BUSINESS MATTERS


A culture of persuasion S


itting at your desk tapping away on the keys of your laptop it’s all too easy to forget that the email you


Steve Martin


Steve Martin, co- author of the New York Times best seller ‘Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion’,


reveals the secrets of cultural persuasion.


are writing could be destined for an audience many thousands of miles away. While technology may have shortened the distance between countries and continents to less than a few seconds, when it comes to human communications our hardware hasn’t changed that much at all. So given that business is a global affair it probably makes sense to consider how the effectiveness of our communications with customers, consumers and business partners might differ depending on their cultural origin. Fortunately, social scientists who study cross cultural communication and persuasion have uncovered some helpful rules of thumb for effectively communicating and persuading others from cultures different to our own. Some of these models rely on broad generalisations and therefore it is important not to stereotype. However, they can still be a valuable starting point and apply equally in face-to-face communications as well as written ones.


Perhaps the most familiar is the individual/collective culture model. In individual-focused cultures such as the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom people tend to value their independence and focus on furthering personal goals. By contrast in collective-focused cultures such as Japan, China, Korea, and Mexico people are more likely to see themselves as fundamentally embedded within a wider social group. One place where these differences have been demonstrated is on peoples’ responses to advertising. One study found that advertisements for detergent products were more appealing to audiences from individual societies when presented as ‘cleans with a softness that you will love’. However, audiences from more collective- focused societies responded more positively to more group orientated messages such as ‘cleans with a softness your family will love’.


Such insights don’t just tell us how to effectively advertise laundry products: Cross cultural studies can provide valuable insights when building new relationships and influencing people from different cultures to our own. Persuasion researchers carrying out a large scale study in a global banking group found evidence that people from different cultures pay attention to different things when deciding whether to say ‘Yes’ to a requests for help from their colleagues. In individualistic cultures such as the USA, the UK and Canada people were more often persuaded to help colleagues and business partners to the extent that the requester had done something for them first. In essence, before deciding whether to help out a colleague they tended to ask themselves, ‘What have they done for me recently?’. They were more likely help if they owed the requester a favour.


Collective cultures But the researchers found very different results in collective cultures where a decision to help a colleague was primarily determined by who the requester was connected to. People asked themselves, ‘Is this person connected to someone in my department, especially someone of a high rank?’. If the answer was yes, they felt more obligated to help the requester. The research looked at other cultures too. In Mediterranean and South American cultures they found that requests were more persuasive if the requester was connected to their network of friends. In Germany and Scandinavia the most successful persuasion occurred when requests were shown to be consistent with an organisation’s official rules and policies.


Studies like these can help anyone who needs to influence and persuade people from cultures different to their own to increase their chances of success by considering one very important feature of their communication – what they do first before making a request. When communicating across individualistic cultures this might mean asking


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ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Steve Martin is the New York Times best selling author, business columnist, speaker and Managing Director of Influence at Work UK. He is co-author of the international best seller ‘Yes! 50 Secrets From the Science of Persuasion’, a New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Business Week best seller. Yes! was nominated for the 2008 Royal Society annual prize for science writing and in 2009 the Harvard Business Review listed the book on its prestigious ‘Breakthrough Ideas for Business’ list. To date Yes! has sold almost 400,000 copies and has been translated into 25 languages.


Steve regularly features in the media and the national press. His popular business columns appear in magazines and online all over the world. As well as his monthly ‘Persuasion’ column in the British Airways in flight magazine he is a regular columnist for the Harvard Business Review blog and a staff writer for Inside Influence and the Institute of Leadership & Management. His columns are read by over 1.8 million people every month, and he will be providing Comms Dealer readers with information and advice on the science of influence and persuasion and its application.


how the resources and help that has already been provided is of benefit before making a request. However, in collective cultures pointing out your connections to high ranking members of the organisation is likely to be a more effective approach. While there are many differing factors that will determine how successful you are at persuading others, studies like this one show the importance of adapting approaches to take into account cultural preferences.


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