Persuade to Win – Part 1: Reciprocity

We all want to learn how to win clients and grow our business. In my pursuit to understand this , I read a book written by Robert Beno Cialdini, a professor of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University .  Professor Cialdini wrote a book in the early 90’s called “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”. This book was a best seller and talks about six methods used by businesses and individuals to persuade and influence particular behavior or action.

Robert Cialdini wrote this book based upon his three years of research of working “undercover” in various sales persuasion jobs. He applied and trained in the roles of used car dealerships, fund-raising organizations, and telemarketing firms where he studied real-life situations of persuasion. The main premise of this book is that people find it difficult to make decisions and hence tend to depend on generalizations. These persuasion principles may help people to act or behave in the right or wrong way and in turn can be used as subtle tactics to influence others.

Let’s start with the first principle of “Reciprocity”. Humans feel a tendency to try and repay what another person has provided us. The main idea of this rule is  that a feeling of indebtedness produces a “yes” response. More often than not we may have wanted to refuse but because we want to return a favour or be grateful for a kind deed we tend to say “yes” in acceptance.

A study was conducted by Cornell University and published with regards to the amount of tip paid by customer to the servers in a restaurant. There was a practice among servers in restaurants is to give their diners an unexpected gift in the form of candy when delivering the cheque. Researchers conducted two studies to evaluate this impact:
1. Study 1 found that customers who received a small piece of chocolate along with the cheque tipped more than did customers who received no candy.
2. Study 2 found that tips varied with the amount of the candy given to the customers as well as with the manner in which it was offered. This study clearly shows that we are influenced by others behavior and hence show our gratitude to them almost instantaneously.

Many organizations the world over use this principle to reciprocity to attract and retain their workforce. Employee reward and recognition certificates and gift vouchers is the best example I can think of in this space. Companies gift employees’ vouchers to celebrate their personal achievements or days that are special to them to make them feel important and valued within the organization. There are companies that give goodies when a candidate has interviewed with them and has been offered a job (but still hasn’t either accepted or joined formally). By doing so, the company is just trying to show how valued they would be in the organization and this in turn leads to a higher joining ratio.

So, how can you use this in your life? Help others proactively. Try to create connections for others. Doing so is good for you. The feeling to reciprocate, to say thank you, to show that we care, to show that we are grateful is something we may have imbibed from our scriptures and reinforced by our parents as a basic human value. It could be a simple message on WhatsApp or LinkedIn asking how you can help or better still, offering an answer or providing the help someone needs. I can say that the way we can help others or even show gratitude today has slightly changed and has been upgraded based upon the present day influence of information and technology.

I would like to finally end this article by saying that the more we give the double we get. By that I mean if we genuinely with a pure heart do something to bring a smile on a person’s face, some day at some point in time we surely would be rewarded for this gesture of kindness. So, what is important is to give without expecting the returns.