Whetting the Appetite

Gaspare Galati, the Palermo doctor whose lemon grove the warden Carollo was taking from him, wrote a memorandum to the Minister of the Interior in 1875. By then he had understood who he was dealing with, and he had made an important discovery about language. In the letters slipped to him, Carollo was called a man of honour, and the new warden, shot in the back, a contemptible spy. Galati later explained the terminology like this: in the language of the Mafia, the thief and the murderer is a man of honour, and the victim is a contemptible spy.

Remember this. Nothing in the business of the grove changed because of what it was called. The same stolen harvest, the same shot from behind a stone wall. All that changed was the frame the event was put into. And for the people who lived inside that frame, it meant a great deal.

The Frame

Our world has always known how to choose its words. In Sicily the levy on shopkeepers is called pizzo, from the word for “beak”: to pay is to let somebody “wet his beak”. Historians have found that in a dictionary of 1857 the word means only a beak, and in one of 1868 it means the levy too; most likely it was spread around the city by that same play about prisoners in which the word “mafiosi” was first heard. Wetting a beak sounds almost friendly. Nobody says “handing over money out of fear”. Just as in your office nobody is ever fired: the staff is “optimised”.

This is what clever people call a frame. You can show one and the same thing so that a man sees a gain in it, or a threat, or a trifle, or a heroic deed. A ten per cent discount and a ten per cent surcharge on the “full” price are the same arithmetic, but the buyer feels them differently. “Nine out of ten recover” and “one in ten dies” are the same statistic, but people make different decisions.

You can’t not use a frame. Every word you say already puts something in the light and leaves something in the shade. The question is a different one: what are you leaving in the shade? Galati saw the main thing: the frame “man of honour” hid the victim. If your frame hides from the client what he needs to know—the price, the risk, the condition—you’re not selling, you’re cheating, and sooner or later it will come out. A good frame doesn’t hide the truth. It brings forward the part of it that matters to the client.

You Can’t Create Desire

Now about desire. The young men in advertising like to say they know how to “create a need”. Don’t believe them. You can’t make a man want what he doesn’t want. All you can do is find a desire that’s already in him and show him that your offer leads there.

With our people you see this better than anywhere. Mafiosi always wanted the same thing: to be respected and feared, to be looked at. Then the cinema came along and gave that desire a ready-made picture. Gambetta collected a whole set of cases. In the late seventies a Sicilian aristocratic family lent its villa to a Mafia boss for his daughter’s wedding, and what the guests liked best was the music: tunes from The Godfather. One former mafioso described how his boss read Puzo’s novel and decided to do things “like in the book”. Tommaso Buscetta, the most famous turncoat of them all, adored the film, though he thought the scene where they kiss Michael Corleone’s hand was an invention.

The cinema didn’t give these men the desire to be respected. It gave them a picture of what that looks like. And they wanted to step into the picture.

Let Him See Himself

That’s what visualisation is. A man buys more readily when he can see himself, in advance, after the purchase. Not “we have a good suit”, but him, in that suit, walking into the room while heads turn.

Lucky Luciano himself, if you believe his own memoirs, taken down from his words at the end of his life, understood this perfectly. When he went back to his home town in Sicily in the fifties, he put money into the local cinema, and the first film shown there was Little Caesar, the American gangster classic. Luciano said people came up to him and all but kissed his hand, because they wanted to show that to them he was a bigger shot than Little Caesar. Historians consider these memoirs unreliable, so how much of it is true and how much is boasting is hard to say. But the old crook had the right idea: he gave the town a picture and put himself in it, right beside the hero.

Don Vincenzo did the same, only more modestly. When he wanted the contract for a new hotel, he didn’t tell the manager about machines and powders. He took a pile of starched tablecloths from our stock, laid one table in the hotel restaurant, set out the cutlery and invited the manager to come and look. “This is how it will be for you every morning.” The manager saw his dining room, his table, his guests. He made his decision right there, by the table.

Three Steps

To sum up. Find a desire the man already has: to be richer, to belong, to know, to be safe, to enjoy himself. Show him a picture where that desire comes true, with himself at the centre of it. Choose words that bring forward what matters to him. And check yourself with Dr Galati’s question: does my frame hide a victim?

If it doesn’t, you’re selling. If it does, you’re doing what the warden Carollo did, only more politely.