Turn Negatives into Positives Using the Contrast Principle by Trey Ryder
N
o lawyer has all positive qualities. When prospects think about hiring your services, they see both strengths and weaknesses. Positive qualities that distinguish you from other lawyers are your competitive advantages. Negative qualities are your competitive disadvantages. Naturally, you hope prospects conclude that your positives outweigh your negatives. And to help make your case, you try to neutralize negatives, so prospects think they are not important. Still, you can’t be sure what impact those negatives will have on your overall presentation. Here is your marketing challenge: How do you take negative aspects of your services and change them into positives so the negatives don’t cause your prospect to hire another lawyer? In his book, Influence (Morrow, 1984), psychology professor Robert Cialdini discusses principles that persuade people at the subconscious level. One of these, the contrast principle, allows you to change how prospects perceive facts. The contrast principle says: You can change how a person perceives something by changing the event that precedes it. Since prospects’ perceptions are their reality, when you change their perception, you change what they believe is true. Here is how the contrast principle works. (Yes, you can try this at home): Prepare three buckets of water. One with cold water. One with hot water. And one with water at room temperature. Place one hand in the cold water and your other hand in the hot water. Then at the same time, place both hands into the room temperature water. 24
Attorney Journals Orange County | Volume 169, 2020
Your surprise illustrates the contrast principle. The hand that was first in cold water now feels like it is in hot water. And the hand that was in hot water now feels like it is in cold water. Yet, you can plainly see both hands are in the same water. How each hand perceives the room-temperature water depends on the event that preceded it, namely whether your hand was first placed into water that was cold or hot. Another example: A man goes into a fashionable clothing store and tells the clerk he wants to buy a three-piece suit and a sweater. If you were the clerk, which would you show him first? The contrast principle says always sell the more costly item first. Because after the man buys the suit, the cost of a sweater —even an expensive sweater—will seem small by comparison. If the clerk first showed the man a $500 sweater, the man might hesitate because that sounds expensive for a sweater. But if the man had just purchased a $2000 custom-tailored suit, $500 for a sweater does not seem out of line. How the man perceives the price of the sweater changes depending on whether it is the first item he considers, or whether he first buys the expensive suit. Now, to your law practice: Identify something you believe prospects perceive negatively about you or your services. To make it easy, let’s use your fee. If you want your prospect to perceive your fee as fair and reasonable, before you state your fee, quote something much higher. Then when your prospect hears your fee, he will perceive it as lower than he would have had you not quoted the higher number.
