The Characteristics Of Persuasive Messages

Advertisement is a form of communication intended to persuade consumers to purchase or to accept the ideas, products or services. Advertising persuasion strategy not only has logic, but also has a unique artistry that advertisers use to find many effective persuasions for various kinds of target markets. Different ways to persuade customers for the same product could have distinct effects by analyzing targets, appeal methods, and angles of vision. Two different image advertisements for watches are analyzed with rhetorical strategies thereinafter, which have entirely distinct groups of the target audiences.

Every day, companies present the people with advertisements everywhere they go. Advertisements have become very prevalent in today’s society nowadays focusing in on a negative connotation. Advertisement has become an effective way for producers to display their new products. In present day, they come in forms of billboards, flyers, e-mails, and even text messages. It is widely known that companies create advertisements to persuade people to buy specific products or goods; however, it is not widely known that advertisements can make a negative impact on today’s society. The companies manipulate people’s mind and emotions, swaying people by new promotions and therefore generating a strong desire to fit into the society, that causes them to make inessential expenditures. Advertisements pose a critical impact on the American culture.

Picture a long, stressful day where an avalanche of work completely exhausted your energy. The only thing worth looking forward to is coming home to relax while tuning into your favorite television show. In between the show, a commercial comes on to propose an energy drink built to help overcome those prolonged and demanding days at work. Advertisers are known for creating the most influential and effective way to launch their products to the general public. In the article “Men’s Men and Women’s Women”, author Steve Craig suggests that advertisements rely on stereotypes in order to manipulate consumers. Likewise James Twitchell, author of “What We are to Advertisers” strengthens Craig's reasoning by discussing the methods of persuasion that capture their respective audience’s attention to create a good commercial and sell a product. Both authors focus on the different techniques used by the advertising industry. Through their supporting demographic and psychographic evidence, they utilize advertising to show a strong correlation between each other. By using subtitles both authors explain the distinctive stereotypic profiles that are formed just from advertisers constantly examining the target audiences in order to create a connection with the product and the consumer. Twitchell reinforces Craig's position by introducing the different types of profiles advertisers target and be recognizing the effects of the method pathos and logos has

2. What – Discuss the Characteristics of the Message: What attributes are inherent in persuasive messages? How are we influenced by the emotion, framing, narratives, and rational appeals in the messaging we receive? What is the significance of the sleeper effect?

Over the years, it is apparent that adverts in general have adapted their advertising language by employing extensive methods of persuasion, instead of focusing on their actual product or purpose.

The Persuaders (2004, directed by Douglass Rushcoff) is a documentary with a hard eye on the multi-billion dollar advertising and marketing industry. They examine the subconscious and psychological techniques behind advertising and marketing developments. The documentary also determines how these new methods of marketing influence us, our desires and our self-image, finally theorizing on the future implications or repercussions of the influential forces that are constantly at work.

We live in a society where everyone is trying to live to a certain expectation set by society. At some point of our lives, we have all been peer pressure into doing something or in some cases thinking. If we sit back and take a minute to analyze our surroundings, we may noticed billboards, newspaper, ads, and television commercials. This is what we come to know as “media”. There are so many techniques they try to use to persuade us into buying that “amazing” product or whatever point they are trying to get across. They could use one of three of the rhetorical appeals, logos, ethos, or pathos. They could use a combination of all three. Persuasion doesn’t only occur through written but also through verbal words or even actions.

Do we want basic cereal or the fancy kind that athletes promote, or can we live with a plain shirt or do we want the one with a guy riding a horse emblem? These want that stray away from our basic needs are all driven by advertisement. No one is born wanting a Gucci shirt, they are taught and conditioned to want one. The Frontline documentary, “The Persuaders”, delves into the world of advertisement in order to explore different aspects of the industry that drives our desire.

When followed by recommendations, threats define the typical format of a fear appeal. Threats in its entirety refers to undesirable events, whereas recommendations refer to strategies for dealing with these undesirable events (Boyd, 1995). This study focusses in on a curvilinear hypothesis, where the amount of fear generated by a fear appeal mediates message compliance. “The subjects were informed that the purpose of the study was to obtain their reactions toward ads being considered for inclusion in a college-oriented magazine publication, entitled NOT (Boyd, 1995). The relationship between the generated fear and message compliance in turn forms an inverted U. At low levels of fear, users are uninterested to process the fear appeal because they consider the information as insignificant. At high levels, however, consumers tend to engage in defense mechanisms such as denial, prevention, and anger (Boyd, 1995). Two aspects of a threatening message operate in a multiplicative fashion to engender fear as well. These two aspects consist of severity and vulnerability. Severity refers to the noxiousness of a threat, whereas vulnerability refers to the probability of threat occurrence if no action is taken. A balanced fear appeal bears

“I now walk into the wild” stated Chris McCandless, as he is about to make the worst decision of his life. Chris was just your average rich suburban kid when one day he decided to flip his whole world around, Chris decided to leave his whole life behind and to go live off the land in Alaska. Chris tried to do the impossible, and failed terribly. For all i know the only people living off the land are tribes and people in third world countries, these people would switch lives with chris in a heartbeat! Chris never realized how lucky he was to have an education (not just your average education either, he attended Emory), a home, and people that love him. In my eyes chris killed himself with his stupidity. He lacked knowledge of the wilderness, and he never got to prove his point. Although he followed his dream, he died which proves that you cannot live your life off of the land. Chris was a fool because he was not prepared to go into the wild and because he hurt a lot of people emotionally while gone.

The Elaboration Likelihood Model has been hailed by some as “unquestionably the most influential recent theoretical development in persuasion research” (O’Keefe, 2002). Even if this is the case, it is by no means a perfect theory. One of the most commonly cited criticisms of the elaboration likelihood model is the vacuous nature of the “argument strength” component. Although this criticism is useful for pointing out an area of the model that can be fine-tuned, any perceived shortcomings due to the argument strength concept can be mitigated through a creative application of other areas of the model.

The 25 minute Magic Bullet infomercial is full of persuasion in many aspects. Throughout my paper I will highlight how the commercial uses Ranks Model of Persuasion, starting with the intensify and downplay strategies that I observed from watching the Magic Bullet Commercial. The strategies and tactics that the persuaders used worked well, by the end of the commercial I wanted the product they advertised. Throughout my paper I will go more in depth to Rank’s Model of persuasion by analyzing, explaining, and providing examples from the Magic Bullet infomercial. There are two main strategies of Rank’s model, intensify and downplay.

Persuasion is a part of our everyday lives. Whether we are persuading our mother, using persuasion through speech, or threw advertisements, we are using rhetoric strategies to get the response we desire. With the help of minor details in many advertisements, Ethos, Logos, and Pathos are a way of persuading the audience to buy or think a certain way. A Colgate toothbrush commercial used Logos, Pathos and Ethos to spread the word that they have the best toothbrush of all, in which they target everyone who has teeth. Through the use of advertisements, Colgate has convinced the world that they have the best toothbrushes, they’re even recommended by dentists.

In writing it’s important to have an understanding of what you’re trying to convey for your audience in addition to how you you will present your ideas. Effective communication extends beyond having well organized writing expressed in complete and coherent sentences. The style, tone and clarity of writing must also be considered, as they are constantly changing relative to the audience. Again, analyzing one’s audience and purpose is essential to successful writing. Appropriately, when choosing the most effective language, it is important to consider the document objective as well as the reader. In essence, this idea of effective use of language has been the overarching theme of this online English course. Each writing assignment

Social psychologists have not only studied the effects of persuasion, but also the elements that contribute to attitude change. Carl Hovland (1953) developed the Hovland-Yale model of persuasion, in which he used a research team from Yale University. They found that there are a considerable number of factors that can influence how likely attitude changes are to occur, however they also noticed that some are more important than others [McGuire et al 1996]. One of the key factors they found that determines whether persuasion occurs is the communicator. Social psychologists have found that persuasion can be influenced depending about who is presenting the argument, which can impact on how an audience receives it. The credibility of the communicator plays a large role in influencing persuasion, in which