The Small BIG: Small Changes That Spark Big Influence (24 page)

F
irst impressions count. But as any pop star or film director will tell you, what happens at the end is important, too. And focusing attention on, or making subtle changes to, the way an interaction ends, a business transaction is completed, or even what you do on the last day of your vacation can have an incredible influence on outcomes as diverse as your customer satisfaction scores, whether you get repeat business and attract client loyalty, or even how much you enjoy your next vacation.

Imagine for a few moments that you have just visited your physician’s office for a routine but rather uncomfortable medical procedure and, on leaving the examination room, you are asked how painful it was and how much you are looking forward to your next examination. By way of contrast, now imagine this much more pleasant scenario: You have just returned from your vacation, and you are asked how much you enjoyed it and how much you are looking forward to your next one.

If you are like most people in various studies who have been asked these questions, then your responses will most likely be influenced by two things: The peak moment of intensity you felt during the experience—pain in the case of the medical checkup and (hopefully) pleasure in the case of your vacation—and the final moments of the experience. Those who first studied this phenomenon referred to it as the
peak-end effect
.

Rather surprisingly, your feelings at any other time of the experience matter a lot less than you might think. Furthermore your overall evaluation of the experience will most likely also suffer from something called
duration neglect
, meaning that you will tend to pay less attention to how long an experience lasted and, on some occasions, will disregard its duration entirely.

One classic study in particular, conducted by Nobel Prize–winner Daniel Kahneman and medical doctor Donald Redelmeier, brilliantly demonstrated how patients who had undergone a painful medical procedure (a colonoscopy) were much more likely to recall
afterward
how much pain they experienced (a) at the peak moment of discomfort and (b) at the end of the examination.

Peak-end effects are the reason why pop stars tend to play their most popular songs at the end of the concert. They also explain why the waiter who was rude at the end of your meal can totally spoil your memory of an otherwise lovely experience. And remember that incredibly boring meeting you were in last week—the one that you thought would never end? On reflection it doesn’t seem so long now does it? That’s duration neglect in action.

Given that our memories of the experiences we encounter are etched into our minds with extremity and recency but not necessarily duration, they can be a less-than-perfect guide when we decide how we feel about what we have experienced. But regardless of how imperfect a guide memories may be, they can still have an enormous influence over our future decisions. As a result, if you want to foster future collaboration with others, encourage greater customer loyalty, or simply get better feedback, while the advice would be to focus on the whole experience, you would be especially advised to make small changes that amplify the high points of the experience (or minimize the low points) and to enrich the very last thing that happens.

Lots of people like chocolate and regard Swiss chocolate as the very best in the world, so on a recent flight with the country’s national airline, one of us was delighted to be given a Swiss chocolate on boarding the flight. One wonders if the impact of this small, yet smart, gesture could be amplified further by giving travelers the chocolate as they leave, rather than only as they board, the airplane.

Similarly we have noticed that some hotels provide welcome gifts to their guests such as stationery items, branded bath products, and, on one occasion, a high-quality bottle opener. These items will often come accompanied with a handwritten note from the duty manager expressing the desire that the guests enjoy their stay. A
SMALL
BIG shift that hotel managers might ponder is whether they could attain the best of both worlds by providing the personalized note as guests check in and the gift when they check out.

Web designers, too, could benefit from
SMALL
BIGs aligned to the peak-end effect by arranging for a nice image or thank-you note to pop up as people log off a website. Or, in the case of an online purchase, arrange for a surprise piece of content or a voucher for the future to be made available. Nurses could give kids (and we suspect some adults, too) a candy or a sticker for being brave at vaccination time. Of course this already happens in many clinics and health centers although probably not with this effect in mind.

Focusing on the
SMALL
BIGs that can be made at the end of interactions and experiences needn’t just be limited to those more obvious transactions that occur, such as in the travel and hospitality industries. There are notable public sector applications, too. For example, a hospital patient’s memory of an otherwise highly satisfactory (and expensive) medical procedure is likely to be dampened by the very last thing they might have to do when they leave the hospital—pay an overpriced parking fee to the parking attendant.

If the hospital could offer to comp or even take a few dollars off the price, the final thought while leaving the hospital would be a positive one and could pay big dividends when it comes to a patient’s reporting of the whole experience to their friends and neighbors. More controversially, a case could be made that inmates incarcerated in penitentiaries might be less likely to reoffend if the final days before their release are the most painful of their sentence and not, as is more usually the case, the easiest.

The finding that people’s memories of previous experiences will often suffer from duration neglect might prompt a small change to a common strategy employed by salespeople and marketers to persuade customers to switch from one product to an alternative. When addressing the specific pain points that a potential customer may experience with an existing product, rather than focusing on the wasted time caused by such problems, it would be better for marketers and sales professionals to focus on the intensity of the pain the customer experiences when such problems occur.

Understanding the influence that these peak-end effects have when it comes to evaluating our own experiences can also prompt small changes that lead to big effects. If you want to have fabulous memories of your next vacation, rather than spreading your budget thinly by booking lots of small excursions and day trips, you’d be much better off spending a bigger chunk of your budget on two amazing experiences, including one at the end. And rather than using those free miles to get a nicer seat on the way out, you’ll likely be much better off if you travel
back
home in style instead.

Business authors too might increase the odds of positive reader reviews on Amazon and recommendations to friends and colleagues by paying special attention to the end of their book to ensure that their readers’ memories are positive ones. To this end, while we may have reached the last of our 52
SMALL
BIG chapters, we have included a bonus chapter that, when coupled with your favorite chapter, provides you with a peak-end positive experience of your own.

O
ur goal in this book has been to provide a collection of
SMALL
BIGs that you can add to your persuasion toolkit. Small changes, informed by recent persuasion science that anyone—from businesspeople to healthcare professionals, politicians to parents—can employ to make a big difference when persuading and communicating with others.

Although the 52
SMALL
BIGs we have presented differ from each other in some way, such as the psychological mechanism that drives them or the contexts or situations where they can be most successfully deployed, they share an important similarity. When used responsibly and in the right context, each can afford the communicator a significant advantage when attempting to influence others.

But the idea that a single
SMALL
BIG, used ethically and in the appropriate context, can make a big difference prompts another question: To what extent can multiple
SMALL
BIGs, used either in sequence or in combination, lead to even greater results? For example, is it the case that shoehorning as many individual
SMALL
BIG strategies into your influence attempts will make your persuasion efforts even more productive?

The answer is clearly no. Just as you would never use every single tool in your toolkit to accomplish a single fix-it job around the house, trying to use too many tools of persuasion at once could actually make it more difficult to achieve the outcome you are hoping for. While there is emerging evidence that some influence strategies can work well in combination there is also evidence that in certain contexts, not only will one cancel out another, but will actually lead to a worse result than if no persuasion strategy was employed at all.

Here are some examples that illustrate each of these scenarios.

Cast your mind back to chapter 8, where we described our research showing how health center managers could reduce the number of patients who failed to show up for their appointments simply by asking patients to make a verbal commitment by repeating back their appointment time before hanging up the phone. Remember also how, in a second study, asking patients to write down appointment details on a reminder card themselves, rather than reception staff doing it, produced an even bigger effect, reducing no-shows by 18 percent. We tested another strategy, too. For a period of several months we replaced the signs in health center waiting rooms that highlighted the large number of people who had previously failed to attend appointments with signs that communicated the much larger social proof of the situation—the number of people who did turn up. When these three
SMALL
BIG strategies were used in combination we measured a 31.4 percent reduction in subsequent nonattendance. To demonstrate that it was the combination of these small changes making this big difference and not some other, unrelated factor, we stopped the interventions and no-shows rose dramatically. As soon as we reengaged the combination of the three small changes, no-shows fell again by an average of 30 percent and in doing so demonstrated how a combination of several small changes can lead to even bigger differences.

So far, the case for combining persuasion strategies is looking good. However, before we get carried away, let’s note that this is not always the case. Take, for example, a wonderful series of studies conducted by behavioral scientists Paul Dolan and Robert Metcalfe. In their experiments they found that informing households about how they were consuming more energy than their neighbors was a small change that led to a big difference. Energy consumption in those households declined by an average of 6 percent in subsequent months.

They also found that offering householders a £100 ($150) reward if they reduced their energy consumption was pretty effective, too. Consumption dropped by a similar amount as for those who received the information that pointed to their being out of step with their neighbors.

But what happens when you combine the social norm approach with the incentive approach? Fortunately, the researchers considered this question and carried out an experiment in which another group of householders was told how their consumption compared to their neighbors’ and at the same time was offered £100 if they reduced it. What happened?

The strategy had absolutely no effect on consumption whatsoever!

At first glance, this makes no apparent sense. In mathematics if you add one and one you get two. In this study adding one and one didn’t even result in a bit more than one. It resulted in zero! Nothing. Nil points. It was as if one successful persuasion strategy cancelled out an equally successful strategy to such an extent that it would have been better to save on the postage and do nothing.

So what is going on? Why is it that certain combinations of persuasion strategies can work well together and enhance the overall result and others do not?

Here are three possible explanations.

The first concerns the incompatibility of underlying motivations that can be activated by a multifaceted message. For example, when being urged to conserve energy, the motivation to do so for personal gain (the £100 offered by the researchers) may have felt incompatible with the motivation to make a sacrifice for the common good (as validated by their neighbors). Consequently, these two strong but countervailing motivations may have cancelled each other out.

Therefore, when constructing an influence attempt that includes a combination of persuasive approaches, it is important to ensure that the approaches complement one another by activating compatible human motivations.

The second reason why combining multiple approaches to persuasion sometimes fails is that the more persuasion tools you use in a single attempt to influence another person, the less likely that person will be to engage with you (or your communication) in the first place. For example, if you are trying to persuade your boss to let you leave work early for the day, she is far more likely to immediately read and respond to a one-line, one-influence-technique email than an email containing six paragraphs full of dozens of techniques. This may be simply because she doesn’t feel she has the time to thoroughly read the longer email. She may put off reading the email until it’s too late, or may even forget about it entirely as her inbox fills up with other urgent (and presumably shorter and snappier) requests. Similarly, home residents may be more likely to disengage from, or “put aside for later” (never to be looked at again in actuality), home energy reports—or any direct marketing materials for that matter—that contain many tactics embedded in a large amount of written material.

A third reason why certain influence strategies will work in combination and others may fail relates to the obviousness of the influence attempt. Sometimes when a number of small changes are combined, they don’t remain subtle but merge into a larger, much more explicit persuasion attempt, which can heighten resistance.

To give an example, in one study conducted by Daniel Feiler, Leigh Tost, and Adam Grant, 8,000 alumni of a large public university were sent an email asking if they would be willing to donate to the university. For some recipients the request was accompanied by a message pointing out the “egoistic” benefits of giving: “Previous alumni report that giving makes them feel good.” Other recipients received the request accompanied by an altruistic reason: “Giving is your chance to make a difference to the lives of students, faculty, and staff.” Finally another group received a request to donate highlighting both the egoistic reasons and the altruistic reasons for giving. Those who received both reasons were less than half as likely to donate as those given either one alone.

In another study by the same researchers, participants received a request to donate to the Make-A-Wish Foundation that had either two egoistic reasons to give, two altruistic reasons, or all four reasons combined. Again, giving intentions were much lower in the group that was provided with four reasons to donate. Post-study surveys revealed a simple reason why: People could see the message for what it was—an attempt to persuade them. It seems that when crafting a persuasive communication there comes a point when adding additional arguments and justifications acts to heighten resistance, which, in turn, greatly reduces the communication’s impact.

So what is the optimal number of claims that should be used to produce the most positive impression?

To answer this important question, consider a study conducted by behavioral scientists Suzanne Shu and Kurt Carlson. In Shu and Carlson’s study, participants were assigned to one of six groups and were asked to read descriptions of five different target objects—a breakfast cereal, a restaurant, a shampoo, an ice cream store, and a politician. As an example, the shampoo advertisement was introduced as follows:

The blank space was then filled with one, two, three, four, five, or six positive claims about the shampoo. For example, participants who were shown all six claims read “Makes hair cleaner, stronger, healthier, softer, shinier, and fuller.”

In the political advertisement participants who were shown all six claims read that the candidate was “honest, had integrity, experience, intelligence, interpersonal skills, and a desire to serve.”

After the participants saw the ads, the researchers measured their attitudes toward each target product or person along with the positive or negative level of their impressions. The researchers also measured the participants’ levels of skepticism in an attempt to locate the point at which people started to think that the claims in the ads were not there to inform them but to push them to choose a particular product.

The results clearly demonstrated that those who had read
three
claims rated all the subjects of the ads (regardless of whether they were breakfast cereals, politicians, etc.) significantly more positively than participants who had read the ads with one, two, four, five, or six claims. It appears that adding additional positive claims to a persuasive appeal increased its effectiveness up until the third claim was encountered. But after that, further persuasion attempts increased skepticism, which in turn heightened resistance to the overall persuasion appeal.

So it seems that, in this case at least, the answer to the question of what is the optimal number of claims that should be used to produce the most positive impression is three.

Or, as Shu and Carlson so succinctly concluded, “Three charms but four alarms.”

These studies show that even as you use and combine these strategies in completely ethical ways, utilizing a large number of persuasive claims or tactics can make your influence target
think
that you may be acting less ethically than you truly are.

When it comes to influencing the way others think, feel, and act, small changes can make a big difference for one fundamental reason. They
are
small. They fly under the radar. They rarely raise suspicion or attention. Instead, they go quietly about their business shaping our decisions and influencing our behaviors in largely automatic and unconscious ways. In a world in which bigger is often equated with better, we’re pleased not only that we’ve provided you with a whole toolkit full of ethical tools of influence, but that the tools themselves are so seemingly diminutive that they will hardly go noticed. And in that sense, when it comes to influence, small is most certainly the new BIG.

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