How to be fake and influence people | VolumeUP

🔊 Leo: Ok. Let's just talk about marketing tricks. Let's talk about the mattress store, that's going out.

🔊 Michael: Right.

🔊 Leo: And they have this liquidation sale that's happening right now. It'll work on some people, some people are going to be like, wow, well they liquidate and the prices must be low. I need to go jump in on that. And for the most part, the kind of people that this is going to work on are not going to be very intelligent.

If the product you're selling is aimed at people who aren't very intelligent, then that is a strategy that will work, to a degree. What works even better is when you actually have something that people do want to buy and you don't have to pretend to be something you're not.

If you sell great mattresses and they're actually something that people will enjoy sleeping on, you're probably better off actually telling people about what's so great about your mattresses rather than trying to trick them with the illusion of scarcity.

🔊 Michael: I would agree. And I think you could probably lump up a lot of marketing speak in general as tricks. To what you're saying, basically if you've got a product that actually delivers value to the end-user, then you don't really need to use the tricks.

For example NLP. Utilizing anchor words, to try to incite emotions within somebody to get them, to buy your product on more of an impulse, rather than on a full evaluation of your product. And if it's actually what they need.

🔊 Leo: I like that you're speaking to NLP. There's a belief that in order to sell, you have to go in the direction of lying and, there are different ways people can lie.

To me, if you're trying to get somebody to feel an inauthentic feeling then you might as well be lying. It's really not that different. Apple is a great company.

When I look at how they're selling their products, they get people excited about the idea that they actually build something cool. And then they explain, how is this product going to help you do what you want to do.

The user is the hero. They tell you how you're going to use their products to do something really badass. You can't do that if you don't have a good product.

🔊 Leo: And at the end of the day, the reason they can use this type of technique is that they actually have a great product.

If you need to move me into a place of some magical imagination where I can get hooked on the idea that this car is going to do something for me. Maybe I have some sort of deep insecurity and it will cover that for me.

You don't have a good car. You're trying to cater to someone's insecurities and the smart people understand that really well. This does not work on them, because they're not dumb.

You can look at the same thing with Tesla cars, the fact those cars drive themselves. It's fascinating. I think that's super cool. The fact that you can have a car that drives itself.

Just from an engineering standpoint and it benefits the end consumer. You don't have to come up with some magical, way of wording things you don't have to anchor into people's imagination.

Say, imagine what it would feel like for you to drive and the car to drive for you.

The car sells itself. It actually does what you would want it to do. At that point tricks become unnecessary.

🔊 Leo: If you need to move me into a place of some magical imagination where I can get hooked on the idea that this car is going to do something for me. Maybe I have some sort of deep insecurity and it will cover that for me.

You don't have a good car. You're trying to cater to someone's insecurities and the smart people understand that really well. This does not work on them, because they're not dumb.

🔊 Michael: Yeah. This gets into a little bit of how the brain works. For example, the prefrontal cortex is a filter to hypnosis and to persuasion, and to persuasive copy.

When talking about the intellect and intellectual people, smart people typically have more activity in the prefrontal cortex, meaning more of a filter, a boundary with marketing in general.

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