How to Coach Yourself and Others How to Influence, Persuade and Motivate | Page 320

malls are made of hard marble or tiles. But the floors of individual stores
are soft and carpeted — encouraging you to stay longer. Have you ever
noticed that it is easy to get disoriented in a mall you are unfamiliar with?
Malls purposely design their structures with hexagonal floor plans, which
are the most difficult to navigate: complicated hallways, confusing angles,
and consistent temperature and lighting. The Mall of America in
Minnesota, the largest mall in America, wants you to get lost — you can
walk forever and still not know exactly where you are.
This is also the reason why malls place department stores at opposite ends
of each other. Department stores are draws, so for people to get from one
to another, they will have to walk past every other store in the mall before
they reach the opposite one. Grocery stores place their milk at the back of
the store so customers have to walk through the rest of the store to grab a
carton. All of these techniques increase the time that customers spend in
the store. And as we know, increased time in a store means increased
sales.
Role-Playing
One way to get your audience more involved is to use role-playing. This
technique has proven to be effective in getting people to actually convince
themselves of something. Role-playing is the single most powerful way to
induce attitude change through vicarious experience. In essence, you are
getting people to make up arguments against their own beliefs. Do you
want to know just how powerful role-playing is? One experiment used
role-playing to convince people to stop smoking. The subjects role-played
cigarette smokers having x-rays, receiving news of lung cancer, and
coughing with emphysema. When compared with a control group of
smokers, those who role-played this situation were more likely to have
quit than those who passively learned about lung cancer.[2]
In another study, students were tested to see what types of persuasion
techniques were most effective in delivering an anti-smoking message.
One group was assigned to write, stage, and put on the presentation, while
the other group was simply required to watch the presentation. As you
might imagine, the group that was more involved in the presentation held
more negative feelings about smoking than did the group that had just
passively listened.

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