The foot-in-the-door (FITD) effect (Freedman and Fraser, 1966) involves gaining compliance with a small innocuous request as a lead-in to a larger subsequent request of interest to the requester. Telecom Canada implemented a field experiment to improve the performance of its seminar program, to see if the FITD phenomenon holds in an actual industrial sales environment, and to ascertain if FITD behavioral-influence-inducedcompliance results in differences in actual behavior and intensity of compliance behavior. A sample of 400 wholesale firms was divided into a treatment group of 200 and a control group of 200. The control group received a telephoned request to receive sales literature, and both groups were sent the direct mail package. All were contacted by phone and asked to attend the seminar. The small request treatment group had a higher rate of actual compliance than the control large request group — 14.5% versus 6.5%. Evidence found for differences in intensity of behavior was only directional but was not significant statistically.
Keywords: Personal Selling, Statistical Analysis, Studies