Fourteen Lectures on Consumer Psychology

Chapter 17: Suggestions in Sales (1)
Suggestions are many thoughts or intentions that pop into mental activity, become part of a stream of mental activity, and tend to express themselves in behavioral ways.There are many forms of suggestion, including abnormal suggestion and normal suggestion, positive form suggestion and negative form suggestion, direct suggestion and indirect suggestion, as well as counter-suggestion and self-suggestion.Whether it is to consumers or to the salesman himself, try to use plain and concise everyday language when giving hints.

The use of psychological cues in sales has been one of the hottest topics in recent years.In the debate, so much mystery was given to suggestion that many salesmen believed that if only they knew how to use psychological suggestion, they could easily impose their will on the helpless and submissive consumer masses body.

The psychedelic smog that permeates psychological suggestion is so thick that modern people regard suggestion as omnipotent, especially in the treatment of diseases.Psychological suggestion has produced miraculous effects on many real patients and people who claim to be sick, so the public believes that suggestion itself has a magical power, which is applicable to solving all problems in life.Of course, some people are in awe of hints, because psychological hints are closely related to hypnotism, which is considered magical and terrifying by everyone.

Suggestive Behavior Analysis
When analyzing implication and showing its relationship with commercial sales, the use of insinuation for improper purposes can be directly excluded.We've been talking about selling under the assumption that the salesman is using hints legally and legitimately.When a salesman uses hints to influence consumers, he should stand on the consumer's point of view and understand that what he does is to maximize the satisfaction of consumers.Also think of hints as commonplace things that often happen in sales, and try to use plain, concise, everyday language when giving hints.

In order to make suggestion easier to understand, a suggestion is first given a definition: a suggestion is a number of thoughts or intentions that suddenly enter the mental activity, become part of the mental stream, and tend to be expressed in behavior .

From this definition, it can be seen that suggestion refers to such a thing: the salesman tries to insert some kind of object (whether it is his sales object or not) into the mental activity of some people suddenly, and this process is not mysterious at all.This method has been mentioned in the second lecture on how to attract consumers' attention.Objects that capture the attention of consumers are not necessarily physical objects.Maybe it's a business English correspondence course the salesman is pitching, or a position on the stock exchange market.No matter what the product is, the salesman needs to do his best to put it in the middle of the stream of consumer mental activity and let the consumer notice it.If this product can arouse consumers' memories of past experiences, and this memory has many similarities with the current product, it will be easier for consumers to have the idea of ​​buying. This is the content of the fifth lecture.

The next stage in the suggestion activity, that is, the specific behavior of the individual, is difficult to achieve and it is difficult to explain the reasons for it. This is also the most mysterious and difficult part of psychological suggestion, and requires more skills and efforts from the salesman. .How can a psychological impulse be transformed into tangible actions, and finally displayed in real life?How should the salesman guide these changes?

The answers to these questions are partly explained by the law of motion: "Thoughts in the brain tend to manifest as actions." This law has been verified experimentally in psychology laboratories.The experimenter tied a recording device on the subject's head, which can record the subject's tiny movements, and then the experimenter asked the subject to look at an object around him.After a period of time, the recording device showed that the subject's body was slightly tilted towards the object he was asked to look at.

It's impossible to know why this happens without explaining how the brain works.The occurrence of this phenomenon is related to the path of information transmission in the brain. As mentioned earlier in this book, once a behavior occurs, there are at least two paths for transmitting information to the brain.When information passes through the first transmission path (where ideas enter the brain), the second path is also activated immediately, and through this path is the movement information (the transmission path of movement information).

If you look back carefully at your daily life, you will find that telekinetic movements are almost everywhere.Housewives would point to the numbers on the ledger when doing accounts, and then concentrate on where the fingertips swept.Suddenly it occurred to her that her hair might be messed up, so she removed her fingers and adjusted the hairpin on her head.Then she bowed her head and continued to settle accounts, during which she might not even notice that she had held the hairpin.

In fact, people do a lot of "unconscious" actions like holding hairpins every day, and they may also buy a lot of useless things.For example, when I left the office at 5:[-] p.m., the word "baseball score" suddenly entered my mind. Without further thinking, I just took out coins from my pocket and bought a newspaper.

These examples illustrate that thoughts in the brain have behavioral tendencies.If this is the case, why didn't the consumer make a purchase after the salesman made the consumer familiar with the information of a certain product?

Because in the minds of consumers, the thoughts that point to the purchase behavior are blocked by other thoughts.The human mind is always overwhelmed with thoughts—thoughts made up of a vast jumble of perceptions, perceptions, and sensations.If there is only one thought in the brain, then this thought must be expressed into a corresponding behavior.But now, all kinds of ideas are mixed together, and everyone wants to express them. The result is that the behavior expressed must be the result of a compromise between these ideas.The salesman's job is to encourage the growth of those ideas in the minds of consumers that agree with him, and try to suppress those ideas that do not support the consumer's purchase of goods.In order to accomplish this goal, here are a few principles that salespeople need to follow:

Laws of Mental Suggestion

1. Let consumers focus on the hint given by the salesman.Don't make consumers distracted or fall into introspection, and don't let consumers notice that he is being influenced by psychological hints.Rules 1 and 5 are used together for maximum coercive effect.

2. Create an environment that suggests that ideas can be smoothly transformed into purchases.

(1) Immediate action is the goal pursued by salesmen.When the suggestion has an effect on the consumer's idea, the salesman should immediately let the consumer put the idea into practice.More sales fail completely because of a moment of hesitation, because during the hesitation time, many new ideas may arise in the consumer's mind, and these new ideas often prevent him from further possible actions.It is precisely because of these occasional phenomena that advertising planners need to indicate in the advertisement where consumers can buy the goods in the advertisement, so that they can "strike while the iron is hot" and let consumers take immediate action under the psychological hint of buying goods.In the same way, a salesman needs to have a blank contract on hand at all times.

(2) Give psychological hints naturally.In the conversation, it is natural to give psychological hints.The psychological suggestion given in this way can avoid being swallowed up by the objections in consumers' minds, and makes consumers feel that it is a matter of course to put the behavior mentioned in the suggestion into practice.

3. To make consumers unable to resist the behavior mentioned in the psychological suggestion, this principle must be followed: the psychological suggestion must be simple.That is, only give the psychological hint that you want to induce behavior in consumers.For example, writing an advertisement and writing all the following contents does not meet the requirements of this principle.These are:

"(1) Please ask the dealer for the product; (2) If the dealer does not have the product, please tell us his name; (3) Mail us 15 cents, and we will send you a sample." From a psychological point of view, all of the above options are failures.The above three kinds of psychological hints will all be hindered to varying degrees immediately when the motion of the mind is aroused.When the first thought wants to cause a telekinetic action through the path abc, the second thought wants to transmit the instruction of the telekinetic action through the path abc, and the third thought is also trying to use the path abc.In the end, the precious neuronal power that can cause telekinetic action is wasted, and the end result is that the consumer does not make any action.The way to change this outcome is simple: give one mental suggestion at a time.

4. Give positive hints.Avoid giving negative hints with words like "no" or "don't."In actual sales, there are many examples that violate this principle, especially commercial slogans.For example, "Don't say it, do it!" is a good tagline, but "No non-substitutes are accepted" is not so good.

The reason why negative hints are not suitable for advertising slogans is that the power of words to prompt people to act is to avoid people thinking, and it is more acceptable to directly express the expression of asking someone to do something.Negative hints with "no" direct attention to the negative rhetoric of the action that needs to be completed in the hint, rather than the content of the hint.For example, the slogan "No non-substitutes accepted" actually means "Substitutes accepted".What it really means is telling consumers that they should accept alternatives.

It can be seen from the above examples that many advertisements do not convey the true meaning of the salesman to consumers. "Later, why not now?" is a typical example of this, which makes the salesman's meaning contrary to the consumer's understanding.

(End of this chapter)