The Psychology of Salesmanship

In 1912, say the word "psychology" to a businessman and you got a shrug, a raised eyebrow and a change of subject. To him it meant the classroom, or the soul, or clairvoyance and telepathy, what Atkinson calls general "spookiness".

Atkinson opens the book by clearing that away. Psychology, he says, simply means the science of the mind. It is not metaphysics and it is not the psychic.

And then the uncomfortable part for the sceptic: he is already using it. Every time a salesman catches someone's attention, stirs their interest, builds a desire and moves them to act, he is working with the laws of the mind, whether he has ever heard the word or not.

Here is the claim the whole book stands on. A sale is not, at bottom, an exchange of goods for money. It is the action and reaction of mind upon mind.

That holds whether the seller is a man at your door, a window full of spring stock or a line of print in a magazine. Atkinson treats them as one thing. A writer he quotes calls advertising "salesmanship on paper", and the same principles run the window and the counter.

So before any parcel is wrapped, something has already happened in two heads. The seller walked in with a certain state of mind, and the buyer has been brought to a different one. The goods only change hands afterwards, as the visible result of what the two minds settled first.

Atkinson gives a small, funny example from his own life. One evening he saw a new advertisement announcing that a certain whisky was "Smooth". Every drinker in the car with him, he noticed, was smacking his lips.

Nobody had tasted anything. One word had been dropped into their minds, and their minds supplied the rest: the feeling in the mouth, the warmth in the throat. As Atkinson dryly puts it, "It was smooth — the idea, not the stuff."

That is the point in miniature. The product sat in a bottle somewhere far away. What was being sold in that car was a sensation built inside the reader, built out of a single word, repeated until it stuck.

When Atkinson says a sale is a psychological process, what does he mean by "psychology"?

• A set of clever tricks for talking people into things they do not need
• The science of the mind, applied to how buyers come to want and decide✓Correct answer
• The study of psychic powers such as telepathy between seller and buyer
• A classroom theory that matters less than knowing the merchandise

Atkinson defines psychology plainly as the science of the mind and insists it is not the same as the psychic. He is describing how minds actually move toward a purchase, not a bag of tricks and not something to rank below product knowledge.

When soft "negligee" hats first appeared, one shrewd hatter sent for a well-dressed, popular college student. Wear this hat for three days, he said, and take your pick of the best hats in the store.

The student hated the idea until the hatter bet him the whole town would follow. The first morning on campus he was teased for looking odd. By late afternoon a few friends decided it looked rather good. The next day crowds of them agreed, and the hatter could not keep the hat in stock.

Atkinson's source adds the line that makes it psychology: had an unpopular, badly dressed man worn it first, the result would have been the reverse. The hat would have been the same. What changed was what people associated it with.

The same force runs in the other direction, and the book tells that story too.

In a large European city, some fashionable ladies chose a cheap but handsome Manila hat for spring without asking the milliners. The milliners were left holding expensive stock nobody wanted. So they bought up a great many of the cheap hats and put them on the city's street sweepers.

The next day the ladies of fashion stepped outside and saw their own hats on the heads of the scavengers. It did not take long for the fashion to die.

Nothing about the straw had changed. Atkinson's lesson is that people do not respond to an object as it is, but to the ideas it carries with it, and whoever controls those ideas controls the sale.