Rapport: The Ultimate Marketing Tool

[Omar Johnson]

The ultimate purpose of any marketing effort is to persuade your prospects to do business with you. Gaining the trust and commitment of a prospect is a necessary step to gaining a client. In order to become a client your prospect must feel in some way connected to you or your company. This connection is a quality known as rapport.

Rapport is simply the feeling of trust, likeability, and similarity that creates a bond between people. Rapport consists of several different components. Being able to identify these components makes it possible for you to consciously build rapport in your marketing and sales efforts.

Rapport is based on similarity. The more closely you match certain components of a person's demeanor the more likely you are to develop strong rapport. One possible component of this similarity is in how people use their voice. Pitch, intonation, speed, accent, and volume are all different components of speech that can be noticed and matched to invoke similarity and thus build rapport.

Another component of rapport is the language a person uses. This includes such features as emphasis, vocabulary, dialect, and even such distinctions as whether a person is speaking primarily in visual representations ("I see what you mean"), auditory representations ("I hear what you're saying"), or kinesthetic representations ("I feel where you're coming from").

Another possible avenue of rapport building is physiology. Many features of how a person uses his or her body can be matched without the person consciously noticing, but this mirroring of physiology will have a subconscious effect on their impression of you. These features include elements of body language such as facial expression, posture, gestures, proximity, orientation, as well as other features of physiology such as breathing, walking, and other forms of movement.

People also develop rapport based on the contents of communication, such as ideas, interests, and attitudes. If you express ideas, interests, and attitudes similar to those of another person, this can be a bridge for building rapport as well.

In addition to looking at how rapport is built, it is also important to look at the factors that inhibit or damage rapport. In particular, there are two things that will kill rapport or keep it from developing: insincerity and inconsistency. Of the two, insincerity is more immediately dangerous, but over the long run inconsistency will kill a relationship just as surely as insincerity. This is why you must be careful to match people's speech and physiology with subtlety, and match their ideas, interests, and attitudes with honesty. If you come across as being mocking or fake your attempt to build rapport will backfire.

Any form of communication provides opportunities to build rapport, especially those that provide repeated contact. When developing your marketing message and materials, focus on how your marketing will build rapport with your prospects, ideally before you ever meet them.

Voice can be used as a channel for building rapport any time you can talk directly to your prospects, such as over the phone or in person, but it can also be used any time you are able to include recorded voice audio as part of your marketing strategy. There are a number of Internet technologies that make this feasible.

Language can be used as a channel for rapport building whether it is spoken or written. Almost all marketing materials contain some sort of language, so this is one of the most versatile tools at your disposal for building rapport.

Physiology is most important when you are face to face, although components of it can an also be detected and influence rapport building over the phone. This is also relevant whenever your marketing materials contain photographs or recorded video footage of your body.

Practically all marketing conveys ideas, interests, and attitudes as well, so you should constantly be seeking ways to make these components of communication work in your favor to build rapport through your marketing.