,social validation, and Efran and Patterson, The Politics of Ap-pearance, unpublished paper, University of Toronto, For a review, see: Alice H. Eagly, Wendy Wood, and ShellyChaiken, Causal Inferences about Communicators andTheir Effect on Opinion Change, Journal of Personality andSocial Psychology, Vol.

6 36 (1978), pp. 424 For evidence of the pervasiveness of this discrepancyin the salaries of North Americans, see Daniel and Jeff E. Biddle, Beauty and the LaborMarket, The American Economic Review, Vol. 84 (1994),pp. 1174 Peter H. Reingen and Jerome B. Kernen, Social Percep-tion and Interpersonal Influence: Some Consequences ofthe Physical Attractiveness Stereotype in a Personal Sell-ing Setting, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Vol. 2, (1993), pp. 25 Kelly R. Aune and Michael D. Basil, A Relational Obli-gations Approach to the Foot-in-the-mouth Effect, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Vol. 24, No. 6 (1994),pp. 546 Tim Emswiller, Kay Deaux, and Jerry E. Willits, Similar-ity, Sex, and Requests for Small Favors, Journal of AppliedSocial Psychology, Vol. 1 (1971), pp. 284 Persuasion TECHNIQUES42 Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration QuarterlyAPRIL 2002of Persuasion may be rare.

7 As a notable excep-tion, however, many waiters and waitresses at onepopular restaurant chain wear a myriad of but-tons pertaining to their interests on their uni-forms, at least some of which are likely to matchthe backgrounds and interests of their Cooperation has also been shown toengender feelings of liking, even between partiesthat previously exhibited mutual Sherif and his colleagues found that pre-existing disdain between two groups of childrenat a camp was transformed into affection afterthey worked together to accomplish a necessary,mutual One would hope that food serverswould start off on a better footing with theirguests than the children in Sherif s study had withone another, so an air of cooperation should al-ready exist. However, just as car salespeople goto war with their managers on behalf of theirclients, some food servers benefit by makingthemselves seem particularly cooperative withtheir guests: You want more chips and salsa, sir?

8 Well, the manager normally asks us to chargeextra for that, but I ll see whether I can get yousome at no charge. Our fondness for another person also dependson the extent to which we believe the other per-son likes us. Just ask Joe Girard, the world s great-est car salesman for 12 years in a row (accordingto the Guinness Book of World Records). One se-cret to his success may lie in a simple greetingcard that he sent to all 13,000 of his former cus-tomers every single month. Although the holi-day theme of each month s card differed, the textnever varied. Other than his name, the only wordswritten on the card were, I like you. 10As a general rule we tend to like and to bemore willing to comply with the requests of thosewho show they are partial to Interestingly,one study revealed that a flatterer s laudatory com-ments engendered just as much liking for thesweet-talker when the remarks were false as whenthey were Thus, praise is one way forfood servers to show their fondness for their cli-entele and thereby to increase their tips.

9 Hav-ing pointed that out, however, servers would bewise to proceed with caution or better yet, withhonesty because the praise tactic runs the riskof backfiring if guests perceive servers commentsto be a duplicitous attempt to manipulate have established that there are anumber of fairly basic strategies servers can useto increase the average gratuity they receive by atleast 20 percent. Many of those strategies use thesimplicity of the liking principle. Squatting, smil-ing, and occasional touching, for example, helpto build a friendly rapport, while writing thankyou and drawing a happy face on the bill arepresumably signals to patrons that they are likedand that their waiter or waitress was especiallyhappy to serve is important to note that these techniquesare not necessarily additive and that the appro-priateness of each strategy varies depending on anumber of factors, including the type of eatingestablishment, the disposition of each guest, andeven the gender of the food For example,waitresses who drew smiling faces on their cus-tomers checks significantly increased average tipsize by 18 No significant difference wasfound for their male counterparts, however.

10 Ifanything, the smiley-face strategy actually back-fired when used by waiters. Due to perceived vio-lations of gender-based expectations, it appearsthat for males, drawing a smiling face on thecheck may very well draw out a frowning facefrom the Muzafer Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood,and Sherif, Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: TheRobbers Cave Experiment (Norman, OK: University of Okla-homa Institute of Intergroup Relations, 1961).10 Robert B. Cialdini , Influence: Science and Practice , fourthedition (Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2001).11 Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Hatfield Walster, InterpersonalAttraction (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978).12 See: David Drachman, Andre deCarufel, and Chester , The Extra-credit Effect in Interpersonal Attraction, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 14 (1978),pp. 458 467; and Donn Byrne, Lois Rasche, and KathrynKelley, When I Like You Indicates Disagreement, Jour-nal of Research in Personality, Vol.