We've got a problem (we being liberal, progressives, Dems, and so forth). We are literally losers. Why? Because we as a monolithic-whole couldn't negotiate our way out of a paper bag. I will make the case for why this is true below.
Let me digress a minute to reflect on some of the less enjoyable days of my professional life, before my career as a marketer began and before I
finally finished my degree. I was 22 and I was shlepin' cars. New cars and used cars. I sold em all. The point isn't that I hated it or that found out that some stereotypes really can be
mostly true (about car sales that is). The point is that I learned about
the universally-applicable dynamic of hostile-negotiations.
Here is the basic outline of ANY hostile negotiation:
1. Person A put a price on something
2. Person B, offers something significantly less than Person A is asking.
3. Person A, says no way, no how - and counters.
4. Person B counters the counter.
5. The negotiations finally end with Person A and B getting less / giving more than they had intended...
What is important to know is that, within small limits, Person A's initial selling price - in terms of how high it was set, OR how low it was set, in step 1 will have ABSOLUTELY NO EFFECT (zero, zilch) on person B's reaction in step 2. In other words no matter how low Person A sets their initial price at they will ALWAYS be greeted with the other party wanting it lower. ALWAYS. ALWAYS. ALWAYS. Period.
I was amazed for years by the phenomenon that many times (most times, actually) the customers I saw driving off the lot with the "best deals" numerically were considerably less happy looking than the people who got taken to the cleaners. And there were usually 1-2 salesman who were expert at making huge profits while getting warm goodbyes from their customers.
The point is that the price really doesn't matter - only the perception of getting a good price matters. How did those salesmen give the perception of a good price to their customers? By understanding that there was no way around the dog and pony show of negotiations. Put simply - they hit the customer at full sticker ("put 'em on the roof") and then artfully proceeded to hold some profit while letting the customer feel like they were "winning". It sounds stupid but after seeing hundreds of deals it seems to be a universal truth that "winning" is MUCH, MUCH more important to the "happiness" of a car buyer - whether they be male, female, black, brown, white, or purple - than is the actual numerical figure. The good salesman gave the customer their chance to "have their big fish story," or else there was no deal (or one that there was absolutely no profit in).
Now I know many of you, like I did, will be full of cognitive dissonance when reading this. It did'nt "make sense" or seem "rational" on almost any level I was familiar with before getting into the car sales biz. Actually, it's still quite bothersome for me to ponder the absolute truth of the phenomenon above (where is the hope for humanity when we all can be so easily manipulated, right?). Well, I'll leave it to someone else to figure out a way to reconfigure our predispositions/hard-wiring...I'm here to draw some inferences of relevancy to our political positioning.
a) If you understand the universally-applicable dynamic of hostile negotiation - where is an intelligent place to set your initial asking price?
b) If you understand the universally-applicable dynamic of hostile negotiation - what do you think is going to happen if you set your initial selling price exactly at a "fair price" or one that would "leave you satisfied" if you got it?
The answer of course is that if you understand how negotiations work you will set your price higher (hopefully quite a bit higher) than what you would be happy to get, because you understand that no matter how low you set it, someone is going to counter offer you anyway (and believe me, many people have no shame when it comes to counter offers).
So why, may I ask, is there so much talk around here and other liberal/progressive/dem places about promoting candidates and policies (our asking price) which are already so low to begin, given that we now know that the laws of negotiation PROMISES that we will get less than we ask for.
If a car sales manager was running the Democratic Party, you can guaran-damn-tee that they'd be pushing a Dennis Kucinich or Barbara Boxer down the throats of everyone (the repubs, the media) for the 2008 election - big old parade floats, and liberals everywhere. Liberal. Liberal. Liberal. Their tactic, based their knowledge of negotions, would be to put the repubs, the media, and those corn-fed red staters "on the roof" and then let them "peel themselves off it". Our car-sales-campaign-manager would then "give em their fish story" by getting us to "settle" on a Howard Dean-type. They'd feel like they accomplished something, and we'd hold a profit for once.
The repubs understand negotiation. They just grabbed that sticker price and put the words "Mandate" on it - in big block letters (you have to look closer to see the "Fuck you" they scrawled underneath it). From a sales perspective you've gotta respect it. And still we run around looking for our Big Fish Story with them, happy when we get scraps from the table. When are we going to ever "put anyone else on the roof" with our asking price?
