If you work in marketing, you already know the importance of generating influence. Whether internally, convincing areas such as Finance, Sales, and Technology, or externally, winning over the end customer, who has countless options beyond your brand.

But have you ever stopped to think about exactly what influence is and how it is generated? Or do you just follow your intuition and wait for the result to appear?

Any professional who wants to increase the effectiveness of their influence network needs to start understanding a little more about the apparatus that commands each and every human decision: the brain. 🙂

And, despite being by far the most complex and mysterious object in the universe, as my 80-year-old professor, with the energy of a 15-year-old, Marcos Telles, would say, our brain is “made in Paraguay and reasonably predictable.”

A clear example of this is how we see the smaller squares within the larger squares in the image in this post. We tend to see different shades of gray between them, but in reality, they are identical. The most curious thing is that, even knowing this now, we continue to see them as if they were different.

What influences our perception, in this case, are the larger squares around them. They generate the cognitive illusion and shape the way we see the squares in the middle.

In other words: context radically influences the object or situation under discussion. And the same happens when customers evaluate our products or services at the time of decision.

You must be wondering: how, then, to influence people at these two levels? We’ll get there, but first it’s important to connect the concepts by summarizing one of the central ideas of Behavioral Economics, developed by Daniel Kahneman, the first psychologist to win a Nobel Prize in Economics.

According to Kahneman, we have two systems that govern our decisions:

• System 1 – fast, automatic, unconscious and with low (or no) cognitive effort. This is what allows us to perform most daily tasks without overloading the brain. In the example of the squares, it would be the “outer square,” shaping perceptions and intuitions about the central object. 
• System 2 – slow, reflective, deliberate. It is activated when we need more analysis, when faced with something important that autopilot cannot resolve. In the example, it would be the “inner square,” which requires attention and reflection.

In other words, whenever you try to influence someone to buy your product or service (the middle square), you cannot ignore the surrounding perceptions (the outer square), which directly shape the decision.

Think of Starbucks: the middle square is the coffee, the product itself. But the outer square is the perception of a “brief rest period.” What leads us to Starbucks is the feeling of pause, not just the coffee. That’s why we accept paying much more for it than at the corner bakery counter.

In conclusion: as marketing professionals, our central objective should be to combine factors that positively influence both System 1 and System 2. This means generating favorable perceptions that activate the autopilot in decision-making (System 1) and, at the same time, offering an excellent product or service capable of being validated by reflective thinking (System 2).

And you, what do you do to generate influence?

Source: books “Decoded”, by Phil Barden, and “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, by Daniel Kahneman.