Pre-Suasion: Unlock the Power of Strategic Influence and Persuasion

Uf: The earliest in your life you read this book, the most benefit it will provide you. Read it and notice how these tricks influence your life in a conscious or unconscious way.

Spain on Apr 24, 2023

F Heusinkveld: Having read (and loved) Cialdini's work in the 1980's it felt almost like a reunion reading Pre-Suasion. Even although I know his work well, this book is full of eye-opening a-ha moments from the master. I thought my sales skills were great, but after reading this book and applying several pre-suasion principles in practice, they got even better! Highly recommended.

United Kingdom on Jan 17, 2023

Bill Harvey: 1. The principle of pre-suasion, or the idea that the way we present information can influence someone's decision-making process before they are even presented with the actual choice.

2. The importance of attention in the persuasion process, and how we can use various techniques to grab and hold someone's attention in order to influence their decision-making.

3. The concept of framing, or the way in which we present information in order to shape someone's perception and interpretation of it.

4. The role of emotions in persuasion, and how we can use emotional appeals to influence others' decisions.

5. The importance of credibility and trust in persuasion, and how we can establish ourselves as trustworthy sources of information in order to increase the chances of our message being accepted.

6. The use of scarcity and exclusivity in persuasion, and how these tactics can create a sense of urgency and drive people to make decisions quickly.

7. The power of storytelling in persuasion, and how we can use stories to engage and persuade others.

8. The use of social proof and influence in persuasion, and how we can leverage the opinions and...

United States on Jan 05, 2023

Daniel V. Rusteen: Summary: There are certain moments that can be created to influence future actions to be more favorable towards your desired outcome, however, these are usually temporary windows of opportunity.

A person’s choice is usually related to the amount of attention given. If you want someone to make a certain selection, give it more attention by elevating its importance. If we can focus someones attention, it makes that thing more important to them than before. Interestingly, this directly applies to the “pick-up artist” community which talks a lot about maintaining the attention of the girl or the group for as long as possible.

A quite interesting anecdote is about starting prices on online auction sites like eBay. Turns out, starting your auction low is best because it will generate more bidders and future bidders are likely to confuse that added interest with the worth of the product rather than the initial price. This is social proof and actually something I did in my high school days to earn money by selling used PDAs on eBay.

Another interesting comment in the book says that research shows performing an action and imagining performing an action involves...

United States on Oct 18, 2022

Avnish AnandAvnish Anand: Cialdini wrote one of the most important consumer psychology books of all time. This is his second book and expectations were bound to be high. This one is not “Influence” but it’s still really really good.

I have read the debate and the critical reviews of this book. I don’t disagree with any of them. What I know is that it’s very useful for people of my type. We run a DTC jewellery business in India and I am involved in product management and marketing.

I am not an academic and I cannot comment on the academic rigour of everything presented in this book. I was looking for actionable ideas for our business and we found lots of them. And that’s why this was a great book for the likes of us. So much so that I gave away copies of this book to many of my team mates.

Priming is not a new concept. But it’s use in creating helpful associations for effective communication was a new one for me. The Zeigarnik effect is a useful hack which I have used a few time now. I also loved the part where he explained which influence is useful at which stage of the consumer funnel. There also a surprise in the end. These are some of the things which made this book...

India on Mar 21, 2021

Douglas Winslow Cooper: “You never get a second chance to make a good first impression” we’ve been advised. Turns out that making a first impression, the opening line or gambit in persuasion, greatly influences the response of the “target” to what follows.

Cialdini doesn’t give this example, but I like it: if you are talking about capital punishment or about foreign orphans, your listener will give you a very different answer if later on asked to spell “euthanasia” (“youth in Asia”). We pay attention to what we are set up to expect.

Dr. Cialdini give many examples of experimental results showing the influence of the preambles to attempts to influence. Sofa or mattress ads with background clouds got buyers to emphasis comfort and pay more than did ads with background coins…for the same set of product options. The texts were the same, but the illustrations were the sub-texts. Many other examples are given, and often the respondents were still influenced weeks later even when having forgotten seeing the ads at all.

Heavily documented, the book is half narrative and half references and notes.

Cialdini’s seminal best-selling book, INFLUENCE, decades old now...

United States on May 26, 2018

Trying to be helpful: Let me say the most helpful thing first. This a good book but the book that came before it, by the same author,  Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials)  is a great book and if you have not read that one already then you may prefer to start with it because in a way this is a sequel.

The reason this is a good book is not that the author writes particularly well or organises the content nicely, in my opinion he could do a lot better. Nor is there a lot of book for your money: although the book is listed at 432 pages, in fact the bibliography starts on page 235 with notes and index to follow. The reason this is a good book is that the author has a lot of insight about influence and persuasion and has managed to write in a way which makes that insight accessible to people who are not academic researchers in social psychology. The most natural readers are those who either market products or who want to be more critical consumers of the marketers' product but since we are all to an extent in the marketing game whenever we want to be taken seriously, to influence or to persuade and we all encounter attempts to persuade us every day a work...

United Kingdom on Oct 30, 2016

Paul Simister: At the beginning of this book, Robert Cialdini tells the story of his first book called "Influence: The Psychology Of Persuasion" which is widely regarded as a master-work. It seems that when the book was first published, it sold poorly, even worse than expected at a time when no one was telling the persuasion story. It took four or five years to suddenly take-off and become a regular best seller that has clocked up 3 million of sales.

That one book did much to publicise the learnings of social scientists in the subject of persuasion and directly and indirectly, many of the books on persuasion and course on sales and/or marketing have been built on the foundations laid by that book. Terms may change but the messages about the importance of authority, consistency, liking, reciprocity, scarcity and social proof remain constant.

Since that book was written (back in 1984), more people have jumped on the persuasion bandwagon and two related fields of study have developed, behavioural economics (which looks at how people respond to various cues) and neuroscience (which looks at what's happening in the brain at the time decisions are made through MRI scanning).

I've...

United Kingdom on Oct 22, 2016