Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

The Tinker Bell scenario isn’t going to apply here: unless those leaders set the proper organizational tone, this argument won’t take wing and fly just because the rest of us really, really believe in it.

The most effective commitments reach into the future by incorporating behaviors that affect one’s personal identity. They do so by ensuring that the commitment is undertaken in an active, effortful, and voluntary fashion, because each of these elements communicates deep personal preferences.

a quote from Voltaire, is contemptuous: “Anything too stupid to be spoken,” he asserted, “is sung.” The second, an adage from the advertising profession, is tactical: “If you can’t make your case to an audience with facts, sing it to them.”

However, within such marketing partnerships, consumer input must be framed as advice to the company, not as opinions about or expectations for the company. The differential phrasing might seem minor, but it is critical to achieving the company’s unitization goal. Providing advice puts a person in a merging state of mind, which stimulates a linking

extraordinary, given

The novelist Saul Bellow once observed, “When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.”

Compare that to the wisdom of employing a commitment procedure.

It turns out to be possible to acquire instant trustworthiness by employing a clever strategy. Rather than succumbing to the tendency to describe all of the most favorable features of an offer or idea up front and reserving mention of any drawbacks until the end of the presentation (or never), a communicator who references a weakness early on is im

scientific research showing that the weakness-before-strength tactic works best when the strength doesn’t just add something positive to the list of pros and cons but, instead, challenges the relevance of the weakness.