It doesn’t matter what you’re selling… cars, coaching, memberships, life insurance, or consulting.
If you do this right (and you’ve got a good message-to-market match), what you’re selling will fly off the shelves or fill your dance card with clients and members.
The best example… and the most transparent… is what you see in weight loss.
Those images of the before-and-after miracles, even if you stumbled on the ads by mistake, are impossible to ignore.
For instance, even an old grainy one like this makes us carefully inspect the pictures to see just how dramatic the changes are.
EVERYONE has to check it out… whether you’re interested in weight loss or not… as your eyes go back and forth to assess the differences.
And that, in a nutshell, is what we’re all doing all the time in our marketing.
We’re painting before-and-after pictures, if not actual images or photos, creating them in the minds of our prospects.
The better you are at this one skill, the more you’ll create…
Killer CONTRAST for Powerful Persuasion
Since CONTRAST is so important, let’s check out a few diverse examples.
But first, here’s the convoluted definition:
A CONTRAST EFFECT is the enhancement or diminishment, relative to normal, of perception, cognition, or a related performance as a result of successive (immediately previous) or simultaneous exposure to a stimulus of lesser or greater value in the same dimension.
Pretty verbose. In plain English, this just means (visually, for example) that what we’re seeing now is affected by what we’ve JUST seen.
Another way to say it is the contrast effect is something that occurs because of a comparison.
So an example?
In the image here, the two inner rectangles are exactly the same shade of grey, but the upper one appears to be a lighter grey than the lower one due to the background provided by the outer rectangles.
Crazy, huh?
Another of my favorite examples of this phenomenon is from Dan Ariely’s book, “Predictably Irrational.”
In it, he talks about the Williams-Sonoma breadmaker that the company introduced for $250.
But it wasn’t selling.
So a market research firm recommended a bigger, more expensive breadmaker with a 50% higher price tag, to be sold along with it.
What happened?
Sales went through the roof.
The contrast effect made the original machine seem so much cheaper.
What’s even weirder is that we can be completely aware of the tactics being used, yet we still experience the effects… like the grey images above.
In our online world we see this technique used on almost every sales letter, VSL, or website when we start getting close to the offer.
First we see how much the product or service “should” cost…
“This widget has been selling on our website for the last 2 years at $10,000.”
That’s the decoy, which can be elaborated on in a dozen ways… number of people who’ve bought it, all the hours spent in research, and all the expensive work that went into creating it.
There are many ways to justify the reason for the cost.
And you know the drill… then we introduce a drastically reduced price of only $197!
Of course, if the reasons aren’t credible or the difference is too extreme, the technique will blow up in your face.
But when applied strategically, it’s amazing how powerful this overused-but-still-effective tactic can be… EVEN IF YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT’S HAPPENING.
Check out the formatted article here: https://www.daniellevis.com/fastest-easiest-way-create-instant-persuasion/
Until next time...
