Sometimes when we are watching an advertisement, we are stimulated by the message being conveyed by the advertisement. However, sometimes we do not care about the content of the message that is being delivered, instead, we start to focus on the communicators’ appearance and presence. There are two different routes to effective and successful persuasion being discussed under the elaboration …show more content…
likelihood model. The elaboration likelihood model is a theory that specifies on the probability of the person that is been given persuasive message will elaborate and imposed on the information that's contained in the message they received. Either the people are more persuaded and influenced by the content of the persuasive message or there are more inclined to being influenced by the superficial factors. There are two ways or routes that can be effective in changing someone’s attitudes and behavior; the two routes are central route and peripheral route to persuasion.
Central route of persuasion is when people are being influenced by the strength and quality of the arguments.
It happens when the people who received the persuasive messages elaborate on the messages that he or she received, listens carefully and start to think about the logic and lucidity behind the message. While, peripheral route is when the person that being exposed to the persuasive message being influenced by the superficial cues presented. It happens when people do not elaborate the message received, but they are swayed by the external qualities that are unimportant to the messages. There are also some key elements of persuasion. The key elements are, who is delivering the messages, how the message being delivered, what are the mediums used to deliver the persuasive message and also to whom the message are
directed.
For the communicator, it is important for he or she to have high credibility; that is a person who has a quality of trustworthiness and is an expert on the topic of the message that being delivered. Besides, the communicator also should have high physical attractiveness, high similarities with the audience, and have high likeability. For example, when I am in high school, all of the students have to vote for someone who are already in a senior year who fulfill the criteria to be a president of a student body. There are two guys who were fighting for the position to be a student leader as it is the highest position a student could get and you can have many benefits from that. In this case, I will name them as person A and person B. Both of the guys have high credibility and were excellent students at my school and the only significant difference between them is person A looks more dashing, stylish and have a better looking than the other. Besides, he also have been in my school since Form 3, so he knew lots more information about my school than person B did and he used that argument during his manifesto to attract students to vote for him and he had also persuaded me to vote for him in the election. In this case, it is clear that the communicator of a persuasive message who has a higher physical attractiveness and high similarities with the people who received the persuasive message, in this case the voters, will easily attract and persuade people to believe in their persuasive message.
Moreover, if we want to effectively persuade well-educated people to believe in our persuasive message, we can persuade them by using logic, reasons, and rational logic as they are more persuade with that type of persuasive message. However, less intelligent people are more impacted by the persuasive message if we are using emotional appeals, such as making them feel good, guilty or fear. The timing of the message also has to be good to take into account both the recency and primacy effect. For the fear arousing campaign to be efficient, the message has to produce substantial fear, make people believe the feared outcome is likely to occur, believe the message will eliminate outcome and believe the capability of executing message. Back in my country, there is an advertisement that delivers a message to love your parents unconditionally, even when they are old, and this advertisement has changed my behavior towards my parents. The advertisement shows a husband and wife scolding their old father in front of their children because he spilled his food on their carpet. Besides, it also shows that the couple asked their parents to eat outside alone. After that, it shows a scene where their two little daughters said that they wanted to put their father and mother outside the house when they older like what their parents do to their grandfather. It really shocked the husband and wife and it makes them realized that what they did was wrong and they quickly beg for forgiveness to their father. This advertisement really give me impact and caused fear for me if I being insolent to my parents. I scared if my attitude of being rude and being impudent to my parents will affect my future children to do the same thing to me and I do not want that to happen. After I watched that advertisement, it had influenced and also helped me to change my behavior to become a better daughter and obeying my parents and not against them, as I want my future children to do the same to me.
The channel that can be used to deliver our message is by social media and face to face. By using social media, we can convey the persuasive message to a lot of people in a short time. To illustrate this from my personal experience, back to my example of the voting for the student’s body position, one of my friends that is shortlisted to be the candidates asked me to help her during her campaign to gain more votes during the election. I helped her by making a poster and using Facebook, Twitter and some other social media to persuade people to vote for her by saying the advantage that the student will get by vote for her and this method is very effective as we can spread the message quickly to lots of people and as a result, she won the election and be in one of the position in the student body because of the high votes she received.
Furthermore, we also have to take into account the characteristics of the audiences of our persuasive message, such as their intelligence, self-esteem, need for cognition and also their self-monitoring. People with low intelligence, have normal self-esteem, adolescence, people who are in low need of cognition and people who have high monitoring are more persuadable. When I am in high school, I joined young entrepreneur program where I have to sell my products to people and to achieve a certain amount of profit. I have to sell customized t-shirts and bands t-shirts. As a group, we decided to make adolescents as our target consumers. Only two groups, including my group make adolescents as out target consumers. Other groups wanted to sell their product to adults as they claimed that adults have more money to buy the products and and it allowed them to sell the products with higher price than us. In the end, when we calculate our profit, both of the groups, including my group who sold the products to adolescents have higher profits than the other group. In this case, we can really see that adolescents are more persuadable. The groups who decided to sell their products to adults have lower profit maybe because adults are wiser and have higher intelligence than adolescents to think the pros and cons when they buy their products.