What can the invention of the shopping cart teach us about persuasion?
Subject: Social Proof - Goldman’s Shopping Cart
Event: Birthday of grocer Sylvan Goldman, 1898
To function, individuals rely not only on knowledge stored within our skills but also on knowledge stored elsewhere: in our bodies, in the environment, and especially in other people. -Steven Soman and Philip Fernbach
Today is the birthday of grocer Sylvan Goldman, born in 1898. Observing customers shopping in his grocery stores in Oklahoma in the 1930s, Goldman noticed a problem: his customers stopped buying groceries as soon as their handheld baskets became full. To create more carrying capacity and more sales of groceries, Goldman created folding carts with wheels, which allowed customers to move and shop more freely. The only problem was that the shopping carts were such a novelty that none of the customers would use them.
Image by Manfred Richter from Pixabay
In order to get his customers to use the carts, Goldman needed a strategy that would show his customers the utility of the carts. To do this he hired a number of people to pose as shoppers, pushing the wheeled carts through the store. Goldman’s plan worked, and soon his customers began to use the carts. Not only that, Goldman sold his carts to grocery stores across the nation, making millions.
In his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert B. Cialdini tells Goldman’s story as a classic example of social proof, the psychological principle that says that “we determine what is correct by finding out what other people think is correct.” Therefore, Goldman’s strategy was so effective because his shoppers became more comfortable with shopping carts once they saw other people using them.
Humans are social animals, and we survived as a species for thousands of years by operating and living in groups. Today, therefore, whether we realize it or not, we possess a herd instinct that makes us feel better when we are mirroring the behavior of others. This is why some comedy programs have a laugh track and why so many products are marketed based on their popular appeal. Both fashion and fads are fueled by social proof.
Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason: What is social proof, and how did Sylvan Goldman capitalize on it to promote the use of the shopping cart?
Challenge - Supermarket, Superpersuasion: Think about how marketers use social proof to sell other items you might put in your shopping cart. Take a trip to a supermarket. Look at the signs and read the words on the packaging. What is a good example of how marketers attempt to make a sale by persuading you that other people are buying and using the product?
ALSO ON THIS DAY:
November 15, 1859: On this day in 1859, the final installment of Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities was published. As with most of Dickens’ novels, A Tale of Two Cities was published in serial form. Weekly installments of the novel began in April 1859 and the final installment was issued on November 15, 1859. Dickens (1812-1870), the author of such classic works as Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and A Christmas Carol, was the most popular novelist of his time, and A Tale of Two Cities is the single greatest-selling book of any genre with more than 200 million copies sold (2). The book is a historical novel, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. It’s appropriate that in a novel with two settings, the author would use the scheme called “balance.” When writing about two or more similar ideas, writers balance the ideas by stating them in the same grammatical form using parallel structure, as in “United we stand, divided we fall.” You can see and hear this balance in the famous opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities. Notice that although Dickens is introducing contrasting ideas (best and worst, wisdom and foolishness), the clauses of the sentence follow the same grammatical structure to create balance:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way . . . .
Sources:
1-Cialdini, Robert B. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. New York: Harper Business, 2021.
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