Ask nicely

It doesn't take much time in the company of books by Dale Carnegie, Robert Cialdini or or Rory Sutherland to cotton onto the fact that how you say something can be be just as important as what you say. Nor is this exactly news: How to Win Friends and Influence People was published 85 years ago.

But it does not take much time in the company of of a modern commercial contract to see that learned legal eagle friends have proven stoutly resistant to its charms. Legal drafting is habitually fastidious over particularised and and logical at the expense of being what Sutherland calls psycho-logical.

As we move into the information age the need for clarity simplicity and brevity will be imperative like it never has been before, so perhaps this is the moment to score a commercial advantage by doing things differently.

A simple example: say you want to ensure all customers in your shop wear face masks.

Now your objective here is not simply to ensure that no barefaced customers comes in your shop. That is not even your dominant objective. You could achieve that by locking the door. what do you want is as many masked people as possible to come in your shop, and for them to be as as well disposed as possible towards purchasing from you, when they do.

If no-one comes in your shop there is no point having a door, or for that matter a shop, at all.

“Please do not enter without a face mask.”

This sets up the worst possible outcome: that a customer is is outright barred from entering the shop, as its default option, which the customer must overcome by meeting certain conditions. A customer will feel proactively unwelcome - even if it can meet those conditions -and many will accept the invitation to continue walking. even those who enter will have felt tidied and commanded to behave in a certain way and will be less favorably disposed as a result.

“Please put on a face mask before entering this store.”

This is bossy, and it assumes the reader is in non compliance with the instructions. It sets up a tone if shpokeeperism and, in chiding, resentment, as if the customers arrival is some kind of necessary evil and will only be reluctantly tolerated under certain circumstances.

“Please keep your mask on when in the store.”

This is better, as firstly it makes the assumption that the user is in compliance and is not therefore chiding in nature semicolon secondly it imposes no condition on entry, but rather assumes that the customer will enter; thirdly in assuming that the customer is already wearing a mask it prompts the customer who might not be to put on a mask without directly instructing this behaviour so, there is no direct command for those customers who are not wearing a mask. Their decision to to do so is there for their own voluntary initiative and not a response to a direction. However, there is a specific instruction to take a certain course of action at the exclusion of all others, so so again the customer is being commanded to take a single action in a certain sense.

“Please do not remove your mask when in the store.”

This has all the advantages of of the the example above: it assumes compliance, imposes no condition on entry, and and allows the customer to make its own decision to put on a mask if it is not wearing one. Additionally, it phrases the requirement to keep the mask as a negative, thereby not compelling the customer to take mandatory action, but rather ruling just one action, of of a multitude of possibilities, out. This way the customer feels maximally empowered and welcomed into the shop whilst getting exactly the same message.