Demand Generation Resources

Dr. Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion provides research-backed principles that I apply daily in my work as a demand generation marketer. Cialdini identifies six ways to get people to take action:

1. Reciprocity;
2. Scarcity;
3. Authority;
4. Consistency;
5. Liking;
6. Consensus.

How did I apply these as a marketer?

It was my job for about two years to write two or three emails each week that all had the same call-to-action: sponsor events our company produced. This was pure demand generation. The goal of these emails was simply to get people to click over to our landing page and ask to speak with sales. We were wildly successful despite being a rather one-trick pony operating off of a seemingly-simple strategy. We ended up acquiring multiple competitors and expanding globally based on the strength of our ability to get new leads and then convert them into new logos. None of that would have been possible without a variety of ways to sustain the audience's attention. We would have been a broken record. One key to our success was the methodical cycling through different ways to position offers that Cialdini outlines. So, if one email capitalized on the human desire to be liked, the subsequent email would tap into the instinct to act fast out of a desire to grab up scarce inventory. Check it out.

One way to interpret the word "Israel" is that it literally means to wrestle with God. As such, and as an Israeli, I am not surprised that it was one of my countrymen who produced a body of evidence challenging assumed human rationality. Israel is a land of deep contradictions. Where better to show how two seemingly paradoxical forces within the human psyche co-exist and reinforce each other? Kahneman shared winning the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for research that frames human choices in terms of fast-acting, instinctive impulses and slower, rational thought.

I'm not sure that it's possible to be an exceptional demand generation marketer without an operable understanding of Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. Whether it's grasping the human tendency to be swayed by irrelevant numbers (anchoring), or leveraging the incremental investment in a brand to eventually eke out a purchase (sunk-cost), the marketer needs to be able to capitalize on the quixotic ways people think in order to drive purchases.

I've found Thinking Fast and Slow to be a force-multiplier when paired with the principles in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.