Would you put possibly unqualified, low-wage overseas freelancers in charge of your business communication?Did you ever wonder why people who are allergic to eggs are advised to never get a flu shot? It’s because the specific viruses that are predicted to affect the population (yes, flu shots are based on prediction) are grown in chicken embryo cells. The vaccine that’s shot into your choice of arm consists of a virus that’s weakened through cell culture adaptation. This process alters its genes and screws up the virus’s infection game plan. As a result, when it’s streaming through your veins, it can’t reproduce as aggressively as it originally did. Fortunately, our bodies respond as if they were invaded by the original full-strength version. Our white blood cells quickly attack and destroy it, leaving us permanently resistant to those specific viruses. Amazing, isn’t it?
Developed by social psychologist and Yale professor William J. McGuire, the inoculation theory of consumer psychology works in a similar way.
For example, let’s say you want to reinforce your customers’ attitude toward your product or service. You want to do this specifically because, let’s say, a competitor is trying to make headway in your market. Since he’s arrogant enough to think that you’ll roll over and play dead and let him scoop up your hard-earned customers, you decide to play hardball. You pull out your psychological toolbox, snap open the lock, push back the lid, and pull out a special mental vaccine. You plan to inoculate your customers before they’re exposed to your competitor’s sales pitch. Your timing is perfect. Your competitor will hate you. Here’s how you do it:
You successfully inoculate your customers by scripting a weak argument against your own product that essentially tricks consumers into defending their purchase decisions. Do you see the ego at work here? The ego associates the decision and purchase with itself and now must defend the decision as if its own survival were at stake. This unknowingly strengthens consumers’ attitudes in favor of your product.
Here are the three steps for inoculating customers:
Step 1: Warn of an impending attack. Tell them what’s happening in the marketplace: another company is making claims they need to beware of to prevent their being manipulated and tricked into buying what you’re asserting is, compared with what they buy from you, an inferior product.
Step 2: Make a weak attack against your own product. Tell them what your competitor is claiming and how those claims wrongly suggest that your customer made a foolish purchase. This puts your customers on the defensive and aligns them with you because (1) they previously bought from you and already passed the trust barrier and (2) they’re likely to believe you’re in the right since you’re the one issuing the warning.
This is similar to the way smart (albeit naughty) kids align the teacher against another child. If Billy hits Tommy, the teacher is more likely to believe that the victim, Tommy, is the troublemaker if Billy is the first one to approach the teacher and complain. When poor Tommy realizes he’s been had, he runs to the teacher to lodge his own (legitimate) complaint, “No! He started it. Billy hit me. I never touched him.” Unfortunately, as complainer number two, he’s seen as trying to squelch the squealer (suppress the victim who’s ratting him out) and therefore isn’t as readily believed.
Result? Tommy is more likely to be considered the actual offender, with Billy snickering into his hand quietly in the background. Poor Tommy; his credibility has been shattered in mere seconds by the bully Billy, the schoolyard master of the early bird keeps his credibility game. Billy outsmarted both Tommy and his teacher by using the power of ordinals. He flipped the typically expected sequence of events, threw everyone off, and enjoyed slugging Tommy without repercussions. What a (skilled) punk.
Step 3: Drum up a strong defense. Okay, You’re angry. Your meanest (and most well-established) competitor, Evil Irving, just committed a big chunk of change to lasso your best customers and permanently add the money they’re now spending with you to his bank account. (Can you believe this guy?)
Irv created ads, brochures, sales letters, e-mails, social media messages, and a well-written website, too, thanks to his tech-savvy son. He, like you, is in the bug business: pest extermination. (Relax! This principle works no matter what your business or industry. Don’t get caught up in the examples I’m using. They’re simply meant to convey the principles and don’t suggest pigeonholed applicability.)
Irv is brutal. His big newspaper ads tell local residents that new exterminators—er, like you—are a waste of time and money because they don’t have the experience he has. In colorfully written sales copy and somewhat revolting photos, Evil Irv tells them how effective his services are. He shows pictures of piles of dead bugs that he proudly slaughtered, shots of mass armies of defunct roaches that he wiped out with just one pass of his deadly spray wand, and even a few images of deep-sixed rats that his beautifully colored Paris Green crystals sent to the vermin pearly gates. He’s attempting to drum up a sense of dissatisfaction among local residents concerning their extermination services. He’s telling people that his experience trumps yours and that his wisdom translates into fewer spiders crawling across his customers’ floors and laying eggs under their pillows at night. And that he always arrives on time. And that his prices—even with his vast entomological experience—are the same as those of his less-experienced, “more-novice” competitors. In short, he’s doing everything he can to make you look bad and encourage your present customers to switch.
Too bad for poor Irving; you’re pretty sharp yourself. You discovered a chink in his armor that you’re thrilled to exploit. You wouldn’t have even mentioned it if he wasn’t attacking you, but now that he is, look out, Irv. Your fangs are bared for battle.
You see, ol’ Irving, being an old-timer, hasn’t kept up on the latest pesticide sprays. He never got into that being green thing, and as a result, he’s using chemicals that could be dangerous for kids, pets, and adults. Irv is also somewhat careless about his work. He doesn’t use shoe covers when he enters your home, and since he sprays the exterior of the house first, he may be getting chemical on his shoes, which he then unknowingly tracks across your floors and carpets as he tramples through your house.
Oh, you have a baby crawling across those floors and carpets? You say your baby picks things up off the floors and sticks them into her mouth? How about the vapors from the toxic chemicals Irv sprays inside your home? How long do Irv’s toxic fumes linger? Are you breathing them all night long? Could they have an effect on you and your developing baby’s healthy cells? Could Irv’s poisons be carcinogenic? Does he cover food-prep areas with fresh, clean tarps before spraying in your kitchen? Poor Irv: so much to think about.
“Overspray? What’s overspray? Nah, it never happens. I’m really careful when I spray. Hey, the whole idea is to kill the bugs, right? So what are you complaining about? It’s silly to think about your children eating pesticides,” Irv hacks out between his seemingly ever-present phlegmy cigarette coughs.
The bottom line is that Irv may know his bugs, but he apparently doesn’t give a hoot about your family’s safety. He’d apparently rather use cheap, old-fashioned, possibly life-threatening chemicals, save a buck, and move on to the next nauseatingly infested house.
As the last step in the inoculation process, I would encourage you, my customer, to really think about what I just explained, about how some other exterminators operate so carelessly. I’d ask you to begin to formulate your own thoughts by asking you for feedback either on hardcopy (survey) or simply by responding to my blog posting: “What do you think about such practices? Do you have small children? Are you concerned about the use of harmful chemicals in your home?” Psychological testing reveals that the more actively a person defends against an attack, the more aggressively he or she will defend a closely held position. In this case, that you are the better antibug guy.
By attacking your ideas and decisions, inoculation encourages you to use critical thought to defend them. Essentially, it forces you to think more deeply about how you feel about the matter, and that naturally reinforces your thoughts and feelings. It’s like forced debate prep or rehearsing an argument with someone before it happens. (Admit it, you’ve done it … we all have!) When the real attack comes (Irv’s ad campaign in this example), your customers will be prepped and less likely to be persuaded because you inoculated them, played defense, and intercepted the pending attack.
Get it? By arming your customers with ammunition like this, you’re preparing them to defend their decision to continue paying you to keep their homes bug-free. Just as important, you’re also prepping them to defend your business practices and fend off Irv’s pending attack.
Result? When Irv launches his army of ads and his son’s social media posts, your customers will have the munitions to shoot his claims out of the sky. You found a couple of key weaknesses in Irv’s (and probably many other competitors’) business practices that completely trump his “hire the more experienced guy” strategy.
You don’t have to mention Irv’s name or that of any other competitor if you don’t want to. (Personally, if he mentioned me by name, I’d strike back in kind, but otherwise it’s not necessary.) If you inform your customers generically about routine practices commonly used by other exterminators, they’ll naturally suspect all exterminators who don’t specifically mention that they don’t operate in that fashion. You’re essentially assassinating your competitors by implication. If your words are strong enough, your customers will heed your warnings. You always want to be honest, of course.
When I recommend that you be a consumer advocate, I mean it. It’s your job to expose to your valued customers—the people who put food on your family’s table—just what goes on behind your industry’s curtains, things that only insiders know. You’re providing an invaluable service that, assuming your product or service is truly superior in some way, will translate into greater sales and tremendous public goodwill. Your clients are too important to you to let them be scammed by unscrupulous practitioners.
Note: Don’t come across as too mean or you might turn people’s minds against you. A kind, light approach can make you sound fair and reasonable: “Hey, those other exterminators are nice people, I’m sure, but they really need to keep up on the latest developments in the industry. And the old-timers can’t rest on their laurels thinking that experience alone is all that matters. When you’re dealing with chemicals in people’s homes, you need to do more than say, ‘I’ve been in the business a long time, so hire me.’”
Rather than waiting for your customers to be contacted by your competitors or be exposed to their sales pitch and risk having them be persuaded against you, you preempt that attack by informing your customers what your competitor might or will say and giving them ammunition that counters the attack and renders it weak and ineffective. The following script provides another example of how it’s done.
“Our competitors will tell you that they can translate any document in up to 20 languages and can do it in less than one hour. They’ll tell you that they use native speakers who really care about the quality of their work. And they’ll tell you that their friendly customer service reps are standing by 24/7, ready to assist you. [Note that the competitors’ claims are given in a list format, with each statement beginning with “They’ll tell you,” with the inoculation section beginning with “but what they don’t tell you.”]
“But what they don’t tell you is that the reason they’re able to offer translation in so many languages is that the bulk of their translation work is done by low-wage, off-site, home-based freelancers with varying degrees of expertise. Some are actually rank amateurs with very little professional experience. [Dissatisfaction generator. Also, note the consumer advocate approach, tapping into your prospects’ and customers’ value system and sense of fairness.]
“Many of their workers are overseas, do it in their spare time, and have varying standards of quality and professionalism. Since most are not businesspeople, they don’t understand how choosing the right words and expressions can make or break a deal. [Note how the ammunition being provided is reasonable and sounds entirely logical, which it truly is.]
“By contrast, we use only highly qualified, college-degreed, USA-based business-translation experts who are credentialed by the respected American Translators Association and have scored in the top 1 percent of all translators in their respective languages—the gold standard level of translation skill and ability. [Credibility String.]
“Ever wonder why those companies don’t display the ATA logo to indicate that their translators carry this prestigious credential? It’s because more likely than not, they have no credential at all. [Giving consumers something to look for to verify your claims about the competition—such as the ATA logo in this example—serves as a quick test, or cue, that because of its easily verifiable nature causes consumers to consider as true the negative connotations that you’ve associated with its absence.]
“The reason they can claim one-hour translations is that many use machine translation that you can do yourself online for free. Unfortunately, the results are usually ridiculous and loaded with embarrassing errors that can lead to terrible misunderstandings. This is not something you’d ever want to use for business because the result could be financially devastating to your company. [Dissatisfaction generator. Note that the script doesn’t simply list the competition’s negatives but also paints a picture of emotional and financial loss to make personal the potential damage that could be sustained by using a company that’s perhaps not telling customers the entire story.]
“And while 24/7 customer service is nice, they don’t tell you that these phone reps typically aren’t employed by the translation company itself but their services are outsourced to giant overseas phone bank operations that care little about your business’s needs and concerns. Plus, they often don’t have the ability to access anything other than your account records and take messages, and many don’t speak English as their first language, which can be terribly frustrating.
“We think hyped-up claims like these are irresponsible and don’t have your best interests in mind. For example:
Would you put possibly unqualified, low-wage overseas freelancers in charge of your business communication?
What do you think about being charged human-translation prices for inferior machine translations?
How much is 24/7 customer service worth to you if they really don’t know what’s going on with your account and have limited power to help you?
“Please click here now and tell us what you think.”
Remember that it’s important to ask your prospect for his or her thoughts about the information you provided in order to start the thought process and cause the ego to own and defend the resulting thoughts. The more emotionally the positions and opinions are expressed and defended, the more successful the inoculation is likely to be.
The same principle can be used very effectively in advertising. Although you wouldn’t be speaking only to your own customers but also to the general public and you wouldn’t get the feedback described above, it’s still an extremely strong way to enumerate the advantages of choosing your company over your competition.
My advice? Do it to them before they do it to you.