FOREWORD
Anyone who wishes to persuade a child, a boss, a partner, a spouse, or a customer in a showroom should read this book. The principles of persuasion Jim Crimmins reveals on the pages that follow apply in any situation where individuals need to be persuaded to do something they are not doing or, conversely, to be persuaded not to do something they are already doing.
As a longtime practitioner of advertising, I wish Jim had written this book years ago when I was still working day to day in the business of creating campaigns for clients and trying to get them to understand what we intuitively knew: Consumers may rationalize a brand choice, but the choice is really driven by their emotions. People don’t choose a brand based on facts and rational arguments any more than they choose a life partner or a political candidate that way. Instead, they base their purchase decisions pretty much on their feelings about a brand, feelings created in large part by the brand’s advertising. That’s why, as Jim so convincingly points out in this book, asking people why they do things is not only a mistake, it will take you down the wrong path. It turns out that people actually don’t know why they do certain things; so, in trying to tell you, they’ll misguide you. Instead of asking them, Jim urges us to “unearth” people’s true motivations, and he shares some proven ways to do that.
It’s a shame that we in advertising, when I was still involved in the work every day and even now, have never been able to fully explain how our product works, how advertising can attach real values and set expectations that actually transform the experience of using a brand. Nor have we always been able to prove that the most persuasive advertising may present no rational argument at all. It’s sad to think about so many potentially great campaigns rejected by clients who, in the absence of the kind of scientific evidence contained in this book, were conned by copy testers with bogus systems into believing that the measure of success for advertising was a respondent’s ability to recall copy points or play back a brand’s so-called “unique selling proposition.” We have always felt passionately that real persuasion is more about a “unique selling personality”—how a brand looks and feels and acts, what a brand does rather than what it says, indeed what a brand’s “body language” conveys. But we have always been at a loss to prove such a point of view and so some of the very best ideas have gone down in flames.
That’s because until now, we weren’t armed with the groundbreaking discoveries made by the new science of the mind detailed in this book. Within these pages, Jim details dozens of recent scientific studies that prove in various ways how and why a reasoned argument can be a waste of time and why, to be successful as persuaders, we must get to know the “lizard,” which is Jim’s way of describing the brain’s automatic, nonconscious mental system that acts without deliberate thinking. Apparently, we share this ancient system with lizards and all other vertebrates. And according to evidence Jim presents, this system makes the key decisions when the brain selects one brand, or one proposition, or one person over another.
Jim Crimmins speaks from his years of experience as a top strategist for advertising agencies Needham, Harper & Steers and DDB Worldwide. He is an expert on the subject of human behavior and he fills the pages of this book with both positive and negative examples, gleaned from his own experience and the related experience of others. Throughout the book, Jim surprises us with new insights in the same enlightening way I came to depend upon during the years we worked together. For example, in one chapter, he turns on its head the idea that attitude change must precede behavior change. With examples, readers are shown why would-be persuaders should aim at the act they wish to change, not the attitude. The attitude change, according to Jim, will follow.
At a time when the advertising industry often seems more obsessed with clicks than with true connections, the revelations found in this book are both timely and empowering. In fact, now that Jim Crimmins has provided us with scientific evidence that persuasion is more about feelings than facts, I may go back and try to sell some of those potentially great campaigns that eschewed rational arguments in favor of emotional appeal. They’re still sitting, rejected, on the shelf. But having read Jim Crimmins’s book, I feel certain the lizard would like them.