Customer Reviews
It is a great book but not 100% what im after, reccomend it though.. - By: , 20 Aug 2008 
This book is definetly worth gettin because it is an interesting read & the author clearly knows what he is talking about. What i like about the book is it is based on research & science, not half guesses & assumptions.
It does make you more aware of sales techniques & how to not fall victim to their techniques. I do think some chapters he tends to go on abit too much for the sake of making the chapter & book longer ( feels that way when you read it) because when you read the book you will find a summary at the end of each chapter which explains 40 pages worth on 1 page.
Though he does go deep into the principles & logic of the science of persuasion if you think that you will become a master persuader after reading this then you will be dissapointed. I have seen Derren Brown & other masters of NLP influence people ( with extraordinary skill ) into making decisions with indirect suggestions, clever word play & body lanuguage without them even realising & this is the type of persuasion that interests me & this book does not go into any of this really.
As i said some interesting facts & research & a good read but for the reason above is why i rated it 3 stars
Wonderful book - By: -, 18 Aug 2008 
I read this bookin less than 4 days.
I reckon this is a must read not just for Marketers but everyone involvedin business.
I found the informal style really engaging but yet rigorous & supported by plenty of facts & research.
I have already started to spot at work some of the topics discussed & I am starting to use some of the tecniques.
I can only highly reccomend this enjoyable & interesting reading, especially if you liase with peoplein your daily job.
Not bad, but... - By: Ton, 19 Jan 2008 This is not a bad book. Actually, I'm ok with having bought it here at Amazon. However, that was not my impression when I startedin the first chapter; I thought "oh no, not again, another book of a wannabe self-proclaimed "guru"". From chapter 3 onwards it became better, but I have one serious problem with this book: I do understand Cialdini is an academic, but I really wish he would stop cluttering up the text with all these side steps to academic research; it's annoying. Just pose your statements, explain them short & clear, & put all your detailed explanations of academic research that supports your statementsin the footnotes. This is your typical book where you have to turn back two pages constantly to see "what was his main argument?". This book could be considerably shorter, *still preservering the same value when it comes to insight", & would make for much more pleasant reading (Mind you, I hold a PhD myself, I know this is academic writing. That's fine when your audience is the academical world, but that is clearly not what the intended audience of this book is). To conclude: there are some valuable lessons containedin this book, it is worth the money, but it needs to be less on the academical details, because that distracts.
Priceless - By: B. W. Jenner, 28 Oct 2007 I have been entertaining my friends at dinner parties with this book. Cialdini, who admits to being a bit of a sucker himself, shows all the ways we've been manipulated over the years by small gestures & situations contrived by salesmen.
There are so many good stories. The one about Joe Girard, a car salesman who sends out each month 13,000 cards every month to former customers with a card saying, "I like you". Surely people wouldn't fall for that? Yes they do, he made more than $200,000 a year selling cars. He'sin the Guinness Book of Records.
There's the story of how the Chinese got the American prisonersin the Korean War to betray their country by setting them essay questions. There's accounts of the trouble we can get into when we insist on being consistent or make a vague commitment to supporting a cause.
Cialdini exposes loads of sales techniques & has some fascinating insights into what motivates us.
As a self-employed person I'm really grateful for this knowledge. This is a book that everyone should read.
Good, but not totally convincing or that useful - By: tomsk77, 10 Sep 2007 I bought this book for two reasons - one to make myself more alert to sales techniques, & two to see if there are any useful insights to glean that could be applied to other areas of life.
On both counts the book delivers. Having recently been pitched to at work by a media tracking agency & nearly taken the bait (didn'tin the end) I immediately recognised the use of reciprocity & scarcity to try & harry me into signing up. That alone was worth buying the book for, & I will definitely use that insightin future.
In addition, the chapter on consistency is also very useful. I've been involvedin trying (and failing) to get people behind certain campaignsin the past. As such the discussion about getting people to make small commitments to establish a self image which they then feel the need to act consistently with both rang true on a personal level, & seems like something worth trying outin future.
So why only three stars? For one I did not find elements of the book convincing. The section dealing with newspaper coverage of suicides is the bit that really troubles me. Some of the data seems both to be limited & have been interpreted quite loosely. I would need a lot more convincing that the stats are being interpreted reasonably, it looks far too rough & ready. Given that this book is really about behavioural biases surely it should be extra careful about interpretaion of data as this is something we humans tend to be very bad at, always looking for patterns that aren't there & so on. That then leads me to query the hypothesis built on top of the data & to be honest I find myself not buying it. That also makes me query whether other chapters suffer from similar flaws.
Secondly, the book isn't actually that useful once you get your head around the key techniques because, as a previous reviewer says, simply having the knowledge that you have biases doesn't make them go away. To be really useful the book should have spent as much time reinforcing ways to resist the influence of biases as it does explaining what they are.
That said it is very readable, & I got what I wanted from it, but it could have been better.
