Professional Land Surveyor Marketing Tip-Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation

Over the weekend I listened to a few podcast; some funny, some news oriented and a few with business and marketing topics. Marketing is often misunderstood, or overlooked altogether, by many professional land surveyors, engineers and designers. So, when I find something to help you understand a subject, like marketing in this case, I’ll share that with you to help you improve your land surveying business.

In one podcast I listened to, the host interviewed Sally Hogshead, who is a speaker, author and brand innovation consultant. She has also been profiled by The New York Times, NBC, CBS and MSNBC. It was interesting and informative listening to her being interviewed in this podcast about her latest book entitled, Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation(eCampus affiliate link). I obviously have not had a chance to get her book and read it yet, but I sure look forward to doing so.

From what she said, and in looking at her website, this book discusses why certain people are captivating, why we lean towards certain brands, and not others, and how to convince people to change their behaviors.

Quoting from her website:

“Fascination is the most powerful way to influence decision-making. It’s more persuasive than marketing, advertising, or any other form of communication. And it all starts with seven universal triggers of fascination: power, lust, mystique, alarm, prestige, vice, and trust.”

This new way of thinking about our hardwired human behaviors and applying our understanding of this phenomenon to branding and marketing, seems to make a lot of sense and is something you could use to better understand your (you and your company) marketing strategy.

As noted above, the seven triggers of fascination are:

• Power
• Lust
• Mystique
• Alarm
• Prestige
• Vice
• Trust

Sally, who has done extensive research into this area, has a very interesting test you can take online to determine your fascination factors, resulting in your very own F Score. The F Score test is quick, very interesting and reveals those fascination triggers you naturally apply and others you should consider.

In a very timely and revealing example of how fascination triggers work, Sally uses Toyota as an example. As she explains, Toyota built up a world class brand using what she has identified as the most precious of all brand triggers, being trust. This trust trigger, based on attention to detail and consistency to deliver quality, earned Toyota loyalty resulting in profits and repeat customers.

Contrast that to what is currently happening at Toyota. Now, Toyota is recalling millions of cars, their customers are losing faith and their “Toyota” brand is severely damaged. I think you can see how these fascination triggers, trust in this case, work.

Here’s a video of Sally Hogshead being interviewed by Harry Smith on the CBS Early Show.

I’m looking forward to reading Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, and when I have I’ll write more about how you can use these fascination factors in your land surveying businesses.

In the meantime, visit Sally’s website, take the F Score test if you get a chance, maybe buy the book yourself, and think about how you can learn from and apply these seven universal triggers.