Persuasive communication
Chapter 1
Advertising is to ‘call attention to’ something, with the goal to encourage or discourage a certain type
of behaviour. Most of the advertising money goes to advertisements on the television. But also,
advertisements on the internet start making more and more money.
Owen Gibson (2005): he stuck a camera to his glasses and recorded a journey through London to test
how much advertising he would see. He came to the conclusion that he had seen 50 different
advertisements in 45 minutes. The results of the amount of advertisements we see in a day differs a lot.
The number varies from 136 up to 5000 advertisements a day. Because of this number, it seems highly
unlikely that we are very much effected by advertisement. We often do not recall many of the
messages, but we do often recognise them. The influence is thus very subtle.
The history of persuasion
Persuasion started with the ancient Greek sophists. They would give lessons and they could even make
people believe black is white. Plato argued that this type of persuasion was wrong. Aristotle, Plato’s
pupil, approached the process of persuasion. He said that the power to persuade is determined by
characteristics of the ‘source’ of the information, its ‘recipient’ and its ‘content’.
During the industrial revolution, companies became more and more interested in the art of persuasion.
During the second world war this interest became even bigger, because troops needed to be motivated
to fight for the cause. In the late 1940’s Harold Lasswell formulated a model of communication. In his
view, the effectiveness of information is best understood by asking ourselves ‘who says what in which
channel to whom, with what effect?’.
Attitude: an evaluative response – positive or negative – to a person, a situation, a product, an idea or
an organisation. Attitude was often researched by Hovland. Among their findings was that factors like
the reliability and expertise of the source helps to determine how a message affects attitudes and
behaviours. Hovland also realised that the ‘direct’ impact of a message often differs from its ‘indirect’
or delayed effect. When you, for example, tell a patient to slick a medicine twice a day, they often
eventually do not do it. In order to persuade people, you should first make sure that people are paying
‘attention’ to what you are saying. You also need to make sure your message is ‘understood’. Once it
is, the recipient can ‘accept’ the message and change their attitude. For this change to stay
permanently, the recipient must ‘retain’ their new attitude. Another insight established by the group
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,was that existing attitudes influence the persuasive power of a new message. Information that
corresponds with the ideas and attitudes a person already holds dear is more persuasive than a message
which contradicts them.
The Yale model of persuasion:
A disadvantage of this model is that the
recipient plays a limited role; as soon as the
person is motivated, they will internalize the
content and shape their attitude and behavior.
After Hovland, William McGuire was the most prominent investigator of attitudes. His inoculation
theory sets out how people can arm themselves against information intended to influence and change
their opinion. McGuire identifies six steps in persuasion instead of four; presentation, attention,
comprehension, yielding, retention and behavior.
Anthony Greenwald further developed McGuire’s ideas in his cognitive response theory. His work
examines the way in which information is processed and how that affects attitudes. Whether the new
information adds up with the already existing information determines whether a person’s attitude will
change. The approaches adopted by McGuire and Greenwald are more centered around the process of
persuasion.
Edward Kellogg Strong (1925) developed the AIDA model. AIDA stands for attention, interest, desire
and action. This model was developed in many different ways. An example is the AIDAS model,
which added the S of satisfaction as a necessary component to assure customer loyalty and so generate
repeat purchases. Persuasion does not
necessarily follow a sequential order.
In practice, the four steps tend to run
in parallel and one or more of them
can be skipped. The AIDA approach
regards the recipient of the
advertising message as fairly passive
– an idea no longer shared by most
psychological models.
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,Perloff (2010) outlined two extreme standpoints on the ethics of persuasion. At one end of the scale is
the vision of Plato, in which he rejects the sophists. At the other end of the scale is the vision that
people are free to do what they wish with the information they receive and so influencing is ethically
acceptable as long as it does not involve force (A disadvantage of this last view is that advertising is
sometimes too misleading).
People are often afraid of the subconscious influence of advertising. This was researched by the
marketing expert James Vicary (1957). He placed invisible advertisements like ‘eat popcorn’ or ‘drink
coke’ during a film, the sales of popcorn and coke raised by 58 and 18 percent. This created a wave of
shock through the United States, worrying many people that they might be swayed and manipulated
without knowing it. Later, James Vicary admitted that he made up the increased sales. Later other
research indeed showed that people can be influenced without realizing it. There are a lot of rules for
advertising to keep it ethical. Yet, there are still instances which use propaganda to systematically
manipulate public opinion.
The rules and laws of a specific country on advertising are often written down in a Code of
Advertising (COA). The COA is different in every country, but they often have a lot in common. The
regulations are hard to follow up, because an advertisement can be banned by a specific country, but
people will still get to see it on the internet (YouTube for example).
The writers of the book made a model based on the models discussed above.
On the left-hand side of the model we see the characteristics of information: source, content and form.
Their influence on attitudes and behavior is dependent on how the recipient processes the information.
The change in people’s attitudes and behavior are shown on the right-side of the model
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, For information to be persuasive, it is essential that it attracts our attention. The various forms of
attention:
On the left-hand side, we find what Daniel Kahneman (2011) calls system 2; the information is
carefully processed. On the right-hand side, we find what Kahneman calls system 1; this is intuitive
and not very systematic, but also quick and instinctive.
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