Persuasion

Persuasion

Daniel J. O"Keefe
Northwestern University
d-okeefe@northwestern.edu

Word count: 884

Persuasion is a communicative function that can be pursued in many different settings, ranging from face-to-face interaction to mass communication. Mass media persuasion takes three primary overt forms: commercial advertising (of consumer products and services), prosocial advertising, and political advertising. On each of these subjects, there is extensive empirical research and theorizing ( Strategic Communication).
Studies of consumer advertising have examined such questions as the effectiveness of different advertising strategies, the role of endorsements in consumer advertising, effects of varying the frequency and timing of advertisements, the role of visual elements, and so on (e.g., Kardes et al., 2005; (→ Advertising; Advertising as Persuasion; Advertising, Endorsement in; Advertisement, Visual Characteristics of.) Advertising is commonly one part of a larger marketing effort involving decisions about pricing, product distribution, market segmentation, sales force management, and so forth (→ Marketing).
Prosocial communication campaigns (sometimes termed "social marketing," because such campaigns apply familiar marketing tools to prosocial ends) aim to forward environmental or charitable causes or to advance health-related ends such as encouraging people to exercise, quit smoking, and so forth (→ Environmental Communication; Health Campaigns, Communication in; Social Marketing; Planned Social Change through Communication). Research on health promotion communication has been informed by such theoretical approaches as the health belief model, the stages of change (transtheoretical) model of health behavior change, and the extended parallel process model (→ Extended Parallel Process Model; Health Belief Model; Stages of Change Model; Health Communication; for collections of studies of prosocial campaigns, see Rice & Atkin, 2001; Hornik, 2002.)...