I need examples of companies overcoming initial reluctance by customers. Typically companies have to overcome inertia, hesitation, fear of making a mistake, lack of role models, and even having a lousy product.

Thanks!

The “availability heuristic” is the related concept that the more easily people can think of example, the more often they think it happens. For example, people think murders occur all the time because of news coverage and television shows, but far more people die because of suicide.

I’m looking for positive examples where you notice something like “lots of people using iPods” so they think it’s very popular, so more people buy it, and it becomes more popular.

Thanks!

Robert Cialdini tells a great story about how the people of Ethiopia provided money to Mexico in 1985 despite the crushing hardships in Ethiopia. This was because Mexico supported Ethiopia when Italy invaded it in 1937.

I'm looking for more examples of reciprocity that's above and beyond the call of duty. Please stick them in the comments section below.

A salient point takes the truth or the fact and makes it communicate the impact of your decision. All salient points are truthful but not all truths are salient points. For example, imagine if a label on the cheeseburger you were about to eat said, “Eat this, and you’ll gain half a pound” instead “Total calories: 1,500.”

Do you have other illustrations of how companies illustrate the salient point and therefore do good marketing? As opposed to providing factual points that don’t…

I’m writing my next book, The Art of Enchantment. I could use some help with finding real-world examples of the principles of enchantment, so I’m going to use this space to make requests.

The first example I need is to illustrate the concept of “cognitive fluency.” This the idea is that people prefer things that are easy to think about compared to those that are not. For example, the stocks of companies with easy-to-pronounce names do better than those of difficult-to-pronounce names.

The Twitter developer community is doing backflips because Twitter bought an application called Tweetie. Here’s my advice to the community.

If you’d like to stay on top of photo-editing, Alltop has you covered:

• Lightroom.alltop
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• Photoshop.alltop

And, of course, there’s general photography coverage at Photography.alltop.

Did you hear that Apple announced a laptop? Of course it happened in a parallel universe, but all the pundits loved it. See what I mean here.