Invisible Influence: The Power to Persuade Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere

2

Is Less More?

The next three techniques are captured from a massive marketing study carried out by a lender of money in South Africa in 2005.1

Unlike most studies that are done on a college campus with adult students, this study was done with 51,000 South African recipients of a direct mail piece soliciting loans to customers who had borrowed money from the lender in the past couple of years.

The goal of the study was to find out what caused people to respond to the direct mail marketing and what didn’t.

Would lower or higher interest rates make a difference? What about differences that had nothing to do with the borrowing of money?

The direct mail pieces sent out were subdivided in several ways, which only could have been done in such a large magnitude experiment like this one.

• They tested for different interest rates, ranging from 3.25 to 11.75 percent per month.
• They compared their interest rates to competitor rates that were higher and stated so in different ways in tables.
• They tested for the inclusion of three different tables that showed various combinations of repayment terms. The third table was a small table with one loan size, one loan term, one monthly repayment, and one interest rate.
• They tested for photos and similarity of last name of letter author . . . of lender employees who were sending the letter, and that person’s race and gender were manipulated depending on the race and gender of the recipient of the letter (guessed by the names of the people). Then ...