The Foot-in-the- Door Technique: A Powerful Sales and Marketing Strategy - Prof. Melnyk, Apuntes de Literatura

¡Descarga The Foot-in-the- Door Technique: A Powerful Sales and Marketing Strategy - Prof. Melnyk y más Apuntes en PDF de Literatura solo en Docsity! The foot-in-the-door technique can be used to explain the correlation between previous decisions and decision making in general. The main point of this technique is that a small request will allow for a more demanding request to be accepted at a later time, as it has been coined with the notion that a literal foot inside of a door keeps the door from closing and maintains the possibility of entrance into the room. There are many reasons that can explain this phenomenon. First, a small request that precedes a larger one lessens the psychological burden of an individual that would have made him or her initially opposed to accepting the second request had it been the only one. Second, people tend to be unstable when they cannot maintain consistency in their behaviors which means that once they agree to accept the terms of the first request, it is more difficult for them to reject the following request because doing so would be inconsistent with their previous behavior. Lastly, after the first ‘Yes’, the distance between the person who makes the request and the one who accepts it decreases allowing for a familiarity to develop between the two parties. The foot-in-the-door technique is one often used by salesmen who negotiate with their clients with this principle in mind. The marketing tactics of supermarkets that offer coupons and samples to customers are examples that utilize the foot-in-the- door technique. The foot-in-the-door concept was first described in the report by Freedman and Fraser, “Compliance without Pressure: The Foot-in-the-Door Technique (1966)”. These researchers conducted an experiment in California in which they asked people to provide their signatures for the purpose of promoting safe driving and protecting the beauty of California or to place a small sign in their front yard advocating for such concerns. When presented two weeks later with the request to placing a larger sign in their front yard in place of the first one, many people who were part of the experiment surprisingly agreed to do so. This finding also indicates that the foot-in-the- door technique is more successful in cases that involve requests that are pro- social. Another important finding of their research was the fact that the acceptance rate of a second request that has same purpose as the first request has proven to be much higher than a second request that has a purpose different from the first request. From the results of their research, Freedman and Fraser were able to discover not only a correlation between a first and second request, but that a first request used in this fashion as a “foot in the door” allows for a second request of a potentially greater demand to garner higher rates of success. Freedman and Fraser’s experiment regarding the foot-in-the-door technique has been adopted in a diverse range of areas such as psychology and human relationships, resulting in the continuous emergence of various research studies and papers in relation to this tactic. We used our knowledge of this paper and the theory tested by Freedman and Fraser in order to form our own hypotheses in our respective