The Law of Obligation

The Law of Obligation
"How To Get Anyone To Do A Favor For You"

The Law of Obligation, also known as pre-giving or reciprocity, states that , when others do something for us, we feel a strong need, or urge, to return the favor. The Law of Obligation conveys our natural tendency to answer a call of duty. By creating a need, returned favor, ie. need for consumer money, a persuader presents a need that can effectively be met with the "cooperation" of the message receiver. Large corporations will often use the law of obligation in order to receive customer feedback. After a service has been offered, a company may offer a survey to its customers in order to better understand their consumer market. This is an exchange between the customer and the company. The company receives information based upon the customer's instinctual need to reciprocate some sort of feedback to the company from which they received such wonderful service. I experience this first hand when I go to the Taco Bell located on WI ave. For some reason they're always looking for customer surveys, but they'll often offer free tacos as a reward.
 A second example of obligation comes from magazine subscriptions. Because you might have held a longstanding subscription to Sports Illustrated, near the end of your subscription the magazine will prey on your obligation to renew your subscription. They'll even take it one step further in order to make you buy certain upgrades to the publication or memorable moments in the magazine's history.
My third and final example comes from the world of Gaming. In the Call of Duty franchise, the game designers are constantly coming out with expansion packs in order to keep gamers interested. It is not required that you purchase this downloadable content in order to play the game but the experience becomes more diverse when you do. Because of a gamer's love for Call of Duty he/she feels obligated to continue the story and to purchase new additions to the game in order to enhance their experience.
After realizing the technique of this law I 'll no doubt be less likely to add $1 onto my purchase the next time a grocery store tries to get me to donate. They add that $1 because it doesn't seem like a lot and because had they not asked, I probably would not have donated. Having said that, I'm still going to keep my guard up.