To make things clear from the beginning, in case anyone doesn’t know exactly what marketing or a marketer are, I will define the two.
Marketing is the set of commercial processes involved in promoting, selling and distributing a product or service. A marketer is the person in charge of designing and executing marketing campaigns.
These days more than ever, at least online, you can see that a very large number of people are marketers (more or less successful) or aspiring to be. The aspiring online marketer usually reads the blogs and webpages of the relatively successful marketer trying to learn new tricks and be just like him. But the successful marketer is 80% of the time marketing to him and 20% of the time teaching him.
“There is no duty more indispensable than that of a returning a kindness. All men distrust one forgetful of a benefit.”
— Cicero
How marketing works
Marketing is an art — in that everyone can do it, but only a few can do it right.
It can be both very useful and almost exploitative. It can make good products known to the public, and it can sell dreams. It makes people want to buy things they don’t need. Sometimes it convinces people that they want things they don’t need. How does it achieve that? One of the techniques is exploiting the norm of reciprocity.
The norm of reciprocity
The norm of reciprocity is a technique that exploits people’s natural tendency to want to repay debts. I know that sounds unbelievably optimistic, believing in a good world where everything works out for the best all the time, because you might think that most people want to avoid paying debts. But no matter how cynical you may feel about the human race, people do have a basically cooperative nature, especially in face-to-face relationships.
It dates from our days as primitive members of tribes, just cavemen, who helped each other to survive. When one person does a favor for another, the other feels indebted and wants to return the favor to even out the score. Even today, there are still a few remaining tribes who have an economic system that is just a complex web of traded favors and debts, and they all manage to remember who owes what to whom.
The Hari Krishnas discovered that they could increase their haul of money from airports by giving away flowers. That is, if they just tried to shake travelers down for donations, they got rejected a lot. But when they gave travelers a flower, “…because we love you, and you are so beautiful…”, and then hit up the traveler for a donation, they got a lot more money. The act of giving the flower made the traveler feel indebted and embarrassed, and vulnerable to the request for money.
