Persuading Prospects with Cialdini: Scarcity, Unity and Reciprocity
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As an agency, The Product Architects specialises in strategic product design. Our secret sauce has always been co-creation, fast-paced prototyping, user validation and iteration, but we've noticed an increased demand for strategy workshops among our clients.
To intensify interaction during our strategy workshops, we invite participants to work collaboratively on a series of exercises. Of all these exercises, our Cialdini poster stands out as a participant favourite (90% popularity vote).
Dr Robert Cialdini, Professor of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University, is the author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. This bestseller offers a persuasion framework that is easy to understand and apply to any product or strategy design workshop. We often use Cialdini's framework in workshops to get participants to think about how seven potential triggers can steer user behaviour.
These persuasion triggers are also used as a last step in other design methodologies, such as gamification. Gamification is a popularly implemented design methodology that adds gaming elements to non-gaming contexts to enhance user engagement and experience. Utilising the principles of influence within the context of gamification changes user behaviours and attitudes through the art of persuasion, which gets them to act in a particular way.
In a strategy workshop, these potential persuasion triggers can be translated into a powerful behavioural tool that convinces users. At the same time, each trigger provides a unique perspective that forces workshop participants to think differently about the value proposition.
To bring this framework to life, we'll explain each trigger and highlight its application with an intuitive example that everyone can relate to.
Scarcity
Scarcity taps into the fear of missing out (FOMO). Once a product or service becomes scarce, people are motivated by the thought that they might lose out on an opportunity.
A great example is OnePlus. You can only get a OnePlus smartphone if a previous buyer recommends you. This requirement creates a synthetic feeling of scarcity and ramped up the desirability of OnePlus products. The brand invested far less into its marketing budget in comparison to some of its main competitors, but the strategy was very effective.
Workshop task: During the strategy workshop, we invite participants to think about ways to induce scarcity into a product. The idea is to create quantity over quality. Afterwards, we select the best ideas and elaborate on them further.
Unity
People crave and enjoy a sense of belonging, whether we want to admit it or not.
Every country has a local Porsche club. Those who buy a new or second-hand Porsche are automatically eligible to join the Porsche club, and many do. A subtler example is digital television service Sky in the UK. A subscription with Sky includes membership with Netflix, HBP and Disney Plus all rolled into one, so there is no hassle of buying separate subscriptions and trying to figure out how they work on the same device. How does this translate into unity? Sky uses these renowned brands to associate their service with their lesser-known brand.
Workshop task: How can you introduce unity and a sense of belonging to your service?
Reciprocity
As human beings, we feel compelled to give something back to those who have provided us with a benefit.
If someone buys you a drink at the pub, you feel inclined to buy them a round in return. Spotify successfully implemented a strategy that plays on reciprocity with its freemium model. After test-driving a free month-long trial of the premium version, users are quick to sign up for the paid premium subscription.
Workshop task: Participants are invited to think about different ways to introduce reciprocity into their model.
There are seven Cialdini triggers in total: Scarcity, Unity, Reciprocity, Social Proof, Authority, Liking, Consistency and Commitment. Stay tuned as we'll delve into the finer details of the next four triggers in our next article.
In the meantime, get in touch with us or drop your email in the comments below if you would like us to send you a copy of our workshop poster.