Hey Reader,

Around 2010, when I was first learning to market my business online, a program I took gave me a quick overview of the principles of persuasion.

Reciprocity, scarcity, social proof and the rest were presented as levers you could pull to get people to yes and buy from you.

The program gave credit to Robert Cialdini's book Influence. So me being me, I bought the book to read for myself.

That's when I realized who he actually wrote it for (*hint - it wasn't for marketers and sales people*).

Cialdini spent years studying the people whose job is getting you to say yes. He wrote their techniques down so ordinary people could spot them and protect themselves from manipulative tactics.

And the tactics are much older than the book. They come out of the same advertising tradition that once had doctors recommending cigarettes, and plenty of what gets taught as 'best practices' come from this book that was originally written to protect regular people.

​Today's episode gives you one question to test all of it against:​

Is this giving me information,
or is it making it harder for me to think?

This episode is a deep dive into all 7 of these priciples of persuasion, with my take on how they can be used honestly and ethically vs manipulatively.

If you've ever felt the ICK when you've been buying something, this will help you see exactly why it might have been rubbing you the wrong way.

Here's to building more ethical marketing and sales practices!

Racheal

PS - Tuesday, October 20 at 12pm ET, I'm running the CEO Ceiling Assessment, and it's the practical other half of the first episode in this series, the one about never assuming you are the safety net.

If you are the person everything runs through, at home and in the business, you already know you are the bottleneck. What you might not know is exactly what to do next to fix it!

Fifty minutes, five domains, you score each one green, yellow or red as we go, and you walk out with one clear picture of where you actually are getting in your own way and how to move forward without adding more to your plate.