Welcome to Chez Cliff!

In my efforts to read at least one book per month, February got an early start with this little ditty: Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion.

This is part of my on-going effort to improve my understand of why people do what they do.  More importantly, why people decide to make purchases.

Someone once told me that when you have a product, you should base your sales and marketing on filling some kind of emotional need.  The example they used was make-up and they base their sales/marketing on the emotional need of Hope.

I’m not sure if I believe that or not.  But then again, I don’t buy makeup nor do I have a desire to.  Actually the entire metrosexual thing weirds me out.

Where was I?

I’m nearly 2/3 of the way through the book.  I’m glad that it’s not a complete, cut and dry business text.  That would get boring after a while.  No, this is more of an analysis of why people do what they do.  Even when their decision defy all conventional logic (like the mass suicide of Jim Jones’ cult in Mexico), people still make decisions based on certain ideas or pre-conceived notions of social norms.

My reasons for reading this book are simple: if I’m going to be experimenting with different marketing tactics, I would like to understand why they work.  Or why they fail.  If something does seem to produce results, I’d like to understand the logic behind it so I can make the idea better, more effective.