So far, we have limited our discussions to methods of capturing people’s attention which generally require direct confrontation with an opponent. There are, however, cases where we want to approach someone not directly accessible to us. We may not even know the person.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that a motor mechanic is dissatisfied with his job. He wants more money, better conditions and greater prospects of promotion.
He has a clear idea of his requirements and the technical competence to hold down a more responsible job. Only one thing stands in the way of a change: he has no idea where to find an employer who is on the look-out for just his kind of mechanic.
Since innumerable people are dissatisfied with their jobs, know precisely what they want to achieve but finally give up because they fail to bring themselves to the notice of their ideal employer, let us study the mechanic’s potential courses of action in some detail.
Phase 1: selecting one of many alternatives
Over a period of some three weeks, our mechanic carefully studies the Situations Vacant columns to see if he can find one or more suitable openings. As soon as he finds an interesting prospect, he contacts the head of the firm or appropriate
departmental chief and requests a personal interview.
If nothing comes of this, he himself inserts an advertisement in the newspaper. It is important that he should not exceed his self-imposed term of three weeks. He must limit his waiting time rather than become inured to waiting and eventually, perhaps, give up. Far better to tell himself from the outset: ‘I’ll give it till then, but after that I’ll get cracking myself.’
He makes sure his advertisement goes in at the week-end, when people have time to study newspapers more thoroughly than on other days.
He lists his main requirements clearly and concisely and gives a box number. His reason for wanting to change jobs: ‘Better pay and promotion prospects.’ He may also convey that he is currently in secure employment.
From the replies that come in, he selects the ones that seem interesting and follows them up.
If this method proves unsuccessful, he conducts a personal survey of the local service stations and haulage concerns. He digs out addresses, consults
fellow-mechanics, leafs through the yellow pages. Then he writes letters to all the
firms that appeal to him.
They might run thus:
Dear Mr X,
I am a motor mechanic with seven years’ experience. My special qualifications are . . . My present job does not offer the sort of prospects I think my qualifications deserve, which is why I am looking for a new and better position. The sort of wage I have in mind is ... If you are interested in discussing the matter without obligation, please write to me care of . . . (or give home address). I hope you will excuse this indirect approach, but I have not given notice and do not want to offend my present employer.
The mechanic’s allusion to his present employer need not be altogether serious and may have largely tactical significance. A prospective employer is likely to be impressed by his wish to be fair to his predecessor. His mind will work as follows:
‘This chap does right by his present boss, so the odds are he’d do the same by me.’
On the other hand, of course, it may be that the mechanic is interested in letting his present boss know, by devious means, that he’s looking for a job with better pay and prospects.
If the boss calls him in, he should not deny that he’s on the look-out for another job. He must put his case calmly and objectively, making it clear that he is determined to seize the right opportunity. It would not be the first time than an employer failed to improve the status of a trusted employee until faced with a genuine threat to quit.
In the latter event, our mechanic will have attained his goal quite as effectively as if he had actually changed jobs: he has aroused his opponent’s attention and used it to his own advantage.
Phase 2: deciding how to capture someone’s attention at the first encounter Next, let us assume that our mechanic has selected one of his numerous self-made openings. A personal interview is arranged. He wonders how best to arouse prompt and favourable attention in his opponent, or potential employer, so as to provide himself with a good bridgehead.
Let me here recapitulate briefly what Victor O. Schwab considered to be the five principal stages in the selling process:
1. Get attention.
2. Show people an advantage the product has.
3. Prove it.
4. Persuade people to grasp that advantage.
5. Ask for action.
Exactly the same principles hold good in our mechanic’s confrontation with his opponent. They apply to us each and every day. They apply whenever we want to
‘sell’ something, be it a product or an opinion or even ourselves — in other words, whenever we seek to persuade someone to do something in our own interests.
Our mechanic will therefore jot Schwab’s selling formula down on a sheet of paper and ask himself how best to proceed.
Being mainly concerned with Point 1, or the arousal of
attention, he will check which of the available methods he can use:
Doing the unexpected.
Deliberate flattery.
Deliberate provocation.
A further application of the indirect approach. For this, however, certain
conditions must be fulfilled, e.g. that some friend or relative of the mechanic happens to be a school- friend, business associate, club-mate or acquaintance of his future boss.
At the next opportunity, the contact will say: ‘By the way, I know a man who’s looking for a better job — a really first-class mechanic. Why not have a word with him before someone else snaps him up?’
‘Who is he?’ asks the prospective employer. On hearing the name, he says ‘That’s right, he’s coming to see me tomorrow.’ There follows a brief conversation designed to kindle the interest which our mechanic will require in his forthcoming interview.
To sum up, the indirect method entails simply that other people or the media — in our case, a newspaper — ‘buttonhole’ an opponent and capture his attention before we ourselves appear on the scene.
6. IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED ...
As a very youthful press reporter I spent a few years working under an editor whose routine response to apologies for failure was: ‘Good tries mean nothing, my boy. It’s results that count.’
This exemplifies one of the reasons why so many people fail to capture attention and assert themselves.
‘I did try, but they misunderstood me’ is an excuse frequently employed by
innumerable people who fail to get ahead. They transfer the blame for their failure to others. Here are a few such utterances culled from my jottings over the years:
A teacher: ‘I tried to keep order by reasoning with them, but it was hopeless. Now I crack down hard — it’s the only
language they understand.’
A superior: ‘I told the man what to do five times over, and what happened? He went and did the opposite.’
An employee: ‘I know damn well I’m right, but he turned my proposal down.’
An unskilled labourer: ‘I’d sooner have been a jobbing gardener — it’s the job I was trained for — but I couldn’t raise the cash co branch out on my own.’
They all tried, but success wasn’t forthcoming so they gave up — each of them equipped with a very good pretext. I know plenty of people who have developed their excuses for failure into a fine art. In many cases, it is hard to escape the impression that their attempts are only a form of insurance against accusations of inertia. They genuinely persuade themselves that an abortive attempt — one from which they may learn nothing — deserves to be rated more highly than no attempt at all.
What should we deduce from this?
The answer is simple:
1. If you want to arouse attention, you must — whatever method you try — be prepared for the possibility of setbacks.
2. A setback does not mean total and irrevocable defeat. It merely teaches you that you have done something wrong and must try a different tack next time.
3. You must be clear in your own mind that there always is a next time. It is up to you, and you alone, whether you abandon an attempt or persevere in it.
4. It avails you absolutely nothing to flatter or do the unexpected, provoke an opponent or gather information about him in advance, if your efforts get you nowhere.
Equally, it will avail you nothing if you try and excuse your lack of success by hurling this book into a corner because its recommendations haven’t helped.
Your success will depend solely on what you yourself make of these hints. On what you make of them, mark you, not on your attempts to make the most of them.
‘Good tries mean nothing — it’s results that count.’ This dictum embodies so much worldly wisdom that you would do well to write it down on a piece of paper and put it in your wallet or handbag for periodic reference. My old editor didn’t coin it, by the way.
He was paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw.
As one who left school at fourteen but became a famous writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, Shaw knew what he was talking about. But don’t imagine that he succeeded at the first attempt.
He started out as a clerk and spent four years as a rent collector. Then he decided to live by the pen and wrote five long novels. These he sent to a variety of publishers in England and the United States, all of whom returned his manuscripts unaccepted.
Was Shaw disheartened by these setbacks? Not at all. He became a theatre critic and began to write plays of his own, but these too failed to gain the success he needed in order to live as he wished on the proceeds of his writing.
More than enough reason, many would say, to resume a commercial job whose regular salary would at least keep the wolf from the door. Shaw did not take the easy way out.
He never gave up, never stopped trying. It was 21 years before he won real acclaim as a playwright. 21 years!
You should remember this story whenever you glance at the slip of paper in your wallet: ‘Good tries mean nothing — it’s results that count.’ You should also remember it whenever you’re tempted to blame others because a single attempt to capture attention has not been crowned with success.
Rule No. 3
You can sell a person anything, or almost anything. All you have to do is package it correctly. Ergo, packaging is more important than contents.
The most effective kind of packaging is one that promises to satisfy a need or solve a problem which has some recognizable connection with the goods on offer.
Experience shows that it is immaterial in most cases whether or not the promise is later fulfilled. What matters is that you succeed in saddling an opponent with
responsibility for the actual solution of his problem.
Finally, everything rests on the extent to which an opponent’s hopes of a solution to his problem can be reinforced by the promise inherent in the packaging.
Don't equate packaging with contents
Thus the third rule of manipulation boils down to this:
Don’t just sell a man a suit. Sell him the fulfilment of his desire to look smart and win the admiration of his circle.
The rule further states that it is immaterial whether people really admire the purchaser for his clothes-sense. It is enough if you talk him into hoping that they will.
This, you may indignantly protest, is a crude confidence trick. By all means call it that if you wish, but bear in mind that it is also one of the commonest and most effective tricks to which you yourself succumb time and time again, in almost every sphere of life.
You do so when you think a doctor offers the best prospect of curing you merely because he runs a surgery.
You do so when you assume that a judge will help you to secure your rights merely because he sits on the bench.
You do so when you vote for a political party merely because it guarantees solutions to problems you would like solved.
You do so when you rely on a teacher to educate your child merely because he presides over a class-room.
The fact is that the doctor is packaged ‘health’, the judge is labelled ‘justice’, the political party trades under the slogan ‘Your welfare is our concern’,
and, last, the word ‘teacher’ automatically connotes the well established and stereotyped concept ‘education’.
Far be it from me to belittle the achievements of every competent doctor, judge, politician and teacher, or to imply that they fail to give of their professional best, but isn’t there a very real difference between the actuality of their achievements and the promise inherent in their function?
To put it another way: the package should not be equated with its contents. As individuals, we can hardly assess a doctor’s efficiency in respect of his entire practice, yet his very status prompts us to believe that he can cure our ills. In other words, where a decision to ‘buy’ is concerned, packaging is more important than contents.
Even after a thousand failures, a doctor can still be deemed competent to cure disease.
In the next section, I propose to supplement these rather theoretical remarks with a few examples which may serve to buttress the propositions advanced by Rule No.
3.
Why no angler baits his hook with cake
Human beings never tire of persuading themselves that they are creatures endowed with reason, yet in many respects they behave like fish.
It would never occur to a fisherman to dangle a piece of cake in the water to lure a trout merely because he himself likes cake. Instead, he baits his hook with a fly, sometimes a real one but more often, for simplicity’s sake, an artificial one. Being stupid, fish fail to spot the subterfuge.
Whether or not you accept the fact, human beings are constantly getting caught in the same way — under different circumstances but to just the same effect.
A few years ago, some sober-suited gentlemen called on the peasant inhabitants of a remote valley in the Tirolean Alps, driving a big American saloon. They were sales representatives for a firm of electrical manufacturers.
They clinched sales wherever they went — for freezers, radios, television sets and a wide range of modem kitchen appliances. The peasants signed on the dotted line, delighted that they too were about to acquire the things which people elsewhere found so life-enhancing and labour-saving.
All the articles were delivered in due course, but there was just one snag: the valley had no electricity and little prospect of getting it in the foreseeable future.
Some of the injured parties refused to pay for their acquisitions, claiming that they had been misled, but it was no use. A court ruled that contracts legally entered into and duly signed by the purchaser must be fulfilled. Needless to say, none of these contracts mentioned the fact that goods so acquired were useless unless the purchaser had access to electricity.
It made no ultimate difference, therefore, that the
sober-suited gentlemen were arrant swindlers. Without being explicit on the subject, they had behaved as if they knew it would be only a matter of weeks before electricity made its long awaited appearance in the valley.
Because they had been expecting this for years, the peasants were eager to believe it. None of them wasted a moment on misgivings, especially as the salesmen could assure them — truthfully — that their neighbours had already bought a number of appliances.
The respectable-looking invaders from the big city were, in fact, greeted less as salesmen than as harbingers of a better world who merited gratitude for having troubled to visit this remote valley at all in their altruistic endeavour to confer the blessings of the modem age.
Do you think the same peasants would have placed any orders if a man had turned up on a motor-cycle and said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we all know it’ll be years before this valley gets electric power, but I’m stuck with an assortment of freezers, mixers and TV sets. Take them off my hands, otherwise my firm will go bust, my wife and children will starve and I’ll have to look for another job.’?
They would all have laughed him to scorn, of course. Weeks later, patrons of the local inn would still have been cackling after Sunday morning service at
reminiscences of the lunatic who had tried to sell them electrical appliances when the valley had no electricity. What really differentiated the sober-suited gentlemen from the man on the motor-cycle? They all offered the same things for sale under identical conditions. The sole difference lay in how they dressed their offer up — in other words, packaged it. The successful salesmen baited their line with a handsome and alluring artificial fly. The man on the motor-cycle used a bare hook.
You may well have smiled somewhat smugly at the story of the peasants and told yourself it could never happen to you. Smile away, but rest assured: you aren’t
immune. It happens to you again and again from the cradle to the grave, and do you know why? Because you want it to.
Here is an example from my own store of experience.
For years now, my wardrobe has housed a grey suit with a
fine red stripe. It was based — or so the story ran, at least — on a model created by the American fashion designer John Weitz, reputedly one of the leaders in his field.
The jacket of this suit is single-buttoned and the pockets are set at an angle. The lining is violet, and I also bought myself a special John Weitz tie and matching
handkerchief in the same shade. Although I found the trouser-legs a bit narrow, I was assured at the time that this was the height of Transatlantic fashion. To sum up, it was a suit with one or two original features and a formidable price-tag — the latter justified solely because it was a John Weitz model.
I can still remember commenting on the price to the shop assistant. ‘Damned expensive, isn’t it?’ He just grinned brazenly and said: ‘Ah well, sir, these designers
charge a lot for their names.’ I also paid handsomely for the elegant retailer’s name,
charge a lot for their names.’ I also paid handsomely for the elegant retailer’s name,