How can reciprocity help you market industrial products to engineers?

Several years ago, fourteen teams of college students in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program were tasked with growing $5 in seed money in 2 hours.

One of the teams set up a bicycle tire refilling station on campus. The team offered to check students’ tire pressure for free. If the pressure was low, they charged $1 to add air using a portable hand pump.

Sales were slow, so they tried a different approach. Rather than charge $1 to top off the air in the tires, they put out a jar asking for donations.

Then a funny thing happened: People who stopped by started donating money. Lots of money. And many of the students donated money whether the tire check showed that they needed air or not.

That’s the principle of reciprocity in action. And it can be applied when marketing to engineers.

Reciprocity in social psychology refers to responding to a positive action with another positive action – rewarding kind actions. Or to state it another way, we feel obligated to repay favors and gifts. Once the bicycle owners received the tire pressure check, they felt indebted to the team that provided the free service.

All human societies subscribe to the principle that we are obligated to repay favors and gifts. If a friend offers to drive you to work because your car is in the shop, then chances are that you will likely feel an obligation to return the favor.

Marketers have used the principle of reciprocity for decades. The children’s charity, March of Dimes, has sent out direct mail pieces for years with a dime showing through a transparent window in the envelope. Why? Because it works!

Does every person send a check to March of Dimes? No, of course not.

Your sense of obligation to return a favor doesn’t always outweigh other considerations. But sometimes it does. Often enough, in fact, that the little dime mailer returns about $20 million annually to the March of Dimes. It’s a great illustration of the fact that reciprocity often results in exchanges of completely unequal value.

The principle of reciprocity is at work when you host free webinars for engineers where you present an educational topic related to the products you sell, and award professional development hours (PDH) to the engineers in attendance.

An educational webinar affords you a full hour to demonstrate topic authority and position your company as a valuable resource that engineers can rely on to help solve their problems.

To reap the full benefits of reciprocity, you need to provide something of real value. Webinars provide two things that engineers truly value:

1. Knowledge
   Engineers crave knowledge. Most engineers are self-aware enough to realize there are gaps in their knowledge that need to be filled by experts. You can be that expert!
2. PDH Credits
   Professional engineers in most states need PDH credits to renew their PE license. Thus, earning PDH is very important to an engineer. The engineer will feel some gratitude to anyone who helps him earn the PDH credits that he needs to maintain his professional license.

Going back to the bicycle tire story… When the team saw how much money people were donating, they thought that perhaps they were taking advantage of the students. But then they realized that this really was a valuable service they were providing on campus. The students were not being taken advantage of. They donated money because of a genuine appreciation for the free service provided.

Likewise, professional engineers who attend your webinar will be appreciative of the fact that you are doing something for them without any expectation of getting something in return.

If you reach out to these engineers in the future, chances are they may feel some obligation to respond because of a genuine appreciation for the value you provided to them in the webinar.  (The engineer may very well be the one to initiate contact with you after the webinar, but that’s another story.)

If you’d like to chat with an expert to learn more about how to use PDH events to connect with engineers, book a free consultation.

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