Business Communications

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Business Communications

• Lesson Nine
• FJU/AIEDL
• Dr. M. Connor
• Based on Excellence in Business Communication,5/e
  Thill and Bovée

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Persuasion

• The attempt to change the audiences attitudes,
  beliefs or actions.
• The most effective business leaders have a way
  with putting together a persuasive message.
• They know how to understand a group and
  communicate in terms their audience can both
  understand and embrace.
• So whether you are selling cars or just trying to
  sell your idea to your boss, writing effective
  persuasive messages is an important skill.

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Step 1 Planning Persuasive Messages

• Unlike good news or good will messages,
  persuasive messages are aimed to influence
  audiences that are inclined to resist.
• Therefore, persuasive messages are generally
  longer, are usually more detailed, and often
  depend heavily on strategic planning. Persuasive
  messages require that you pay special attention
  to several planning tasks.

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Analyze your purpose

• Although most business messages are routine, some
  circumstances require messages designed to
  motivate or persuade others.
• An external persuasive message is one of the most
  difficult writing tasks you will have at work.

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Two problems

• People are busy
• People receive many competing requests.

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Complex task

• Given the complexity and sensitivity of
  persuasive messages, making sure of your purpose
  is perhaps the most important planning task.

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Analyze your audience

• Earlier in the term, we discussed the basics of
  audience analysis, but the process can become
  much more involved for persuasive messages.
• Learning about your audience and the position you
  intend to argue can take weekseven months.

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Why?

• Because everyones needs are different, so
  everyone responds differently to any given
  message.
• For instance, not every reader is interested in
  economy or even in fair play.
• You may even find that satisfying someones need
  for status or appealing to someones greed may at
  times be much more effective than emphasizing
  human generosity or civic duty.

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Gauging audience needs

• The questions you ask before writing persuasive
  messages go beyond those you would ask for other
  types of messages

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Consider these questions

• Who are my audience?
• What are their needs?
• What do I want them to do?
• How might they resist?
• Are there alternative positions I need to
  examine?
• What does the decision maker consider the most
  important issue?
• How might the organizations culture influence my
  strategy?

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Maslows Hierarchy of Needs
SELF-ACTUALIZATION CreativitySelf-realizationWisdom--Vocation
ESTEEM AND STATUS Self-WorthUniquenessRespect--Community
SOCIAL AffectionFriendshipGroup Ties
SAFETY AND SECURITY Personal confidenceStabilityProtection from enemies
SURVIVAL (PHYSIOLOGICAL) AirFoodWaterSleep--Shelter
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Demographics

• To assess various individual needs, you can refer
  to specific information such as demographics
• The age
• Gender
• Occupation
• Income
• Education
• And other quantifiable characteristics of the
  people youre trying to persuade

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Psychographics

• And psychographics
• The personality
• Attitudes
• Lifestyle
• And other psychological attitudes of an
  individual.

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Both are strongly influenced by culture

• When analyzing your audience, take into account
  their cultural expectations and practices so you
  dont undermine your persuasive message by using
  an inappropriate appeal or by organizing your
  message in a way that is unfamiliar or
  uncomfortable to you audience

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Considering cultural differences

• Know the culture for which you are writing.
• In the US, audiences are usually concerned with
  practical matters.

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Corporate culture

• As with individuals, an organizations culture or
  subculture heavily influences the effectiveness
  of messages. All the previous messages in an
  organization have built a tradition that defines
  persuasive writing within that culture.
• When you accept and use these traditions, you
  establish one type of common ground with your
  audience.
• If you reject or never learn these traditions,
  youll have trouble achieving the common ground,
  which damages both your credibility and your
  persuasion attempts.

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Establish your credibility

• Your credibility is your capability of being
  believed because youre reliable and worthy of
  confidence.
• Without such credibility, your efforts to
  persuade will seem manipulative.
• Research strongly suggests that most managers
  overestimate their own credibilityconsiderably.

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How to gain credibility

• Some of the best ways to gain credibility include
  the following
• Support your message with facts
• Name your sources
• Be an expert
• Establish common ground
• Be enthusiastic
• Be objective
• Be sincere
• Be trustworthy
• Have good intentions.

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Support your message with facts

• Testimonials, documents, guarantees, statistics
  and research results all provide seemingly
  objective evidence for what you have to say,
  which adds to your credibility.
• The more specific and relevant your proof, the
  better.

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Name your sources

• Telling your audience where your information
  comes from and who agrees with you always
  improves your credibility, especially if your
  sources are already respected by your audience.

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Be an expert

• Your knowledge of your messages subject area (or
  even of some other area) helps give your audience
  the quality information necessary to make a
  decision.

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Establish common ground

• The beliefs, attitudes, and background
  experiences that you have in common with your
  audience will help them identify with you.

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Be enthusiastic

• Your excitement about your subject can infect
  your audience.

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Be objective

• Your understanding of and willingness to
  acknowledge all sides of an issue help you
  present fair and logical arguments in your
  persuasive message.

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Be sincere

• Your concern, genuineness, good faith and
  truthfulness help you focus on your audiences
  needs.

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Be trustworthy

• Your honesty and dependability help you earn your
  audiences respect.

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Have good intentions

• Your willingness to keep your audiences best
  interests at heart helps you create persuasive
  messages that are ethical

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Strive for high ethical standards

• Some people think of the word persuasion as
  something negative.
• It doesnt have to be.
• Positive persuasion leaves your audience free to
  choose.
• To maintain the highest ethics, try to persuade
  without manipulating.

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Step 2 Writing Persuasive messages

• When applying step 2 to your persuasive messages,
  you will define your main idea, limit the scope
  of your message, and group your points in a
  meaningful way.
• But you must focus even more effort on choosing
  the direct or indirect approach

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Approach

• As with all other messages, the best
  organizational approach is based on your
  audiences likely reaction to your message.
• However, because the nature of persuasion is to
  convince your audience to change their attitudes,
  beliefs or actions, most persuasive messages use
  the indirect approach.
• So youll want to explain your reasons and build
  interest before revealing your purpose.
• Nevertheless, many situations do call for the
  direct approach.

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Direct approach

• If audience members are objective, or if you know
  they prefer the bottom line first, perhaps
  because it saves them time, the direct approach
  might be the better choice.
• Youll also want to use the direct approach when
  your corporate culture encourages directness.

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Direct approach

• In addition, when a message is long or complex,
  your readers may become impatient if the main
  idea is buried seven pages in, so you may want to
  choose the direct approach for these messages as
  well.

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Blind faith?

• If you use the direct approach, keep in mind that
  even though your audience may be easy to
  convince, youll still want to include at least a
  brief justification or explanation.
• Dont expect your reader to accept your idea on
  blind faith.

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Examples
Poor example I recommend building our new retail outlet on the West Main Street site. Improved version After comparing the four possible sites for our new retail outlet, I recommend West Main Street as the only site that fulfills our criteria for visibility, proximity to mass transportation and retail space.
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Your position

• Choice of approach is also influenced by your
  position (or authority in within the
  organization) relative to your audiences.
• You need to think carefully about your corporate
  culture and what your audience expects before you
  select your approach.

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Step 3 Completing Persuasive Messages

• The length and complexity of persuasive messages
  makes applying Step 3 even more crucial to your
  success.
• When you evaluate your persuasive content, judge
  your argument objectively and seriously appraise
  your credibility.
• When revising persuasive messages and rewriting
  them for clarity and conciseness, you must
  carefully match purpose and organization to
  audience needs.

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Design elements

• Your design elements must complement, not detract
  from, your argument.
• In addition, make sure your delivery methods fit
  your audiences expectations as well as your
  purpose.
• Finally, meticulous proofreading will identify
  any mechanical or spelling errors that would
  weaken your persuasive message.

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Sending persuasive messages

• Persuasion involves a bit more than routine
  communication.
• Persuasive messages differ from routine messages
  in one important way in addition to
  communicating your main idea and reasons, you
  need to motivate your audience to do something.
• So before looking at specific types of persuasive
  messages, were going to look at some special
  persuasive strategies.

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Strategies for persuasive messages

• There are four essential persuasion strategies
• Balancing your appeals
• Framing your argument
• Reinforcing your position
• Overcoming audience resistance

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Balancing emotional and logical appeals

• How do you actually convince an audience that
  your position is the right one, that your plan
  will work, or that your company will do the most
  with readers donations?
• One way is to appeal to the audiences minds and
  hearts. Most persuasive messages include both
  emotional and logical appeals.
• Together, these two elements have a good chance
  of persuading your audience to act.

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Four factors

• Finding the right balance between the two types
  of appeals depends on four factors
• The actions you wish to motivate
• Your readers expectations
• The degree of resistance you must overcome
• How far you feel empowered to go in selling your
  point of view

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Which approach?

• When youre persuading someone to accept a
  complex idea, take a serious step, or make a
  large or important decision, lean toward logic
  and make your emotional appeal subtle.
• However, when youre persuading someone to
  purchase a product, join a cause or make a
  donation, youll rely more heavily on emotion.

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Emotional appeals

• An emotional appeal calls on human feelings,
  basing the argument on audience need to
  sympathies.
• However, such an appeal must be subtle.

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Emotionally charged words

• For instance, you can make use of the emotion
  surrounding certain words.
• The word freedom evokes strong feelings, as do
  words such as success, prestige, credit record,
  savings, free, value and comfort.
• Words such as these put your audience in a
  certain frame of mind and help them accept your
  message.

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But be careful!

• Emotional appeals arent necessarily effective by
  themselves.
• Emotion works with logic in a unique way.
• People need to find rational support for an
  attitude theyve already embraced emotionally.

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Logical appeals

• A logical appeal calls on human reason. In any
  argument you might use to persuade an audience,
  you make a claim and then support your claim with
  reasons or evidence.
• When appealing to your audiences logic, you
  might use three types of reasoning.

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Three types of reasoning

• Analogy
• Induction
• Deduuction

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Analogy

• You might reason from specific evidence to
  specific evidence. In order to persuade
  employees to attend a planning session, you might
  use a town meeting analogy, comparing your
  company to a small community and your employees
  to valued members of that community.

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Induction

• You might reason from specific evidence to a
  general conclusion. To convince potential
  customers that your product is best, you might
  report the results of test marketing in which
  individuals preferred your product over others.
  After all, if some individuals prefer it, so will
  others.

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Deduction

• You might reason from a generalization to a
  specific conclusion. To persuade your boss to
  hire additional employees, you might point to
  industry-wide projections and explain that
  industry activity (and thus your companys
  business) will be increasing rapidly over the
  next three months, so youll need more employees
  to handle increased business.

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Logically sound

• No matter what the reasoning method you use, any
  argument or statement can easily appear to be
  true when its actually false.
• Whenever you appeal to your audiences reason, do
  everything you can to ensure that your arguments
  are logically sound.

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To avoid faulty logic

• Avoid hasty generalizations
• Avoid begging the question
• Avoid attacking your opponent
• Avoid oversimplifying a complex issue
• Avoid assuming a false cause.
• Avoid faulty analogies
• Avoid illogical support.

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Avoid hasty generalizations

• Make sure you have plenty of evidence before
  drawing conclusions.

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Avoid begging the question

• The term begging the question means not answering
  something, but appearing to do so. People beg
  the question by simply restating the claim in
  different words. This is something you need to
  avoid.

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Avoid attacking your opponent

• Be careful to address the real question. Attack
  the argument your opponent is making, not your
  opponents character.

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Avoid oversimplifying a complex issue

• Make sure you present all the facts rather than
  relying on an either/or statement that makes it
  look as if only two choices are possible.

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Avoid assuming a false cause

• Use cause-and-effect reasoning correctly. Do not
  assume that one event caused another just because
  it happened first.

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Avoid faulty analogies

• Be sure that the two objects or situations being
  compared are similar enough for the analogy to
  hold.
• Even if A resembles B in one respect, it may not
  in all respects.

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Avoid illogical support

• Make sure the connection between your claim and
  your support is truly logical and not based on a
  leap of faith, a missing premise or irrelevant
  evidence.

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Framing your arguments

• Whether you emphasize emotion or logic, and
  whether you decide to use a direct approach or an
  indirect approach, you still need to frame your
  argument in the most effective way.
• You want to present the advantages of your
  decision, idea or product.
• You want to support you main point.
• You need room to anticipate and answer any
  objections, as well as motivate action at the
  close.

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Using the AIDA plan

• Most persuasive messages follow an organizational
  plan that goes beyond the indirect approach used
  for negative messages.

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Opening

• The opening does more than serve as a buffer. It
  grabs your audiences attention.

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The close

• Finally, your close does more than end on a
  positive note with a statement of what action is
  needed.
• It emphasizes reader benefits and motivates
  readers to take specific action.
• Although similar to the indirect approach of
  negative messages, this new persuasive approach
  pushes the envelope in each of its four phases.

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The explanation

• The explanation section does more than present
  reasons, and it is expanded into two sections.
• The first catches your audiences interest, and
  the second changes your audiences attitude.

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AIDA

• 1 Attention
• 2 Interest
• 3 Desire
• 4 Action

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Attention

• Make your audience want to hear about your
  problem or idea.
• Write a brief and engaging opening sentence, with
  no extravagant claims or irrelevant points.
• And be sure to find some common ground on which
  to build your case.

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Beginning

• Begin every persuasive message with an
  attention-getting statement that is
• Personalized
• You-oriented
• Straightforward
• Relevant

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Interest

• Explain the relevance of your message to your
  audience.
• Continuing the theme you started with, paint a
  more detailed picture with words.
• Get your audience thinking, This is an
  interesting idea could it possibly solve my
  problems?
• In this interest section relate benefits
  specifically to the attention-getter.

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Desire

• Make audience members want to change by
  explaining how the change will benefit them.
• Reduce resistance by thinking up and answering in
  advance any questions your audience might have.
• If your idea is complex, explain how you would
  implement it.
• Back up your claims to increase audience
  willingness to take action that you suggest in
  the next section. Just remember to make sure
  that all evidence is directly relevant to your
  point.

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Action

• Suggest the action you want readers to take.
  Make it more than a statement such as Please
  institute this program soon, or Send me a
  refund.
• This is the opportunity to remind readers of the
  benefits of taking action.
• The secret of a successful action phase is making
  the action easy.
• Ask readers to call a toll-free number for more
  information, to use an enclosed order form, or to
  use a prepaid envelope for donations.
• Include a deadline when applicable.

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Making the AIDA plan work

• The AIDA plan is tailor-made for using the
  indirect approach, allowing you to save your main
  idea for the action phase.
• However, it can also be used for the direct
  approach. In this case, you use your main idea
  as an attention-getter.
• You build interest with your argument, create
  desire with your evidence, and emphasize your
  main ideas in the action phase with the specific
  action you want your audience to take.

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Subject line

• When your AIDA message uses an indirect approach
  and is delivered by memo or e-mail, keep in mind
  that your subject line usually catches your
  readers eye first. Your challenge is to make it
  interesting and relevant enough to capture reader
  attention without revealing your proposal. If
  you put your request in the subject line, youre
  likely to get a quick no before youve had a
  chance to present your arguments.

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Options
INSTEAD OF THIS Proposal to install New Phone Message System TRY THIS Savings on Toll-free Number
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Narrow your objectives

• Another thing to keep in mind when using the AIDA
  plan is to narrow your objectives.
• Focus on your primary goal when presenting your
  case, and concentrate your efforts on
  accomplishing that one goal.

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Reinforcing your position

• The facts alone may not be enough to persuade
  your audience.
• Supplement numerical data with examples, stories,
  metaphors, and analogies to make your position
  come alive.
• Use language to paint a vivid picture.

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Semantics.

• Say that youre trying to build your credibility.
  How do you let your audience know that youre
  trustworthy? Simply making an outright claim
  that you have these traits is sure to raise
  suspicion.
• However, you can use semantics (the meaning of
  words and other symbols) to do much of the job
  for you.
• The words you choose to state your message say
  much more than their dictionary definitions.

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Ideas
INSTEAD OF THIS I think we should attempt to get approval of this before its too late.... It seems to me that... Ive been thinking lately that maybe someone could... This plan could workd if we really push it. SAY THIS Lets get immediate approval on this. I believe... After careful thought over the past two months, Ive decided that... With our support, this plan will work,
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More semantics

• Two other ways of using semantics are choosing
  your words carefully and using abstractions to
  enhance emotional content.
• But one note, make sure that you include the
  details with the abstractions.
• The very fact that you are using abstract words
  leaves room for misinterpretation.

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Other writers tools

• Be moderate
• Focus on your goal
• Use simple language
• Anticipate opposition
• Provide sufficient support
• Be specific
• Create a win-win situation
• Time your messages appropriately
• Speak metaphorically
• Use anecdotes and stories to make your points

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Be moderate

• Asking your audience to make major changes in
  attitudes or beliefs will most likely get you a
  negative response.
• However, asking audience members to take a step
  toward that change might be a more reasonable
  goal

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Focus on your goal

• Your message will be clearest if you shift your
  focus away from changing minds and emphasize the
  action you want your audience to take.

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Use simple language

• In most persuasive situations, your audience will
  be watching for fantastic claims, insupportable
  descriptions, and emotional manipulation.
• So speak plainly and simply.

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Anticipate opposition

• Think of every possible objection in advance.
• In your message you might raise and answer some
  of these counterarguments.

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Provide sufficient support

• It is up to you to prove that the change you seek
  is necessary.

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Be specific

• Back up your claims with evidence, and when
  necessary cite actual facts and figures.
• Let your audience know that youve done your
  homework.

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Create a win-win situation

• Make it possible for both you and your audience
  to gain something.
• Audience members will find it easier to deal with
  change if they stand to benefit.

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Time your messages appropriately

• The time to sell rooves is right after the
  typhoon.
• Timing is crucial in persuasive messages.

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Speak metaphorically

• Metaphors create powerful pictures.
• One metaphor can convey a lifetime of experience
  or a head full of logic.

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Use anecdotes and stories to make your points

• Anecdotes tie it all togetherthe logic and the
  emotions.
• Dont tell your audience what kinds of problems
  they can have if their system crashes.
• Tell them what happened to Mike Hu when his hard
  drive crashed in the middle of his annual sales
  presentation.

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Dealing with Resistance

• The best way to deal with audience resistance is
  to eliminate it.
• If you expect a hostile audience, one biased
  against your plan from the beginning, present all
  sides.
• Cover all options explaining the pros and cons of
  each.
• Youll gain additional credibility if you present
  these options before presenting the decision.

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What if?

• To uncover audience objections, try some what
  if scenarios.
• Poke holes in your own theories and ideas before
  your audience does.
• Then find solutions to the problems youve
  uncovered.

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Enlist support

• Recognize that people support what theyve helped
  create, and ask your audience for their thoughts
  on the subject before you put your argument
  together.
• Let your audience recommend some solutions.
• With enough thought and effort, you may even be
  able to turn problems into opportunities.

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Avoid common mistakes

• Dont use "up and front" hard sell.
• Dont resist compromise
• Dont rely solely on great arguments
• Dont assume persuasion is a one-shot effort.

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Dont use an up-front hard sell

• Setting out a strong position at the start of a
  persuasive message give potential opponents
  something to grab ontoand fight against.

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Dont resist compromise

• Persuasion is a process of give and take. As one
  expert points out, a persuader rarely changes
  another personas behavior or viewpoint without
  altering his or her own in the process.

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Dont rely solely on arguments

• In persuading people to change their minds, great
  arguments matter, but they are only one part of
  the equation.
• Your ability to create a mutually beneficial
  framework for your position, to connect with your
  audience on the right emotional level, and to
  communicate through vivid language are all just
  as important.
• They bring your arguments to life.

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Dont assume persuasion is a one-shot effort

• Persuasion is a process, not a one-time event.
• More often than not, persuasion involves
  listening to people, testing a position,
  developing a new position that reflects new
  input, and so on.