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Coercion = Manipulation
For Persuasion this week we read the first half of Rushkoff’s Coercion: Why we listen to what “they” say. It’s a mighty fun read full of rhetorical tricks and little stories about mostly loathesome people doing vile things and then justifying it to themselves in ways that make them pathetic.
The bits about customer service and sales staff in shops reminded me of my few months working in a maternity shop in California and the things I was supposed to do. I was meant to greet everyone within 30 seconds of walking into a shop. The sinister side of making sure that a customer knows you know they are there never occurred to me before. I like to be acknowledged when I walk into a shop, but I do think that my feeling that it’s important to have someone say “hi” when you arrive started back then. I guess I was coerced.
The idea that customer service is the path of least resistance and is entirely about doing as little as possible to keep the customer happy while trying to get them to spend more money is one that’s very easy to believe. That said, I used to do all sorts of things in that maternity shop that I wasn’t meant to do, but that probably did increase sales and I only did them because I liked my regular customers, I like children, and I was bored. I used to play with their children while they shopped. I let the kids make a terrible mess throwing hangers and clothes about the store and drawing on till roll with pens from behind the counter. I used to walk crying babies up and down the shop, sometimes while their mothers had a sit down and bought nothing, sometimes they went to other shops. It was a bizarrely enjoyable job.
But no day was better than the day a man came in with his boyfriend looking to buy a maternity belly-supporting belt. Apparently he had a hernia, so I shouldn’t have found it so funny. But sod it, they thought it was pretty funny too. The herniated one was even walking around like a pregnant lady.
We also read The CIA’s Secret Manual on Interrogation. This is a bizarrely banal read. It talks about interrogation in a very matter-of-fact way that makes sense given how most of the tactics feature in every good episode of SVU. Munch and Ice T root around in some bins, Elliot and Olivia pull a Mutt and Jeff, a Nobody Loves You, and an All-Seeing Eye, and then the wrong guy goes to Attica and commits suicide.
My favourite technique described is the Spinoza and Mortimer Snerd where you ask someone a load of questions about “lofty topics” that they won’t know about and then hit them with some easy questions they might be able to answer. Apparently the lofty questions are things like the relation of the intelligence service to its government, but I prefer to think of them asking questions like “What is the relation of the mind to the soul?”, “Can a deed truly be considered good if it is done for pleasure?”, “What is beauty?” and refusing to believe the person when they say they don’t know the answer. It’s like a Monty Python sketch.
I’m also a fan of the Alice in Wonderland, where you confuse the subject by talking nonsense with weird intonation and asking bizarre questions that don’t make any sense. Basically it seems to involve playing with all of a persons expectations of spoken language and how it works. I can see that melting a person’s head pretty fast.
Finally we had to think of a rccent interaction where persuasion was involved. My example was of my recent experience in a supermarket where I foolishly admitted that I had a store card. I got this thing a year ago and I only agreed to get it because the person trying to get me to get it seemed so convinced that I was clearly some kind of reetard for not having one. I felt she must be such a simpleton not to realise why I wouldn’t want to fill in a bunch of forms to give a company a bunch of information about myself so that they could give me crappy discounts that wouldn’t anywhere near cover the loss of privacy. Anyway I felt bad for thinking that about her, so I signed up but never used the card. This time I admitted to having a card, why I’m not sure, but it was something in the repeated wondering questions that I wasn’t already a member of this wonderful club, so I admitted I was. The woman then wouldn’t let me go without trying to help me out by trying to find my details in the system, even though I told her I didn’t want her to.
It was a real testament to convincing your staff that they are helping their customers. This woman (and the one last year too) were so utterly convinced that I was missing out on a great thing by not having this stupid card that she went to great lengths to make sure I was getting my discount entitlements, even though I don’t want them.
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