Give a little, get a little. It’s that simple. This fundamental principle of human interaction can be deployed to add serious muscle to all kinds of persuasive communications. It’s like being able to give your communications a perfectly legal steroid injection...and a cheap communications edge.

Here’s how it works. If somebody gives us something, we should give something back, right? This sense of reciprocity is deeply embedded in our shorthand (what social scientists call "heuristic") sense of how the world is supposed to work and we all have experiences to back it up.
Here's one of mine. If you ride a motorcycle, it is customary to make a gesture to other motorcyclists you encounter on the road. I’ve never known exactly what this gesture means, but it has an inclusive effect: it’s a way of acknowledging membership in that special family known as motorcycle riders.

The motion is really not a wave, but a sort of cool, casual pointing gesture made with the left arm. Usually straight out or pointing down a little. May even include a pointing finger. You make that gesture and the other rider is supposed to reciprocate. When somebody makes the gesture to you, you are obligated to reciprocate. It’s an unwritten code, something we riders do heuristically, without thinking.

If a rider fails to reciprocate our gesture, we're a little disturbed. If we're preoccupied and miss returning another rider's gesture, we're also a little disturbed with ourselves. Our heuristic sense of reciprocity seeks balance.

Reciprocity works to one degree or another in a lot of different persuasion settings. Some companies send out free gifts along with their sales pitch; not a reward, mind you. It’s a free gift. You don’t have to do anything to get it. All it’s supposed to do it create a reciprocal response: increase the odds of getting a sale.

I get a lot of free pens with my company names imprinted on them and I feel bad every time I don’t buy some of those imprinted pens. But I don’t buy them. The reason is that the stakes are high enough to trigger a systematic thinking state that overrides my feeling-vulnerable heuristic state. In my case that means analyzing whether or not spending some money for imprinted pens would be a good awareness-building investment for my company. I decide against it. Reciprocity failed in my case, but evidently it works on a lot of other people. Nothing is perfect. Still....

What if the stakes are lower? What if they involve, say, zero out-of-pocket cash and only a minute or two of reading (eyeball) time? Here, the reciprocity effect is more likely to work frequently.

This is where reciprocity (and some other factors, as well) can increase the horsepower of written communications. I call it Eyeball Reciprocity and it can be used in a lot of different ways in a lot of different settings. Here are a couple examples.

The Free Nugget

Most people like to learn, particularly if they don’t have to work very hard at it. Think of the enduring popularity of quiz shows like Jeopardy and games like Trivial Pursuit. If your written communication piece gives readers a tidbit of unexpected knowledge right up front, several things can happen.

First, you have given the reader something unexpected and pleasurable: a gift of new knowledge. In return, most readers will stake you enough of their time to go deeper into your communication. Reciprocity in action; it’s only balance, after all.

Second, you have triggered a deeper level of attention for the rest of your message, which is where the persuasion or influence will be applied.

Third, if they like the nugget you’ve given them, they’re going tend to respect your company and thus be more open to your message content.
Fourth, you have established yourself as an authority (you know something they don’t know), which enhances the believability of the balance of your message.

The Free Nugget can be used in a dizzying variety of communications, from letters and memorandums to annual reports to newsletters, to advertising in all sorts of guises. Anywhere getting your message across matters even a whit.

The Visual Snag

In advertising parlance, "stopping power" is what makes a reader or viewer stop to read or watch your ad. In TV, print ads, direct marketing pieces and point-of-purchase materials, for example, visual stopping power is absolutely critical to message delivery. As I’m sure you will agree, an incredible amount of advertising on TV and in print has virtually no stopping power. Of course, you can’t remember any of those advertisers because their ads didn’t stop you. Amazing, isn’t it?

Increase the stopping power and you inevitably increase the impact and cost-effectiveness of your ad, assuming your selling proposition is relevant to the audience and you don’t blow it completely delivering the message through the copy (a whole other topic).

Sometimes all it takes to stop us is an image of surpassing beauty; it’s just too marvelous an image not to stop and see what the ad is about. Advertising agencies spend huge amounts of their clients’ dollars to produce images with this kind of stopping power.

Consider, say, a fashion magazine like Vogue. Every advertising page screams “I’m beautiful” in a slightly different way, but all of them are slick, sumptuous, glossy, stylish and so forth. Imagine how hard it is to stand out in this crowd. But what if we don't have that kind of money to play with?

One way to stand out in any crowd is to go “contrarian.” Here we employ a psychological principle called “cognitive dissonance.” It inserts what I call a "constructive disconnect" into the moment. Cognitive dissonance creates a momentary door into the reader’s mind. Such dissonant images snag the viewer or reader with their oddness, incongruity or unexpectedness. They’re just plain different from the other ads that are competing for your attention with only monumental beauty and perfectly honed attitudes in their holsters. Apple Computer’s much talked-about and still famous “1984” TV commercial still sticks in my head for its contrarian excellence. A true nonesuch.

Visual Snags and Free Nuggets together are particularly useful in advertising collateral. While it is sometimes tempting to believe that stopping power is less relevant when the reader already has your expensive brochure in his or her hands, nothing could be further from the truth. Particularly if your message is complex or abstract or requires thought on the reader’s part. Or if the stakes are high, like wanting the reader to make a significant investment in what you’re selling.

Suppose you’re a company that sells accounting and consulting services. Is there an alternative to gratuitous people pictures and handshakes and all that trite, overworked, unimaginative nonsense that only occupies space on the page and transfers nothing new to the reader’s mind? Yes.

You’re a prospective client sitting with the accounting and consulting company's slick, full-color brochure. Imagine turning to a page spread titled Accounting and Auditing. If you’re like me, your Boredom Alert has gone off and you’re looking for a toothpick you can use to prop your eyes open.

The right hand page is all text. It's clean and well organized — not dense, or crowded or filled with text that's too small to read — but there's nothing but words. Sigh. But wait! The left hand page is a strange and striking image of what must be a human head. Some kind of high-tech MRI or something, you think. What’s it doing facing a page about accounting and auditing? That’s an odd juxtaposition. Yes, it is. By design.

Inside the full-page picture, you notice a box with this text in it: “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” The quote in the box is attributed to Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, American scientist. You may or may not know that Szent-Gyorgyi was a Nobel laureate (physiology and medicine), but you probably can’t help but think about that provocative quote. He's the same guy who said: “A discovery is an accident meeting a prepared mind.” Wise man.

Also in the box is an explanation of the striking, mysterious image: “Color-coded nuclear magnet resonance image of a man eating a plum.” Maybe you’re congratulating yourself on getting MRI part right, or maybe you’re just smiling to yourself. Eating a plum? Hmmm. Or maybe you’re already wondering what any of this has to do with accounting and auditing.

Whichever of those apply, you’ve received two unexpected Free Nuggets (the “eye candy” image and the pithy quote). Interesting nuggets. Plus, you’re now engaged and your thinking self is involved; you may even be curious enough to wonder if this company has some angle on accounting and auditing that's worth reading about. Thus, you’re likely to give the brochure a bit more of your time. Or keep it around so you can come back to it.

A brochure like that might actually have more stickiness than a brochure without those nuggets, right? What if the brochure had a bunch more of these multi-nugget page spreads?

In fact, it did. I conceived, co-wrote and designed this 28-page capabilities brochure in the 1980s for Laventhol & Horwath, one of the top ten accounting and consulting firms at that time. It turned out to be the first brochure they’d ever produced that generated unsolicited positive comments from prospective clients. They believed it even led to a number of new accounts. Imagine that! Here's the spread we just talked about. Let's reverse-engineer it.



First, we notice that it appears to have structure: it's organized. Research shows that readers appreciate being presented with organized, structured information. And a conservative accounting and consulting firm absolutely must look organized.

The page design also has white space elements to assist the organization and mitigate any sense of information overload. In other words, it's reader friendly; it respects the value of the reader's time.

Because readers also appreciate consistency. the text pages throughout the brochure have a consistent organization scheme, the same four content elements always appear in the same places.

1. A topic title.
2. A sample client story, the next best thing to a testimonial. This is intentionally brief and situated in the gutter next to the image, providing a "baby steps" path to the the meat of the sales message.
3. The sales pitch for the Accounting and Auditing service category.
4. What exact services are being offered in the Accounting and Audition category.

That's it for today's exposition on Free Nuggets and Visual Snags. A sample of actual text for the above spread can be downloaded in PDF form by clicking here. But there's more! The cover and another sample spread can be seen by clicking here.