The principles of persuasion

The 6 principles of persuasion are: reciprocity, scarcity, authority, consistency, liking and consensus. I found this theory very interesting and something for me, logical, but maybe also something that you take for granted and do not think about in business. I believe you can excel a lot in your business if you consider these concepts.

Especially interesting, and what I want to reflect upon, is the authority and scarcity. Authority is for me very interesting, you trust titles and ”important” and more powerful people in specific questions than you do with others. Often, this is a good thing, with for example that you trust doctors more than just someone in the streets telling you about medicine, since they have the knowledge and experience.

However, in some situations, companies might be bad at paying attention to new employees since they are not consider the most powerful people with the most experience. In some situations, it must be good with new influence and other perspective, which new employees, newly graduated etc might have.

Scarcity is interesting, since you feel more attracted to a product when it is a limited resource. For example, when you see ”only 1 room left” or ”last chance” and ”22 people are looking at this hotel right now” on a hotel webpage – you intend to make a purchase faster than if they would not write these sentences. However, how easy is it to do this within a company? Depends on the product of course… can you make a ”limited edition” of your product, that only will last for a couple of weeks or ”until it is sold out” it could work. I believe, however, that this is a powerful strategy, but I also feel that it is a fine line between being a serious company offering ”limited edition” to a certain price, and to be a not so serious company that only tries to ”use” their customers behaviour due to the influence it has on their purchases.