On first impressions, and why they matter

A few days ago I read Gary Halbert’s The Boron Letters, and I was struck in particular by the letter that he wrote on the subject of first impressions. It made me think again of how critically important it is to make sure your headshots are the best they can be and that they convey the right first impression for your needs.

I had never heard of Gary Halbert until I stumbled upon this book of his letters. He was, apparently, an American advertising guy and copy writer who made (and lost) a lot of money selling all kinds of things to people. He wrote these letters to his son while incarcerated for some sort of tax crime in the now-abandoned Boron Federal Prison, which was a minimum security prison located in the desert somewhere to the east of Los Angeles.

Addressing his son, he wrote:

I am going to try to teach you what I have learned about selling by mail, getting and staying healthy, how to get along with people, and, in general, how to have a good life without getting yourself all screwed up.

That sentence alone made me want to keep reading!

He starts his 19th letter by saying:

Today, as I promised, our subject will be “You Never Get A Second Chance To Make A First Impression.”

And a little further on in that letter he wrote:

what I believe is that most (or many) of our decisions about how we like or dislike something are made not in 40 seconds or the first 4 or 40 minutes but rather in the first fraction of a second that we see something new.
And, I further believe that we unconsciously spend the rest of our so called decision making time not really making a decision after all but instead searching for justification for the decision we have already made.

The thing that I found so surprising was that he wrote those apparently intuitive ideas more than twenty years before social science researchers were able to confirm that what he wrote was in fact true.

In 2006 the researchers Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov published a paper in which they demonstrated that people make a judgement and form an impression on traits that include trustworthiness, competence, and likeability, in less than one-tenth of a second. Furthermore, they found that the initial impression does NOT change significantly with time. Rather, with more time people became more sure of that initial impression.

So it turns out that Gary Halbert’s jail-cell thoughts about first impressions were very much ahead of his time.

To take it a step further, researchers have since found that those initial impressions persist for a long period of time, even if that initial impression was thought to have been forgotten.

That means that if somebody looks at your headshot photograph and forms a bad impression, that same negative impression will persist even when that person meets you in person many months later. And, if that weren’t enough, people tend NOT to revise their impressions after meeting you or learning more about you.

That’s an incredibly persuasive argument for making sure your headshots are the best that they can be, and for taking care that they convey a positive impression.

There is still another lesson to be learned from Halbert’s 19th letter to his son. As the letter proceeds, he explains that everything about an initial impression matters and that no detail should be overlooked. He wrote specifically about the impression that his direct-mail advertising pieces would give as soon as the recipients received them: he mentioned the importance of the layout, of the paper choice, of the type of envelope, of the address label on the envelope, of the type of postage stamps, of the font selection and colours, and of the importance of any enclosures to look “crisp, clean, glossy and clear” rather than “cheap, limp and soggy”.

In other words, it’s the whole package that matters and ALL of the elements that comprise that package combine together to create that sought-after positive first impression. If any one of those elements individually gives less than the best impression, then the overall effect of the package is compromised.

How many times have you seen a website that is otherwise well designed and aesthetically pleasing, that is then littered with really awful photographs of the people involved in the business? Or where the photographs are so inconsistent in both quality and style that it’s obvious that the owners of the website just didn’t care enough to worry about the impression that they give. (Because that’s what it looks like — a lack of care, which reflects on the website and business overall.)

Hopefully the 19th of Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters, and the snippets of research that I have mentioned here, will convince you that your first impressions matter, and that every element in that ‘package’ of first impressions (your website, sales material, tenders and quotes, statements of capability, annual reports, and so on) — including your headshots — matters.