How Persuasion Knowledge Provides a Defense Mechanism Against Marketing
By: Daniel Hopper
Tags: Marketing, Advertising, Business, Psychology, Sales

The Persuasion Process

There are four factors important in facilitating the persuasion process.

First, the communicator’s credibility and reputation. Are you reliable and credible?

Next is the order of statements and there are two approaches here, primacy or recency. Whether you state your position right at the beginning, or if it is the last thing you do.

Third, completeness of statements, meaning being able to cover the topic holistically, for and against, and have a complete argument. If you can weigh the pros and cons, you can be more persuasive.

Finally, the announcement of intentions. If you are going to persuade your audience, they need to be interested in the first place. Be specific with your message and intentions.

Photo by Amy Hirschi on Unsplash

Several factors need to be in your favour to persuade an audience. The audience needs to be receptive and interested in your message in the first place, it needs to support the same ideas and opinions as to their own.

People have a filter and quickly tune out, so receivers need to be open to a conversation and to receive a message.

Marketers always try to rationalise a behaviour, so created a formula to explain the process. Values, Beliefs and Motivations influence a person’s attitude, and this attitude then influences their behaviour. Value + Beliefs + Motives = Attitudes → Behaviour.

Marketing communicates a message to try and change an attitude. They do this in two ways.

First, to try to change a belief. Second, to try and mature a belief through modifying that person’s values and/or motives.

The second route is much more difficult as values and motives are part of who is a person is and is not easily changed. It is far easier to add a new value or motive.

“In its most basic form, persuasion involves changing a person’s mental state, usually as precursors to behavioural change.” (O’Keefe, 2008)

Persuasion tactics

There are several tactics that marketers/brands can use to try and influence and persuade their audience. Five persuasion tactics are:

Creating Uncertainty: If a communicator has an audience strongly opposed to their view, creating questions around that topic in the audiences’ mind is a powerful tool. This tactic is used when the audience is strong in their stance.

Reducing Resistance: if the resistance in the audience is moderate, it is possible to influence their view from negative to neutral. You do not expect them to side with you but to accept your view.

Change Attitude: When the audience is neutral, there is a good opportunity to persuade their attitude to your favour.

Amplify Attitude: Where the audience is already favourable, a message reinforcing your point of view is beneficial here to stay strong.

Gain Behaviour: When your audience is strongly on your side, the goal is to act. Like for a salesperson, making the sale.

Persuasion Knowledge —Our Defence-Mechanism Against Marketing

Marketing is everywhere in our environments containing persuasive messages. We are living in a media-saturated world.

“One of a consumer’s primary tasks is to interpret and cope with marketers’ sales presentations and advertising” (Friestad & Wright, 1994).

A theory of persuasion would not be complete without understanding how a person’s recognition of persuasion alters what occurs.

Consumers activate the persuasion knowledge to cope with persuasion attempts, to lessen the effects of its influence.

Persuasion knowledge encompasses a person’s experiences and beliefs about the goals and tactics marketers use to persuade them. This includes the extent to which they find these techniques effective and appropriate, but also personal beliefs about how to cope with these tactics.

Consumers choose a response tactic and we should not assume that people use persuasion knowledge only to resist an attempt.

Persuasion Knowledge is Learnt

The understanding of persuasion and advertising starts developing at childhood with the ability to distinguish commercial content.

Persuasion knowledge develops throughout their life span, learnt through different scenarios such as social interactions and conversations with friends and family, and day-to-day general observations.

Because of this, persuasion knowledge will differ among individuals.

Consumers are also far more likely to develop negative perceptions towards a person trying overly hard to persuade them into something that they do not want to do.

In sales situations, negative perceptions of the sales agent also lessened the agent’s ability to persuade and increased the chance of the target’s resistance to the persuasion attempt.

While some of these consumers may still make the purchase recommended by the salesperson, there are still long-term consequences of these negative perceptions such as negative word of mouth and a lower chance of repeat purchase.