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College aantekeningen Marketing & Persuasive Communication
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Lecture notes for the MPC at the VU. Lectures 12 and 13 are missing, but the rest is present with important concepts from the literature!
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Marketing and Persuasive CommunicationLecture 1: Introduction
Persuasive communication: a sender’s attempt to change a receiver’s beliefs, attitudes and
behaviour.
More precise definition: a symbolic process in which communicators try to convince other
people to change their attitudes or behaviour regarding an issue through the transmission of
a message, in an atmosphere of free choice (free choice: de keuze om zelf de poging om
overtuigd te worden aan te nemen of niet, niemand wordt gedwongen om de overtuiging op
zich te laten werken).
- In case of unequal power or hierarchical contexts there is no free choice, so no
persuasive communication.
- Broader than marketing communication.
- Foundation of most marketing communication, because companies want to persuade
their customers (eg. through advertisements, commercials).
Marketing communication → persuasive communication, but also:
- Attention or awareness (memory effects of an advertisement/commercial)
- Consumer choice behaviour (eg. bias)
- Branding
- Targeting strategy (how to distinguish your product, company, etc.)
- Media influence (online and offline)
- Etc.
Persuasion → application areas
- Corporate sphere:
● Marketing comm, but also sales/negotiations, motivating/leadership, online
campaigns/influencers.
- Public sphere:
● Health comm, politics, societal debates.
- Individual sphere:
● Relations, education, family life.
Halo-effect: strong prejudice for things and people (eg. good people are seen as more
intelligent, nicer, more outgoing, etc.). This is customer’s favouritism toward a line of
products due to positive experiences with other products by this maker.
→ It is correlated with brand strength, brand loyalty and contributes to brand equity.
Why do we need to observe persuasive communication?
- People often do not understand their own beliefs, attitudes and behavioural motives
→ let alone those of others.
- We need objective evidence to understand why people change their behaviour.
- How do we get this evidence?
,Chapter 3
- Attitude: a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity
with some degree of favour or disfavour.
● Attitudes aren’t something people are born with, they are learned through
socialisation in childhood and adolescence.
● This means that no one is born prejudiced.
● Attitudes are evaluations according to Cooper et al.
● Attitudes influence behaviour: they guide our actions and steer us in the
direction of doing what we believe.
● You aren’t neutral about the topic anymore.
- Having an attitude: categorising something and making a judgement of its net value
or worth.
- Values: ideals, guiding principles in one’s
life, or overarching goals that people strive
to obtain.
● They are large macro constructs that
underlie attitudes.
● Values are more global and abstract
than attitudes.
- Beliefs: cognitions about the world;
subjective probabilities that an object has a
particular attribute or that an action will lead
to a particular outcome.
● Beliefs are more cognitive than
values or attitudes
● Cognitive: relating to, being or involving conscious intellectual activity (eg.
remembering, thinking, reasoning, etc.)
● Beliefs often get confused with facts. People fervently believe something to
be true while it’s not (eg. God created the world).
Beliefs can be categorised into different subtypes:
- Descriptive beliefs: perceptions or hypotheses about the world that people carry
around in their heads (eg. God created the world).
- Prescriptive beliefs: “it should be” statements that express conceptions of preferred
end-states (eg. Weed should be legal). These statements cannot be tested by
empirical research as they are part of someone’s worldviews.
Expectancy-value approach: attitudes have two components: cognition (head) and affect
(heart). Your attitude is a combination of what you believe or expect of a certain object and
how you feel about these expectations (evaluations).
- Find out about beliefs people have about something or someone.
Symbolic attitude approach: emotional reactions, sweeping sentiments, and powerful
prejudices. They are believed to lie at the core of people’s evaluations of social issues.
- Find out the basis of the attitude: do people think Muslims are weird because they
wear a hijab (symbol)?
, Ideological attitude approach: attitudes are organised “top-down”. They flow from the
hierarchy of principles that individuals have acquired and developed.
Ambivalence: we feel both positively and negatively about a person or issue. It is
characterised by uncertainty or conflict among those elements.
- Type 1: ambivalence occurs when our beliefs are incompatible (eg. my doctor is
good, but the health system is bad)
- Type 2: head-versus-heart variety: our cognitions take us one way, but our feelings
pull us somewhere else (eg. a student believes her teacher taught her a lot about
plants, but she had to wait a long time in his office for that)
Lecture 2: Attitudes and balance
News may influence attitudes, but there usually is no intention to persuade people.
Key characteristics of attitudes:
- Tendency: longer than emotions, shorter than personality traits.
- Learned: through experience and others.
- Evaluative: has a valence (positive - negative) and intensity (weak - strong)
- Directed at object: person, issue, group, etc.
Attitude functions → Attitudes are psychologically useful:
1. Knowledge function of attitudes
● Attitudes organise our thinking: make the world understandable and
predictable.
● Attitudes help us predict how people will respond and how a situation will
work out.
● Eg. good guys vs. bad guys.
2. Instrumental function
● Attitudes and associated behaviour (approach, avoid) will help obtain positive
outcomes.
● Usually result from learning processes (rewards and punishments) (eg.
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 towards other group confirms own
superiority (eg. negative attitude towards immigrants).
4. Value-expressive function
● People want to express their identity, their opinions → what kind of person
they are.
● Attitudes help to express central values, obtain social approval (eg. liking
classical music to show refinement and class)
5. Social adjustment
● People like others with similar beliefs (happens naturally)
● Expressing attitudes helps in forming or maintaining (or blocking)
relationships
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