One of the greatest consumer psychology books you could ever read is Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. If you’ve never read the book (and you SHOULD read it), it’s about how “compliance practitioners” (Cialdini’s term for people whose job it is to persuade people) like salespeople, advertisers, negotiators, lawyers, politicians, tabloid journalists, etc. use certain rhetorical “weapons of influence” to “produce a distinct kind of automatic, mindless compliance from people...without thinking first.”

While Cialdini talks about several of these persuasive “weapons,” the one I want to talk about here with you is the one he calls “the friendly thief,” which simply means that we are much more likely to buy from somebody we already know and like.

It seems like a self-evident point to say now in the age of the internet, social media, algorithms, affiliate marketing, mass targeted content/advertising, that “liking” has become the universally-known currency of the modern 21st-century economy.

But the cracking of the “liking code” happened long before the internet, way back in the 1940s and 50s with the invention of the “party selling plan.”

Here’s the story.

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