Applying the Principles of Persuasion

Applying the Principles of Persuasion

Introduction

Psychology plays a very important part on the way humans behave. The life a person lives and the decisions made can also be affected by someone influencing them. Persuasion plays a vital role in influencing people. Although persuasion and influence may seem the same, there is a big difference in the sense that persuasion requires communication while it is not necessary for communication to occur in the case of a person being influenced (Greenwald et al, 2009). Persuasion is mainly aimed at changing the thoughts and behaviors of individuals by using reasoning, feelings, or simply by conveying a simple message.

Summary of the Campaign

In late 2012, the Canadian Blood Service launched a campaign in order to collect blood during the holiday season. This campaign was named “Miracle” holiday campaign and was aimed at collecting at least 3,000 pints of blood from Labrador and Newfoundland by the end of the year. According to the service, a pint of blood can save the lives of around 3 patients; therefore, this target would enable the service to save a lot of people (CBC news, 2012).

One characteristic of this program was that after donating the blood, the donors could donate it on behalf of someone else. Therefore, people were motivated to donate their blood on behalf of someone as a gift to someone considering the Christmas season. Although the person whom the blood is being donate on behalf is not the receiver of the blood, the joy comes from the fact that some lives could be saved and this could be one of the best gifts one could ever receive.

This program was very successful as people got involved in it and even tough donations are usually low during the holiday season, they managed to gather a significant amount of blood thus proving that the program was a success (Meyer 2012).

Goals of the Campaign

A very common trend witnessed by the Canadian Blood Services is that the donation of blood decreases significantly during the holiday season because the regular life of individuals undergoes a change due to which they do not have the spare time to donate blood. However, the demand for blood does not change and considering the fact that it has a limited shelf life, donations are still required.

Canadian Blood Services decided to launch a blood collection campaign in which they used the value-expressive functional theory of persuasion. Since people derived pleasure from doing something that would save lives, they were persuaded to donate their blood.

There was no motive to earn money from the campaign therefore the campaign was set to have a Christmas theme and gifts were distributed which further persuaded people to donate blood for patients that were dying.

Critical Analysis of the Existing Campaign

The campaign was quite persuasive in nature since it sought to collect blood at a time when people were too busy to spend some time at a clinic donating blood. In order to persuade people firstly, they formulated this program in a way ...