What Other People Say About You

What other people say and do matters to us a great deal. So much so that we’ll do crazy stuff purely because someone we see as similar to us is doing it.

Which really goes against my grain because I like to think of myself as an independent free thinker. Which reminds me of a funny story of when I was a teenager in Malaysia visiting my father during my school holidays. And it’s actually relevant. Go figure.

I think it was in 1991, I’d gone for one of my regular two week holidays to Kuala Lumpur to stay with my dad where he lived in an upmarket Condominium complex with over a hundred other Australian Pilots living in exile after the Pilots strike in 1989.

I was a talkative kind of a kid and I met a Muslim boy a couple of years my younger and I was just shootin the breeze with him trying to make contact with the local people. Bored out of my brain while my dad was still working.

There’s only so much Roti Canai you can eat.

Anyway, this kid wanted to know if I too was Muslim. [Hint: he was searching for where we were similar so he could know what to do with any information he got from me]

He asked “Are you Muslim?”

“No” I replied smiling.

“Oh, you are you Christian?”

“No” I replied wondering how he was going to deal with the realisation that I might not be religious at all. And then with great surprise and sincere concern in his eyes he exclaimed “FREE THINKER?!”

I think I may have been the first real life non religious person he’d ever met. He’d heard they existed but to actually meet one… Our relationship didn’t really go much further than that as he scuttled off to tell his parents he’d met one of the mystical free thinkers. So much for making friends with the natives. Back to eating their food.

Anyway on with the point of this article.

On November 18, 1978, Nine Hundred and Ten people died in Jonestown, Guyana (South America), people died in a mass suicide by strawberry flavoured poison. The few people who survived (had the sense to get the hell out of there) say that almost the entire community participated in the show of unity in an orderly and willful fashion.

Robert Cialdini dissects the incident and it’s relevance to social proof and sales in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. But the basic message is this. We have a natural tendency to behave like the people we see as similar to us.

The people of Jonestown were all part of a religious cult. They all lived the same way in a small fenced community. They were all from San Fransisco and had relocated to the jungle in South America. They lived in total alienation in hostile country. No one else around their community was like them.

Now, I know it’s not the prettiest way to talk about social proof. And I’m certainly not saying you should find ways to manipulate people to their ultimate demise. What I am saying is Birds Of A Feather Flock Together and you ignore that at your own peril.

The way to use this information is through qualified testimonials. People want to know what other people have done to solve their problems and want to know what the results were. It’s one of our main ways of gathering proof to ourselves that the decision we are about to make is the wrong one or the right one.

What other people say about you and your products is 100 times more believable than anything others have to say about you.

So a solid way to help people make the decision to buy your product is to find past customers who your prospects will see as being like them. People who once shared the same problem – and who have since managed to solve that problem because they bought from you.

And present their message to your prospects in a brief note (good idea to include a photo of the person giving the testimonial) or go one step further. Record the testimonial in a quick video.

Here’s a little formula so you can coach your past customers to create the best and most powerful testimonials known to the human mind. The kind that’ll convert prospects to customers like poor San Franciscans to cult members in the Jungle.

Get the satisfied past customer to answer these three questions clearly and concisely. Get them to go to the essence of each question. This should not be a great big story. The quicker and clearer the better.

1. What was life like before buying the product? (The pain of their existence before knowing you)
2. What did you do? (they bought your product)
3. What has that made possible? (how is life easier, better, safer, cheaper, faster?)

Your prospects will identify themselves in the problems and pain of what your customer was dealing with previously. And then they’ll want to know what they did to solve the problem. The natural next question for any human being is to know what results that produced.

What other people say about you matter way more to your customers than what you say. Use testimonials everywhere in your advertising and sales messages.

To enforce this idea a little, in the comments below I’d like to hear about where in your life you rely on what others say before you take action.

Remain Awesome.
Scott Junner
The Unlikely Ad Man