Sell From the Center (Jim Karrh On Marketing)

This column might affect where everyone wants to sit during your next meeting.

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Marketing is fundamentally concerned with influence — how to sway people to your product, service or point of view. Two relatively obscure research articles show that a variable as basic as physical position (of people during a meeting, or of products on a shelf) plays a big role in influence. You can use the lessons from this research to potentially increase your influence at meetings and to sell more stuff as well.

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Let’s take the “meeting seating” example first. Psychologists have identified a “center-stage effect” in which folks tend to believe that the most important people in a gathering sit in the middle. This is a perfectly reasonable base assumption to make; think of the president at a Cabinet meeting or the bride and bridegroom at a wedding reception. It turns out that this effect carries over to many other settings as well.

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Individuals in the center begin a meeting with a little more credibility than do others in the room. One upshot is that people pay less attention to the errors or misstatements of those in the center compared with those elsewhere in the group.

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Researchers Priya Raghubir and Ann Valenzuela thought they noticed this phenomenon playing out during the run of the TV quiz show “The Weakest Link.” The format of the show placed contestants in a group and had each of them take turns answering general knowledge questions. There was a communal pot of money, and a key element of the show was that contestants voted one of their own off the show at the end of each round.

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The researchers analyzed past episodes of “The Weakest Link” and found that contestants who were randomly placed in one of the positions in the show’s semicircular seating lineup were much more likely to win the game if they started in one of the central seats. Could it be that the center-stage effect played a role in how contestants decided to boot their own off the show?

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Raghubir and Valenzuela tested that view in a lab setting through four subsequent experiments of games and group interviews. In an article published in Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes, they concluded that “the use of the center-stage heuristic substitutes for the effortful processing of individuating information, leading to a biased (favorable) assessment of people in the center.” That’s a fancy way of saying we all take mental shortcuts in evaluating people and things. You might as well be on the good side of those lazy shortcuts, right?

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If you want to be a little more influential in meetings — in part because you get more benefit of the doubt when it comes to mistakes — then work yourself into the center. If you are a manager who wants to generate new thinking and ideas from a group, then the center-stage effect is another reason to mix up seating arrangements from meeting to meeting.

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In the product-marketing world, our favorable bias toward things in the center shows up as well (albeit for a different reason). The same two researchers, in a paper recently published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, used three studies to test the center-stage effect in product choice. They used a rather mundane consumer choice (from among three made-up brands of chewing gum); no matter the physical arrangement or how the flavor choices were rotated, the option placed in the middle was selected significantly more often than were the other two. The pattern held even when the number of choices was increased.

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The reason for this bias turned out to be, of all things, assumed popularity. People tend to believe that products placed in the center of an array are the most popular. So when the people in these studies were making a quick choice — having no prior information about the brands, nor a big stake in the choice — they tended to simply select the gum they thought was already most popular.

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The lesson for greater influence and more sales is that “running to the center” generally works. I’ll leave it to others to comment on occupying the center as political strategy.