Influencing styles; which one are you? And your company?

A checklist, nicely summarized: 9 Things to Know About Influencing Purchasing Decisions

Starbucks and loyalty: an evolving file. This time about mobile payments/loyalty.

The ‘other side’ of persuasion marketing. A (very) critical perspective on what we do. Very interesting read! Read the comments as well. By Alexander Furnas.

Research Theme from The Altimeter Group: The Dynamic Customer Journey.

Bit braggy in its language, but a project with nice results from Tier 10 Marketing: How they reached a high level of engagement.

Reflections on persuasion marketing and the empowered consumer.

This week, it seemed that IBM was all over the place with thir Smarter Commerce. They also presented the new 4Ps of marketing: persuasion, personalization, presence, & permission. We couldn’t agree more….

Behavior Change as Value Proposition. With very interesting graphs.

Interesting lessons to learn from Persuasion in Health: Conference Persuasive 2012.

The Power of Persuasion in Forbes, an article about PeerIndex.  There’s a White Paper with the same title, published by PeerIndex itself on Scribd.

How transparant are you? How transparant are your customers to you? What do you base your profile on? On what they say?

Ready for some deep reading? Personalized Persuasion in Ambient Intelligence in a PDF.

A PDF article from a loyalty veteran about how to build trust. Do you know how to do that?

Interesting list of persuasion picks.

That’s it for this week! Let me know when you have more links through Twitter or Google+ or add your comments under here!

Sympathetic story about a spoiled child and a great company.

Are less choices more persuasive? HBR provides an answer.

Enterprise loyalty, 3 principles.

When persuasion doesn’t work: JCPenny’s pricing strategy is not clear.

Not updated frequently, but an interesting newsfeed

Does your company spend more time on tracking financials, or more on tracking customers? Veteran Reichheld speaks again.

Testing persuasive strategies; necessary, but it can lead to dead ends...

Persuasion Marketing Tips by Susan Bratton

Chinwag sheets about the Psychology of Online Influence

A golden oldie (2007) in persuasion marketing

List of ‘must use’ design words: how would we score in persuasion marketing?

The Behavioral Targeting Blog has put pro’s and con’s in a list.

Contagious ideas can be persuasive. Or not?

NY start up Brouha (what’s in a name?) uses RFID to measure behavior.

LA Times found Cialdini’s book persuasive enough to write about it

That’s it for this week! Let me know when you have more links or add your comments under here!

Still, apart from the biggest web retailers or the big advertising networks, many retailers fail yet to make use of this persuasive technology. Now the distance starts to grow even larger when retailers with experience in behavioral targeting start making use of Behavioral Group Targeting (BGT).

First let me define Behavioral Group Targeting: It is a strategy to create a model of the behavioral dynamics and beliefs of a distinct group so it can be used to successfully offer tailored products/services to the group, such with the goal of realizing significantly higher conversion rates than offers to individual consumers would deliver. If a brand understands who are the Key Group Influencers (KGI’s) and how and when they are capable of influencing other group members in their buying decisions, then making use of this knowledge can cause multiple sales in a relatively short time. On top of that, it generates group loyalty to brands ‘endorsed’ by the group, enabling ‘safe choices’ for group members looking for group recognition. Behavioral Group Targeting is so new that I did not find a lot of cases yet. Yet, my own experiences are very promising. I’ll share a particularly interesting case with you: ‘Follow the Queen Bee’.

Essentially, (female) shoppers searching for fashion/luxury items are social shoppers. For many of them, group approval and confirmation about shared beliefs are crucial in the selection process of which brands and which products to purchase. The dynamics of members influencing each other in such a group is quite complex however. Yet, some groups of (young female) shoppers seem to have an (implicit) leader who leads in brand selection and product approval: the Queen Bee. The presence of a Queen Bee provides specific opportunities, since dynamics follow more predictable patterns. My case describes two steps for companies or brands on how to profit from the Queen Bee-model: a specific application of Behavioral Group Targeting.