No, stories like that are used in B2B marketing. Sometimes you take a very well perfoming testimonial, and craft it into a story and blast your list with it. Instant sales boost, and the degradation of your list is minimal, especially if you can pound in some kind of novel insight as well.
So if you want to help your business succeed, some great low-hanging fruit would be to teach your employees how to counteract status biases when making decisions.
Some even better low hanging fruit would be to teach it to yourself first, because I doubt you can. Great marketing is incredibly seductive, and it invokes psychological principles which you simply can't get rid of. So your only path out would be to resign yourself from ever buying anything, and retreating to a heremit lifestyle. Not a feasible option in my opinion.
Let me tell you a story. About a year ago, I started getting into online marketing in preparation of starting a business. Fair game, right? Split testing, Keywords, the whole google-fu. But the most important aspect of online marketing isn't ninja-SEO, or conversion secrets out of Japanese dojos. It's copywriting. And copywriting is like all other writing. You improve by practice, and you improve by studying the masters. So I set out to find some masterfully crafted ad copy.
Now through my previous study, I stumbled over the ads of John Carlton. One of them, "Testosterone" caught my attention. It was one of his best converting, it was older, and I was incredibly far removed from his target market. After all, he was trying to sell body building supplements, and if there's a thing I don't do, then it's bodybuilding. I mean look at me, I'm skinny as a twig. I look at gyms from the outside, and that's that. So I thought, perfect, I'll start with that one.
So I started chewing my way through this 5 page ad, this machine gun feed of bullet points. I was trying to reverse engineer what he did. I get exited by it. This is good. I like this. I...I want to buy it? What the hell?
That moment, I knew Carlton had me. I'm wary of ads. I toss most of them without reading further than 3 lines, the words BS written all over my face. But there, he got me.
So you think you're dealing with low hanging fruit there?
Eradicating status bias effects is almost certainly not possible. But there are effective and simple techniques for reducing your susceptibility to them.
Minimizing the amount of marketing literature you expose yourself to is a good start. In fact, that's a good way to reduce your exposure to many of the weapons in marketers' vast arsenal. Exposure to marketing materials should be limited only to what is necessary to evaluate what objective benefits are offered with a product or service, and what it costs.
One technique is to read those minimum necessary materials, take notes on the actual objective costs and benefits, omitting all marketing buzz, and then walk away from it until any excitement from what you read fades. Later, you can review those notes with a clearer head. Or better yet, hand them off to someone else to evaluate, who hasn't been exposed to the propaganda.
It's also a good idea to read Robert Cialdini's Influence, and then reread it periodically. It's an excellent (but far from complete) run-through of some of the most common tools used by marketers, and techniques for resisting them.
I've read Cialdini's Influence. It's a great book, but he puts forth the point as well that these mental shortcuts can be tremendously helpful heuristics. The crux is really in the differentiation.
