4.422 Implications of NLP for Advertising.

Advertising agencies and personnel have utilized the pacing of strategies since advertising began (although they probably never thought of it that way). Consider the following example of an advertisement, paraphrased almost word for word from a popular magazine:

"When I shop I like to ask a lot of questions. That way I can feel sure that I've seen all of the options, and am really making the best choice. Product X has the best quality I've seen …"

The strategy of the person making this statement is obviously

The strategy is essentially one for information gathering in which the person asks questions, and is shown samples of the product, which are then evaluated kinesthetically with respect to the sample size required for the person's decision strategy. This ad would, of course, pace to some degree anyone who shared a similar strategy. The ad also contained a photograph of the person allegedly making the statement — dressed in stylishly modern clothes. Such a picture might also serve to pace the image a person has of themselves, or an image they aspire to achieve.

A statement which would pace a different shopping strategy might go something like:

"I don't like to feel pressured when I'm shopping. When I see someone really coming on with all that phony show, I just keep telling myself, "Who needs it?" and get out of there as fast as possible. The people at company X have never tried to put on any glitter. It's a good feeling to see people that really care. I can say from the bottom of my heart, "They know how to treat their customers …"

This statement would pace a strategy that went:

In this strategy the person derives feelings from what they see and then makes a verbal evaluation which leads directly to the outcome.

One effective approach in advertising, since there are different buying strategies, is to discover the most general or pervasive classes of strategies and create an advertisement pacing each one.

Most successful advertising involves all of the representational systems in the 4–tuple, generally placing an emphasis on one or two—depending upon the nature of the product. The essential desired outcome of any product advertising is to establish overt and/or covert anchors linking the product to positive 4–tuples and to the motivation and buying strategies of consumers, such that anchors will be triggered when prospective buyers enter a context in which that product is sold. For this reason it is important to include visual or auditory cues in the advertisement that will also be present in the buying environment. Audience participation in the advertisement (the involvement of the viewer/listener), such as showing what the observer will see through his or her own eyes, or hear on the scene, establish effective anchors associated with the product and its market environment.

Another important step often left out of advertising is that of telling the customer what to do to buy the product — giving him explicit directions about where to go and how to buy.

Tailoring your vocabulary to the culturally established dialect or idioms of the target population of your advertisement is another very effective and often amusing means of pacing that may be employed by sales and advertising personnel. One of the authors, for example, was recently consulting for a floral brokerage. The primary marketing targets of this company were florists, whose very job demands sensory refinements (olfactory) not common in the general population. One of the recommendations made to them, as a means to help their sales department branch out to new areas, was to mix in an assortment of floral idioms and terms, and olfactory predicates, into their advertising and sales arrangements. This would provide an enjoyable way to pace customers, to keep rapport from wilting and to insure healthy growth. It would also provide a fresh, fertile and satisfying environment for the creativity of sales personnel to blossom and even help morale to grow. A sample list of floral terms easily transplanted into everyday speech could include:

smell, process, wilt, moist, assortment, mix, bloom, shrivel, light, fertile, sort, blossom, rot, petal, fresh, transplant, arrange, fade, root, firm, grow, stem, fragrant, arrangement, texture, budding, branch, bouquet, nip in the bud

Specialized vocabularies like this, that provide overlap into everyday speech, are available in most businesses and fields and can provide extremely useful and powerful advantages in communication.

4.423 Recruiting and Selection.

Neurolinguistic programming is a valuable and practical asset to those involved in the recruiting, selection or training of personnel. It should be obvious intuitively that the strategies that make a good sales executive will be different from those which make a good personnel manager or engineer. For anyone involved in the recruiting or selection process there are basically two choices available:

1) If you already have within your organization a person who is naturally skilled at the job you are recruiting for (that is, if the person already has the necessary strategies) and you want find someone else to recapitulate this person's behavior, elicit the strategies of the person who is naturally good at the job and record them. Once you have recorded the person's strategies for decision making, motivation, learning, creativity, etc., conduct a series of interviews in which you elicit the natural strategies of the applicants. You will want to choose, of course, the applicant whose natural strategies most closely match those of the employee you have chosen to model.

2) After you have elicited and recorded the strategies of the person who is naturally skilled at the job you are recruiting for, you can choose to install those strategies in an existing employee or applicant (installation will be discussed in detail in the last section of this book).

You can also recruit an individual with three out of four of the necessary strategies and then install the fourth. Depending on the nature of the task, and your available time, you may find it more profitable to opt for one or the other of these choices. If the task is not highly technical and doesn't involve a great number of sophisticated strategies, it will be easier to recruit people. If the task is technical and sophisticated, there will be less likelihood that you will find someone who already has the necessary strategies, and it will be easier to install the strategies in someone who most closely approximates the job requirements.

If you don't already have a highly qualified person in your organization who can be modeled for your selection process, you can always locate someone who is skilled in another company or organization and model their strategies. Rather than trying to "steal" or "buy" that employee, you can take him out to lunch or engage him in a social setting to covertly elicit their strategies and record them for later installation in somebody else.

You may choose to implement career development or employee development programs designed to develop representational systems or strategies in existing employees. We have successfully implemented several human resource development packages designed around this simple principle. Such programs help to encourage and fortify natural abilities in employees and to develop those who are deficient.