Healthy Influence Blog

While there is much to persuasion that is art, the basic principles possess a compelling feature: science supports them. We know what we know about the Elaboration Likelihood Model or CLARCCS cues or Dissonance Theory or Classical Conditioning is based upon a wide variety of experimental studies that systematically manipulate and control persuasion variables, then quantitatively assess their impact. The Primer chapter on Prove It! very, very briefly outlines the scientific approach to persuasion and recommends those scientific procedures as tests everyone should use when assessing any persuasion claim. I also recommend science even with its limitations as an excellent foundation for understanding the world.

This argument gets a lot of support in academic and research circles, but in the real world most people most of the time don’t have time for science and tend to go with a Darwinian approach (if I survive doing this it must be okay). I think a lot of businesses tend to operate that way. So what?

Well, today we get yet another news story about a suffering pharma that has to make huge jobs cuts to survive. Pfizer is cutting 10,000 jobs including over 2,000 sales representatives. Pharmas are often held to be prototypes of hardnosed persuasion agents who use whatever tactic that works to achieve success. They aggressively advertise and market information direct to consumers that drives people to demand pills from physicians. So why are these guys cutting 10% of their overall workforce? Have their persuasion tactics finally caught with them as consumers and physicians rise in angry protest?

Nah. They lost their patents. And they haven’t got new drugs in the anywhere in the pipeline that they can patent.

Business is easy when you’ve got the market cornered. And when you lose the corner, then all that’s left is your skill. And, I’d argue that pharmas in particular have fallen victim to several of the Rules.

Power corrupts persuasion.

Patents are “power” and when you’ve got power you don’t really need to be persuasive. When the patents expire, your power expires, and then all that remains is skill.

Great persuaders don’t need rich uncles, kindness from strangers, or third party vote splitters.

The vaunted persuasion reputation of the pharmas has to be adjusted here because it is apparent that pharma depend upon the action of a third variable to make it happen.

This is a complicated post, so let’s clarify and recap.

First, I am not gloating over the economic challenges facing Pfizer or any pharma. This is awful news. At one level it is the “creative destruction” of capitalism, but at another it is serious pain and suffering for thousands of families. Second, the “vaunted” reputation of pharmas is not solely of their own creation. I think many people in media and in the health and medicine communities have wildly exaggerated the operation of pharmas in much the same way people villianize big oil. Advocacy groups have made pharmas appear to be manipulative, deceitful, and conniving. Given these terrible economic problems of pharmas, not just with Pfizer, it’s hard to believe the evil stereotype of those big, bad drug guys when their stock prices are dropping and they’re laying off employees by the thousands.

That said, I still can point of this story as both an illustration of a scientific approach to understanding things and as an illustration of the Rules. Pharmas have taken a Darwinian approach to their sales approach and as long as they were surviving, everything was hunky-dorey. Now, the sky is falling and in a very predictable way and one that a more scientific approach could foresee, forestall, and perhaps prevent. Further, that Darwinian approach blinded them to the Rules and has left them in a weakened position.

I’d expect that pharmas will now take science and persuasion considerably more seriously. Without patents, they’ll have to make money the old fashioned way.