Why is it so hard to say no to a friend or relative? Why is it so much easier to say yes to a smiling, happy person? Why does someone wearing similar clothes to you have a better chance of persuading you to their viewpoint? Why does a well-designed website increase engagement? Why do you rarely talk to human salespeople anymore?
The answer to these questions all revolve around liking; how much you like the person or product you are engaging with. You don’t need to be an expert psychologist to realise that we are much more likely to comply with a request if it comes from someone we like. While this principle of influence seems obvious in some scenarios, professional persuaders use our inbuilt desire to help people we like in order to move us towards the decisions they want us to make. Before delving into some examples, it is worth exploring what liking something really means and why humans have this inbuilt instinct.
What is liking? The definition of the verb “to like” is “to enjoy or approve of something or someone”. When we are in the presence of something we like we get an indescribable feeling of joy and want to remain around it for as long as possible. Just thinking about a thing we like gives us a feeling of happiness.
We like what is familiar to us: if we have encountered something before and it has made us feel good or helped us in some way then we can create a mental shortcut that it’s something worth being around. This is what we consciously feel as liking. As with all of the other principles, the reason the feeling of liking has evolved in humans is that it reduces cognitive load. It is much quicker, and requires less effort, for our brains to create a sense of liking when we have had one or two experiences with a thing or person, rather than reassessing whether it is worth interacting with every time we come across them.
What are some of the things that we like? We like people who are nice to us. We like people who we deem to be similar to us, whether that is dress sense, background, interests or otherwise. We like things that have helped to make our life easier. We like attractive things, both people and items. All of these leave a lasting positive impression on us for the reasons explained above. Someone being nice, attractive or helpful enables us to make a shortcut in our judgement instead of weighing up all of the pros and cons of their personality or attributes.
Ancient liking
This affinity for likability is present in us as, like all of these principles, it helped our ancestors survive long enough to pass on their genes. Early societies and tribes would have relied on people working together to achieve a common goal in order to succeed. To work together you need to have good relationships with the people around you. The stronger the tribe the higher chance the people in the tribe will survive to reproduce and so the genes responsible for the liking instinct got passed on.
It also helped in that it enabled you to identify the people more likely to be friendly to you. In each tribe, or society, certain idiosyncrasies or styles would develop that would become identifiers for the group. Different groups would have different characteristics. People from other groups could pose a potential threat, or at least not actively contribute to the success of your group, and so the inbuilt sense of liking gravitates towards people that we deem to be similar to us. In modern times this is easily seen in various social groups. People who like certain sports form close groups, people who like similar music form close groups and people with similar political opinions form close groups. Many of us will have had the experience of being in a foreign country and meeting someone from the country we grew up in, you have an almost instant bond and talk much more freely than you likely would if the person didn’t share the same background as you. It makes sense to stick to what you know and people similar to you as it is likely you will both be working toward similar goals.
Another factor that influences how much we like something or someone is how often we interact with them and how familiar we are with them. We are much more likely to become friends and have positive feelings towards people we spend a lot of time with, in a class at school or in our team at work for example. In our ancestors’ time, the more we spent time with someone and they didn’t attack us or steal our food the more we could trust them to be on our side and be someone to share resources with. It massively reduces cognitive load to remember that you have interacted with a person many times with no negative effects than to fully weigh up their threat to you every time you mix with them. This mental shortcut results in the feeling of liking towards people that are familiar to us and the more you mix with a person the stronger it becomes.
Halos
When we see an aspect of something or someone, we deem to be attractive we tend to generalise this attractiveness to their other completely unrelated traits. Research has shown that we rate people we find attractive more highly in various other traits like honesty, ability and likeability based on nothing other than their appearance. Psychologists have named this bias the Halo effect. Attractiveness in one trait essentially produces a halo and we view everything the person with the attractive trait does in a better light. This bias gives attractive people an unfair advantage in life but the knowledge of it is useful to everyone as it isn’t limited to physical attractiveness. If someone is very skilled in one aspect of their life we tend to unconsciously generalise and expect them to be skilled in other aspects. Someone being nice to us also elicits this halo effect and an easy way to get people to like you is, very simply and perhaps obviously, to be nice to them.
This “halo” that attractive people, whether physically attractive or in other ways, give off makes us feel good. We are much more likely to like someone who is competent, attractive or is nice to us. Professional persuaders realise this and try their best to show an impressive and attractive image to the world. Traditional salespeople make sure they are dressed well and aim to appear competent and friendly. The people they aim to persuade see this as a halo and subconsciously deem them trustworthy and people worth doing business with.
Being liked for money
There have been many ways professional persuaders have used this bias humans have towards things that we like. A large reason for the success of the Tupperware brand is the company’s clever use of the liking principle.
When first created in 1946, Tupperware bowls were unfamiliar to the average person as plastic was a fairly new invention when it came to the kitchen with people being more familiar with glass or ceramics. The company had a challenge to raise the American public’s awareness around their new, cheaper and more resilient products. They did this in an ingenious way by creating what is now known as the home party model.
Someone would sign up as a Tupperware dealer and would then be trained by a regional salesperson from Tupperware in preparation for hosting a Tupperware party. The party would consist of the Tupperware dealer giving demonstrations and singing the praises of the Tupperware products while the guests got to feel the products in their hands and try them out.
The result was that a lot of the attending guests would end up purchasing a new Tupperware bowl and some would even sign up as hosts for future Tupperware parties. This model was incredibly successful and skyrocketed Tupperware into being the market leader and household name it is today. It has been so successful that we now often refer to any plastic container as a Tupperware box even when it is another brand.
Why did this work so well? A large factor is the effect of social proof, which I have explored in a previous article. The other factor is the effect of liking. The attendants to the party would all have been friends or family of the host and so, chances are, would have positive feelings towards them. These positive feelings make it much more likely that they will purchase something from the host and also transfer those positive feelings to the bowls themselves. I like Lisa and she is singing the praises of these bowls, therefore I like these bowls too.
Charitable liking
Though Tupperware parties are not quite the rage they once were, partly because everyone’s house is now saturated with Tupperware, this marketing method is still commonly used. One example is charity coffee mornings. Someone will nominate themselves to host a coffee morning in aid of a charity, the charity will send them branded balloons, games, reading material, things to decorate the house with and a money box. The host invites their friends and family for a nice morning with coffee and cake and then at the end the guests will donate some money to the charity. People who would never think of donating money to a charity otherwise will be happy to part with their money to please the host, who they like. They will also probably leave with a new liking for the charity as they will associate it with the host and the nice morning they had. All the charity had to do was send out a small pack of branded items and they have raised a decent chunk of money.
Charities of course also have a natural advantage: people will usually automatically like charities and the causes they raise money for. Charities are, usually, doing good in the world and so people don’t need too much persuading beyond awareness to donate. For-profit companies recognise this and will spend millions of pounds on PR campaigns in order to appear to be doing good. Often the causes the company appears to support have absolutely nothing to do with the product or service the company offers. They realise that if they can align themselves with a cause the general public supports then this will create positive feelings towards the company and make people more amenable to buying their products.
Warming up
In the sales world new potential customers, also known as leads, can be described as either warm or cold. A cold lead is one that has expressed no interest in your company or product and likely has no initial interest in buying from you (where cold calling gets its name from). A warm lead is one that has expressed interest in your product or service or has been referred by a friend and has some awareness of your company. The aim is to get as many warm leads as possible as they are much easier to sell to.
In the past, door to door salespeople would ask the people they were selling to whether they knew of anyone who would also be interested in buying from them. They would then go to this person and say they know the original person or mention how the original person had bought the product they were selling. As this new potential buyer has a positive relationship with the referrer they will view the salesperson favourably, have an unconscious sense of liking they wouldn’t have otherwise had, and be more inclined to purchase from them.
Door to door salespeople are a rare breed these days but modern persuaders have learnt the lessons of the past and try their best to generate warm leads. As discussed in the social proof article, app and website based products often offer generous referral bonuses in return for a warm lead. If someone you like and respect vouches for an app then you will be more likely to also see that app in a favourable light.
Tech companies also use this principle to aid in recruitment. The job market for software developers is currently very competitive with many openings and scarce talent. Companies find it very difficult to find and hire new developers. One way they try to improve this is by offering referral bonuses to their current employees; a monetary reward for bringing in a developer to the company. If you have a friend working there and they vouch for it then it’s safe to say you will view that company in a positive light from the start and feel a pull towards them when it comes to deciding where to work.
Liking robots
As discussed above, when someone is nice to us we tend to like them and are therefore more inclined to buy from them. Yet the further we progress into the digital revolution, the less we deal with actual humans. The principle of liking still holds, however, so how can professional persuaders build products with the same sense of liking even when we are not dealing with humans.
One way is using friendly copy. The art of copywriting has been around for decades but was usually just the beginning of the sales process and a salesperson would step in once a customer had expressed interest. These days often the only interaction we have with a company before deciding to make a purchase is the copy on a website or app.
In the same way that if a person is nice and friendly to us we start to like them, if a website or advert uses a friendly tone in their copy we start to like that too. A lot of new startups talk about themselves in a colloquial way, using slang and referencing new trends or memes in their advertising. This is designed to get potential customers to see them in a friendly light and make it look like they are a company that should be liked and trusted. The aim is also to appeal to their target market and convince potential customers that they share similar interests in the same way a traditional salesperson might feign interest in your hobbies. The end result is that members of the target market start to feel an affinity with the company and therefore more likely to purchase from them.
Another way in which companies try to get us to like them and their products is through the use of friendly chatbots on their websites or apps. In a move to reduce costs and improve user experience, customer support has been slowly moving away from real people in call centres to fully automated chatbots. The success of these chatbots largely depends on their quality, as a badly done chatbot will have the opposite effect. When done well with a friendly tone, these chatbots can help endear you to the product or service. Some personal finance apps, such as Chip and Cleo.ai, are primarily used by interacting with their chatbot which communicates very colloquially and often quips about your spending habits. This endears customers to the app and keeps them coming back. Contrast this with traditional finance products where the main interaction with them would be a person in a suit and lots of forms and you can see why people are happy to move towards digital solutions for their finances.
Some companies even use chatbots for a large portion of their sales process. They will program them to respond to certain questions and have what seems like a normal, friendly conversation with the prospective client. At a certain point, once initial information has been gathered, the conversation will switch to a human salesperson who will close the sale.
The interesting thing here is how internet-based companies are trying to create a sense of liking in you from these inanimate websites and apps. Previously it would require a real person’s time and effort to build a relationship with a potential customer. If you wanted to increase your sales, you would need to hire more people in proportion to the sales you wanted to make. With friendly chatbots and copy it costs very little to build relationships with tens of thousands of potential customers.
Modern disliking
The flipside to the liking effect is the disliking effect. People tend to avoid something they don’t like even if it displays tangible benefits to them. Most people in this day and age are sceptical of traditional salespeople. An Ipsos MORI poll in 2019 showed that in the UK only 30% of people polled said they trust estate agents and only 17% of people said they trust advertising executives. Think about the last time you bought something from a cold caller, or even picked up the phone to one. Even if these people were selling you an amazing product that would change your life you will be very unlikely to actually buy from them. The disliking effect is even stronger than the liking effect. There is more risk to us in wrongly disliking someone or something than there is in wrongly liking someone or something.
Modern companies still need to make sales but can no longer rely so heavily on traditional sales methods, as they are so often tied to the perception of salespeople being pushy or deceiving. They, therefore, try their best to never appear like they are selling to you so as to avoid these negative associations and stop you from instinctively disliking them. Even the word ‘sales’ can conjure up these negative associations which is why many sales teams now use terms like business development or client services.
The move to the modern tactics and methods I have walked through in this series of articles is the result of companies combating the widespread distrust of traditional sales tactics as much as they are the result of recent technology changes. People’s opinions on sales techniques have changed, but the quirks of our psychology, our biases and heuristics have remained largely unchanged. This has resulted in professional persuaders making the most of technology to use these principles of influence in a way that will not provoke an instinctual feeling of distrust or disliking while still working on our inbuilt mental heuristics and biases.
Conclusion
The result of the liking effect is that we are more likely to say yes to people that we like. We experience this daily when interacting with friends and family, often going out of our way to do something we don’t really want to do because a member of our family has asked us if we can help them. Professional persuaders have known this for decades and try their hardest to create a similar feeling when selling to us. This can be through using your real friends and family to sell their product for them or trying their hardest to appear like they share your interests and are part of your ‘tribe’.
Unfortunately for them the public as a whole has seen through the facade of these tactics and no longer deem these salespeople trustworthy. Resulting in professional persuaders turning to modern technology to help them create a sense of liking in us. They make their websites look friendly and speak to us in a way our friends would, they create automated chatbots that also speak to us like our friends and they give you referral discount codes when you refer a friend.
Next time you feel yourself saying yes to something on a friendly-looking website, displaying a message you identify with, ask yourself if what you are purchasing is really something that you want or whether an artificial sense of liking has been created within you.
