Why We Think People Want To Listen To Our Pitch: The Illusion Of Control
Imagine yourself for a moment walking along a crowded street in your favorite city. Hear the horns of the cars, the buzz of people talking on their phones as they walk by, and feel the heat coming off the asphalt streets. You come up to a cross walk and nonchalantly press the crosswalk button, wait for the little guy in lights to turn white and you cross. You get to your destination, get on the elevator, see someone you don’t particularly want to talk to and you start pressing the close door button until the door finally closes and you can enjoy the ride in peace.
What if I told you those buttons don’t hasten a change in traffic movement or door closings? What if those buttons were there only for your psychological benefit and not for functionality? Well, consider yourself told. A majority of those buttons don’t function or create the outcome you assume they do (In New York City, only about 100 of the 1,000 crosswalk buttons actually control the traffic pattern, confirmed by a spokesperson from the City's Department of Transportation in an email), but they do serve a purpose. These buttons are what’s referred to as “placebo buttons” and they are there to achieve the illusion of control. In a recent interview with CNN, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, who pioneered the concept of “illusion of control,” summarizes there function like this:
"They do have a psychological effect because taking some action leads people to feel a sense of control over a situation, and that feels good, rather than just being a passive bystander. Doing something typically feels better than doing nothing.”
In the example of the elevator buttons, Kevin Brinkman of the National Elevator Industry says:
"To put it simply, the riding public will not be able to make the doors close any faster using that button.”
So, NO the buttons you press at the cross walk and on the elevator do nothing but make you feel like you are in control. Feeling in control offers a sense of safety and gives you confidence to tackle the many other things headed your way in a given day, month, year, etc.
I see this illusion of control in the sales and marketing efforts within the water and wastewater industry every day. Despite conclusive data to the contrary, manufacturers and solutions providers continue to spend most of their time, money and resources in content that only talks about them. Psychologically it feels good. It feels good because it feels safe and inside a comfort zone that was created almost a century ago and most effective four decades ago.
When you talk about yourself you feel as if you are in control because it’s what you know the most about. The problem is that it’s NOT what your customers and prospect want to hear. Unlike the pre-digital buyers journey (before the year 2000) your prospects and customers have already researched you and don’t need you telling them what they already know or aren’t ready to learn. They need to be engaged on a level that gives them a reason to be engaged. They want to be educated, they want to be heard, they want to give their share of mind to a company that talks to them and not at them.
Customers and prospects have the control and the only way to help get some of that back is to engage them with insight, information, entertainment and discussion (about them, not you). By continuing to talk about yourself all you are achieving is the illusion of control.
Image credit: ""Body By Escher"," Katexic Clippings Newsletter © 2015, used under an Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/