How do you get attractive people to be attracted to you? How do you attract customers to your business? How do you attract fame and popularity? All these questions are addressed in Sally Hogshead’s book Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation. Sally says that there are seven different things that trigger people’s fascination with something or someone: lust, mystique, alarm, prestige, power, vice and trust.
Fascination is usually irrational; it gets around our usual rational barriers and leaves us vulnerable to persuasion. Fascination has become increasingly important as an oversupply of information competes for the increasingly limited attention of consumers; the author even argues that we are living in a Fascination Economy, in which fascination has become the means by which companies command influence and can charge a premium for their products.
By identifying and analysing the seven triggers of fascination, the book provides a means by which the degree of fascination of an idea, person, product or company can be evaluated and if necessary enhanced. There is something a bit too clinical about analysing irrational behaviour in such a rational manner, but the book addresses a subject which is very important to most people, and it does so in an entertaining and informative way.