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Summary: Marketing and Persuasive Communication [Lectures]
Lecture 1: Introduction
Persuasive communication - a sender’s attempt to change a receiver’s beliefs, attitudes and
behavior
● Broader than marketing comm
● Foundation of most marketing comm
- Grab attention of consumers/ awareness (memory effects)
- Branding
- Targeting and positioning
- Channels (ex: online vs offline)
- Strategy and campaign design
Application areas:
Corporate sphere
- Marketing comm, advertising, but also
- Sales/negotiations
- Motivating/leadership
- Online campaigns/influencers
Public sphere
- Health comm
- Political comm, public opinion
Individual sphere
- Relationships
- Education/upbringing
Persuasive comm theories: skills to systematically analyze persuasive messages and predict their
effects
- Sender
- Message
- Receiver
- Context characteristics
- … and their interactions!
Practical use:
- Predict the effectiveness of a message
- You will know when and how someone is trying to persuade you or others
- Learn how to persuade more effectively
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Scientific approach to persuasion: 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
Street survey: (attractive people are perceived as more intelligent, and therefore more successful)
- We would probably find no relation between attractiveness and intelligence
- People do not admit that they think there is such a relation (political
correctness/social desirability)
- People are not aware that they make this connection
ADD EXAMPLES OF ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS
Persuasion - (Perloff) 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
- Symbolic process → communication
- Intentional influence
- Beliefs, attitudes and behavior
- Sender, receiver, message, object, context
- Receiver has free choice
News or Persuasion?
- News may influence, but there usually is no “persuasive intent”
- If there is persuasion intent → persuasion
Lecture 2: Attitudes and balance
Atmosphere of free choice
In case of unequal power/hierarchical contexts, there is no free choice
Hence: no persuasive communication
Ex: having to go to the army, cultural situation (North Korea)
Persuasion - (Perloff) 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 atmosatphere of free choice
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Tendency - longer than emotions, shorter than personality traits
Learned - through experience or other
Evaluative - has a valence (positive/negative) and intensity
(strong/weak)
Directed at object - person, issue, group, etc.
Attitude functions
- Attitudes are (psychologically) useful
- Katz (1960): ego-defensive, value-expressive, instrumental and knowledge function
- Smith, Bruner & White (1956): social adjective function
1. Knowledge function of attitudes
- Attitudes organize our thinking; make the world understandable/predictable
- Attitudes help us predict how people respond/situation will work
- Ex: 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 & punishments)
- Ex: children develop positive attitudes based on associated positive outcomes
3. Ego-defensive function
- Attitudes help maintain a positive self-image
- In- vs out group: negative attitudes toward other groups confirms own superiority
- Ex: negative attitudes toward immigrants
4. Value-expressive function
- People want to express their identity
- Attitudes help to express central values, obtain social approval
- Example liking a classical music to show refinement, class
- Ex: liking “Black Pete” (or being “woke”)
5. Social adjustment
- People like others with similar beliefs
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- 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!”
Expectancy-value approach
(Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975)
Attitude - strengths of beliefs X evaluations of these benefits
Ex: Attitude towards Ye
● Beliefs about Ye?
● Strength of beliefs?
● Evaluations of beliefs?
1. Ye = weird, unhinged → negative?
2. Ye = talented, creative → positive
Strength of beliefs
● Accessibility
- “Anti-Semite!?”
● Personal importance of belief
- “That’s a line you don’t cross!”
● Personal importance of attitude object
- “I grew up with his music, we would play it in the car”
● Certainty of belief
- “Is he unhinged or does he just had a very weird ideas…?”
● Uniqueness of belief
- “Kim Kardashian’s only ex-husband”
● Relative importance of belief
- “I don’t care about politics”
Measuring attitudes
Or: measure beliefs first
Then: evaluation of beliefs
