Persuasion: Who, What, to Whom

Persuasion: Who, What, to Whom

Introduction

Persuasion refers to the influence on an opinion, created in order to achieve the desired result. In the context of social psychology, it can be viewed in terms of marketing and advertisements, where its usage is increasing by the day. Persuasive communication takes place between a sender and a receiver of the message. The characteristics of both the parties, as well as of the message that is being communicated, play a decisive role in successful persuasion. This paper aims to provide an in-depth analysis of these three parts of persuasive communication.

Discussion

According to Feenstra (2011), persuasive communication can be broken down into three main parts: the communicator/sender, the message, and the receiver/audience (p.88). Each of these parts is explained in detail below.

Who: The Sender

For the message to be effective in its persuasive ability, it should be communicated by a persuader with certain characteristics such as credibility. Credibility refers to the expertise of the communicator/sender of message, along with the trustworthiness of the communicator. When it comes to expertise, people are more likely to be persuaded by someone whom they believe is an expert; field of expertise plays a major role in this regard. Another decisive factor determining the trustworthiness of the sender is the quality of argument he uses; this factor alone is so much influencing that the use of quality arguments by a non-expert usually yields more persuasive results than the employment of an expert who does not use quality argument(s) to persuade.

Another characteristic that should be present in an effective communicator is physical attractiveness and likeability. A general pattern that is observed is that attractive communicators are likely to be more persuasive than unattractive ones, owing to their physical attributes grabbing attention. Likeability plays another deciding role in the successful persuasion of a message. If a person we like states his/her intention to persuade, we tend to be influenced intensely, as compared to the same technique being used by someone we dislike. In that case, we would more likely move away from the message, due to our tendency to repel that person. Therefore, a disliked source should keep the intention of persuasion hidden in order to minimize repulsion (Reinhard, Messner, Sporer, 2006).

Both these concepts of credibility and attractiveness/likeability can be illustrated by the e-word of mouth phenomena. Potential customers usually look for customer reviews of products before purchasing them, and it ...