Interested in using simple tactics to persuade others? If you were a product development manager, interested in raising the sales of your product, what would you do? Give the consumer more choices to choose from? Most definitely, that would raise sales you would think. However, when does offering people more make them want it less?

According to research conducted by behavioral scientist Sheena Lyengar, the more choices employees were given with regard to mutual funds, the lower was the participation rate. When only two funds were offered, the level of participation was about 75%, however, when fifty nine funds were offered, the level of participation dropped down to about 60%.

This counter-intuitive result stems from the fact that when people are offered too many choices, we often find the decision making process frustrating, resulting in a reduced interest in the product being offered.

This phenomenon transcends itself at the supermarket as well. According to an experiment conducted at a local supermarket, when the number of flavours of jams was reduced from twenty-four to six, the percentage of people who actually made a purchase increased from 3 to an staggering 30 percent.

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This strategy rears its head in advertisement as well.

In a study conducted by Michaela Wanke, students were asked to compare an ad for BMW that states:

“BMW or Mercedes? There are many reasons to choose a BMW. Can you name 10?”

against a slightly modified ad

“BMW or Mercedes? There are many reasons to choose a BMW. Can you name ONE?”

Afterward, the students were asked to give their opinions about BMW and Mercedes. Surprisingly, the first advertisement that asked for 10 reasons resulted in lower evaluations of the BMW and higher evaluations of the Mercedes compared to the modified ad.

So, what is the reason for this result?

It is speculated that when the students were asked to come up with only a single reason for the BMW, they had an easy task as compared to the more difficult task of naming ten reasons. Hence, rather than using the number of reasons in order to evaluate the car brands, the participants instead based their judgment on the ease or difficulty of the assigned task to make their selection.

This result reinforces the main idea of this post, which is often times, the most effective persuasion tactic or strategy is the more simple one. People inherently like easy solutions in life. Do simplify your persuasive arguments by leaving out all the unnecessary clutter and just present the clear facts and have simple alternatives.

Besides employing the simplicity of persuasion, we can also use other persuasion tactics such as the persuasive power of social proof. Indeed, the art of persuasion is both an art as well as a science. Communication is indeed an important aspect of all our lives, thus let us focus on improving our communication and persuasion skills each and every day.