Messages and Persuasion

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Messages and Persuasion
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Key Ideas

• Means-end chain
• Recall product attributesgt consumergt
  benefitsgt desired end state (personal values)
• Emotional responses
• Psychophysical and Conditioned responses
• Types of Appeals
• Structure of an ad

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Psychophysical or learned responses (from
Cialdini)

• Contrast principle
• When two things are shown in sequence and they
  are different, the second one will appear much
  more different from the first than it really is.
• Reciprocity
• given a gift or favor, we are conditioned to give
  something back
• Rejection-then-retreat
• combines contrast with reciprocity

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More psychophysical or learned responses

• Consistency and commitment
• Once we see ourselves as being a particular way,
  we tend to behave that way
• Once we decide to take a particular action we
  tend to follow with consistent decisions and
  behavior
• Once we commit to something, we tend to follow
  with consistent behavior and rationalization that
  we made a good decision.
• Commitment is stronger when it is public, active,
  not coerced, and requires more effort

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More psychophysical or learned responses

• Social proof
• When we are uncertain how to act, we look to see
  what others are doing, particularly if they are
  similar to us
• Liking / association
• We buy stuff from people we like
• we buy more when confronted with symbols we like
  
• we try to associate ourselves with positive
  things and people
• we try to dissociate ourselves from negative
  things and people

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More psychophysical or learned responses

• Authority
• We tend to defer to authority, even when there
  are good reasons not to.
• We pay attention to titles and clothing
• We pay attention to other cues of credibility
• Scarcity
• Reactance we want the scarce thing even more
• When we are competing for something we tend to
  pursue it more vigorously

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Designing Ads
MessageStrategy
Type ofAppeal
ExecutionalFramework

• Fear
• Humor
• Sex
• Music
• Rationality
• Emotion
• Scarcity

• Animation
• Slice-of-life
• Dramatization
• Testimonial
• Authoritative
• Demonstration
• Fantasy
• Informative

• Cognitive
• Affective
• Conative
• Brand Image

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Structure of an ad (print, mainly)

• Promise of a benefit headline
• Spelling out the benefit subheadline
• Amplification
• Proof of the claim
• Action to take