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All lecture notes - Marketing & Persuasive Communication - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
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All lecture notes from the course Marketing & Persuasive Communication at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
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Hoorcollege aantekeningen – Marketing en Persuasieve CommunicatieCollege 1 – Introduction
Persuasive communication
• Persuasive/ persuasief/ overtuigend= A sender’s attempt to change a receiver’s beliefs,
attitudes, and behavior
Persuasive communication and marketing communication
• Persuasive communication is:
- Broader than marketing communication
- Foundation of most marketing communication
Marketing communication
• Is also persuasive communication, but also:
- Attention or awareness (memory effects) à moving objects, bright colors, etc.
- Consumer choice behavior (biases)
- Branding à how to get a band to persuade or get attention, hardcore MarkCom
- Targeting strategy à how to distinguish a group
- Media influence (online vs. offline) à how to reach people, how to get a message
across, interactive or non-interactive, etc.
MPC class subjects
• Which elements determine a commercial’s effectiveness?
• Can we influence people outside of their awareness?
• When you need evidence and arguments in persuasion?
• How do people persuade themselves?
• Is there such a thin as a charismatic leader?
• What do we have in common with Pavlov’s dog?
Persuasion: application areas
• Corporate sphere
- Marketing communication
- Sales/negotiations
- Motivation/leadership
- Online campaigns/influencers
• Public sphere
- Health communication
- Politics
- Societal debates
• Individual sphere
- Relations
- Education
- Family life
Persuasive communication: scientific approach
• Why do we need it?
- People often do not understand their own beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral motives
(let alone those of others…)
- We need objective evidence to understand why people change their behavior
- How do we get this evidence? à experiments, most of the time
1
,Question
• Are good-looking people seen as more or less intelligent as less good-looking people?
- We project the positive things to the more good-looking person and vice versa
- Good looking people are seen as more intelligent, nicer, more outgoing
- Effect à more positive responses, credible, reliable
- Effect à more persuasive
- Effect à better (paid) jobs, partners etc.
This is why we run experiments
• We can manipulate the independent variable
- Good vs. less good-looking
• We can measure its effects on the dependent variable(s)
- Perceived intelligence
• Street survey:
- Probably no relation attractiveness intelligence because:
- People do not admit that they think there is a relationship (political correctness/social
desirability)
- People are not aware that they perceive a relationship
More questions
• What is more effective in a TV-commercial: good arguments or nice images?
- It depends on the product à for some products you need to inform people because of
complexity, for some products you will need images to persuade people
• Can it be effective to “flash” secret messages for a few milliseconds during a TV-
commercial?
- Yes
• What would be a good time to show a super-cute puppy in a TV-commercial?
- Right after showing the brand à you will get a good feeling after seeing the brand,
like a reward
Persuasion
• More precise definition:
- A symbolic process in which communicators try to convince other people to change
their attitudes or behavior regarding an issue through the transmission of a message,
in an atmosphere of free choice
2
,College 2 – Attitudes and Balance
Atmosphere of free choice
• In case of unequal power/hierarchical contexts there is no free choice à no persuasive
communication
• Een tentamenvraag zou kunnen zijn om aan de hand van een situatie aan te moeten
geven of iets persuasieve communicatie is of niet
What are attitudes?
• “A mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a
directive and dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects and
situations with which it is related” (Allport, 1935)
• “The predisposition of the individual to evaluate a particular object in a favorable or
unfavorable manner” (Katz, 1960)
• “A tendency to respond in a consistently favorable or unfavorable manner with respect to
a given object” (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975/ Azjen ,1988)
• “A psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some
degree of favor or disfavor” (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993) à Definitie om mee te werken
Key characteristics
• Tendency à longer than emotions, shorter than personality traits
• Learned à through experience or other
• Evaluative à has a valence (positive or negative) and intensity (weak – strong)
• Directed at object à person, issue, group, etc.
Attitude functions
• Attitudes are (psychologically) useful
• Katz (1960) à ego-defensive, value-expressive, instrumental and knowledge function
- Smith, Bruner & White (1956): social adjustive function
(1) Knowledge function of attitudes
• Attitudes organize our thinking; make the world understandable/predictable
• Attitudes help us predict how people will respond/situation will work out
• ‘Good guys vs. bad guys’
(2) Instrumental function
• Attitudes and associated behavior (approach; avoid) will help obtaining positive outcomes
• Usually result from learning processes (rewards and punishments); e.g. children develop
positive attitudes based on associated positive outcomes
(3) Ego-defensive function
• Attitudes help maintain a positive self-image
• In- vs. outgroup: negative attitudes toward other groups confirms own superiority
• E.g. negative attitudes toward immigrants
(4) Value-expressive function
• People want to express their identity
• Attitudes help to express central values, obtain social approval
• E.g. liking classical music to show refinement, class
- Being woke?
(5) Social adjustment
• People like others with similar beliefs
• Expressing attitudes helps in forming or maintaining (or blocking!) relationships
- “Wow, this class really sucks, right?”
- “No, I think it’s the best class ever!”
3
, Attitudes
• Expectancy-value approach (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975)
- Attitude= strengths of beliefs X evaluations of these beliefs
College 3 – Cognitive Dissonance
• Leon Festinger (1957)
- Cognitive dissonance was first investigated by Leon Festinger, arising out of a
participant observation study of a cult which believed that the earth was going to be
destroyed by a flood, and what happened to its members — particularly the really
committed ones who had given up their homes and jobs to work for the cult — when
the flood did not happen. While fringe members were more inclined to recognize that
they had made fools of themselves and to "put it down to experience," committed
members were more likely to re-interpret the evidence to show that they were right all
along (the earth was not destroyed because of the faithfulness of the cult members).
Cognitive dissonance= refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors.
This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes,
beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance
Balance theory (Heider, 1946)
• How to reduce imbalance?
- Denial à ‘it doesn’t break down’
- Bolstering à ‘it breaks down a lot, but it is a great car’
- Differentiation à ‘It breaks down a lot, but it’s only a certain part of the car, the rest is
great’
- Integration/transcendence à accepting the situation, ‘yes it does break down a lot,
but it’s okay’
Cognitive dissonance (Leon Festinger, 1957)
• How people persuade themselves
• Deals with relations between cognitive elements (attitudes, beliefs, behavior)
4
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