The effect of the ‘evoking freedom’ technique on sales in a computer-mediated field setting

The ‘evoking freedom’ technique is a verbal compliance procedure which solicits someone to comply with a request by simply telling a person that he/she is free to accept or to refuse the request. However, the effect of this technique has never been tested in a selling context. Previous customers (N = 900) of an extreme sports store were solicited by email to participate in a campaign where they were offered a gift voucher if they persuaded someone to become a new customer of the store. According to the case, the email contained a sentence that stated that they were free to participate or not in the operation. It was found that the ‘evoking freedom’ condition was associated with a higher number of new customers (+8.4%) than the control condition (+4.7%).