Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 - Posted in Uncategorized

Where you sit and what you sip are two key factors in a successful meeting, according to Neurosciencemarketing.com.  Offering your client a hot beverage is not only a nice thing to do, it will change their perception of you.

“John Bargh of Yale University, found that the temperature of a beverage makes a difference in how a person judges another person:

The experimenters, Lawrence Williams of the University of Colorado and John Bargh of Yale, gave cups of either hot or iced coffee to people and asked them to rate someone’s personality based on a packet of information. The ones who held the hot cup rated that individual significantly higher for “warmth” than did the subjects holding the iced coffee…

Dr. Bargh points to recent brain imaging studies showing that the experience of hot or cold stimulus triggers activity in the insular cortex, the same area of the brain associated with a personality disorder that makes people uncooperative and distrustful.”[From the New York Times - Heart-Warming News on Hot Coffee by John Tierney.]

So, not matter the outside temperature, offering a hot beverage is the better choice, rather than an iced beverage.

Where you sit also plays into the success of a business encounter. Although, why stop there, you could apply the same principal to say, your future in-laws, someone you’d like to ask a big favor from or a future financial donor.

According to neurosciencemarketing.com, in a study by Joshua M. Ackerman (MIT), Christopher C. Nocera (Harvard), and John A. Bargh (Yale), showed that “hard objects increased rigidity in negotiations.” One of a series of experiments involved a simulated car price negotiation in which the subject had to make a price offer for a car, which was rejected. Then, the “buyer” had to make a second offer. The subjects were also asked to evaluate their negotiating partner.

“The researchers found that there was a significant difference between subjects sitting in hard and soft chairs. Those seated in hard chairs judged their negotiating partner to be less emotional. Most significantly, the “buyers” in soft chairs increased their offer by nearly 40% more than those in hard chairs. In short, a hard chair not changed the buyers’ perception of their negotiating partner, it made them harder bargainers.”

Yikes! To avoid a rigid, cold meeting, serve a hot beverage while offering the ‘customer’ a cushy chair. Your chances of success increase with a few touches of home.