In the persuasion game, priming is the innocuous first move. The seemingly innocuous move, that is.

Colleen Jones, marketer and author of Clout: the Art and Science of Influential Web Content, defines priming as “introducing words, images, or ideas now to influence people’s choices a little later.”

Priming is a staple of effective marketing, and is particularly important if:

•    you sell complex products or services
•    you have a long sales cycle
•    you have a resistant/cynical audience
•    your market isn’t fully defined or mature
•    you have an expensive product
•    you need to establish a high degree of trust
•    you don’t have an established relationship with the prospect

Priming is an exercise in subtlety and restraint, but it can be brutally effective all the same. Consider this example Jones cites in Clout: one of the best ways to encourage people to vote is to ask them, the day before the election, if they plan on voting. This simple question boosts the likelihood a person will vote by 25 percent! It acts as a powerful nudge that the recipient cannot even detect.

In push-polls, a less benign form of priming is used. A partisan pollster might ask what sounds like an innocuous question or present a damning hypothetical scenario, such as, ‘If you knew candidate X finished a pot of coffee without brewing another one, would be you less likely to vote for him?’ The facts are immaterial: the pollster is simply creating a tie in the voter’s mind between candidate X and antisocial behavior. Believe it or not, push-polls actually work (and are often as ridiculous as my example).

Whether it’s black hat or white hat in nature, priming allows you to maintain an air of objectivity while planting a seed (e.g. data backup is important) that you’ll cultivate later with more overt, less-partial messaging (e.g. our data backup plan is tops). It is a setting of the stage that masters in rhetoric and human psychology use often. (Socrates was the master.)

Sometimes priming is so subtle it doesn’t seem like priming at all. For example, here at Kutenda, our sales team swears by a very simple but proven strategy for engaging prospects: write a short, casual email to with a link to an interesting article or site. It doesn’t have to relate to work. As long as it will resonate.

How is this priming?

Remember, priming is about planting an idea, feeling or association. By sending an interesting article, you’re telling the prospect that you are a source of interesting information. Do this a couple times and you can set up a Pavlovian response: you send, they read, you send, they read. Rinse and repeat until the email contains a call to action!

If all of this sounds very calculating, that’s because it is! Assuming you’re confident in your product and truly believe it has value, you shouldn’t feel sheepish about using basic human psychology to advance your cause.