R vs E - Magic of Persuasion

Art of Persuasion is not only important skillset for mankind in general but very specific to marketer & marketing world, why? All successful marketer with personal power is persuasion experts. Marketer with good Persuasion skills can see and talk from another person’s point of view. They can understand another person’s objections and concerns and respond to them effectively. These people have good intuitive insight, role confidence, practical thinking ability and ability to think on their feet. So, in my quest of mastering this skill being seasoned marketer – I found out we either communicate in person or thru your brand communication – emotionally or rationally. In this article let’s dissect these two most important modes of communication. Always remember persuasion is combination of art & science & it can be master

One decision you have to make when you're going to persuade someone is whether you should appeal to their emotion or their intellect as an example.

Take a look at this instance of persuasion where you might be trying to raise money for a for a charity called Hunger crusade and you might use a more emotional appeal like this one. Finding food can be heart-breaking.

Every day this little girl wakes up to a world where she cannot find the food she needs.

The desperation in her mother's eyes is palpable hunger crusade brings hope to those in need reinvigorating lives like this one. We are looking to bring smiles back to children. It's a very emotional appeal. You can even see an image that maybe arouses some emotion as well but I could try to convince you of the importance of my charity through another route a less emotional one.

So I might say finding food can be problematic. Every day thousands of children cannot get the food they need. The problem lies in an infrastructure that's incapable of serving a population hungry crusade works with local municipalities to identify core issues and work to resolve them through careful analysis. Now this is a very different kind of approach. This is a little more belief based intellect based non emotional approach and you can imagine each of these messages being relatively successful in convincing people that you're doing good work with this charity.

So what do you do.

How do you decide.

So should you appeal to people with emotions or with a reason and this will change your approach to persuasion in general.

One thing to note is that it will depend on the topic.

So some topics are more emotional or rational than others.

So if you look on the left that picture of pizza food warm junk food that tends to be very emotionally driven opinion.

And so that topic might be relatively more emotional whereas if you look on the right that light bulb that conserves energy that saves the environment environmentalism might be a relatively more rational topic.

It involves thinking far in the future and coming up with concrete ideas now in a way that we can't really feel emotionally right now.

And so when your topic is one that's relatively emotional That's so when you want to use more emotional arguments a more emotional message.

But if what you're trying to convince people of is something that's generally more intellectual a little more belief driven less emotionally laden then you might want to make sure that you're not distracting your audience with irrelevant emotional appeals if the topic doesn't demand it.

But if you look at the opposite if I give people a rational message a more belief based or less emotional message that's more successful when the topic is a rational topic.

And so, when you look at these you can notice that there's a matching effect here where the most persuasion occurred when there was a consistency between the kind of topic that was being talked about and the basis of the message or arguments.

OK so the other thing to note is that this will depend on the person as well.

Sometimes one topic can be emotional for one person but more rational for another person. So, some people have more emotional versus rational reasons for their opinions. So, imagine people's opinions about running an exercise. One person might say that she likes running because it feels good. This is a person whose opinion of running and exercise is an emotional opinion. But other people might say that they like running because it's good for their health. This isn't an emotion it's not a feeling it's a belief a rational understanding of the benefits of this activity.

And so, if one person has an emotional basis for their attitude and another person has a rational basis for their attitude then you're going to want to appeal to whichever base is that person has.

However, the rational message works in the opposite way.

And so, what we can see here also is that it's important to note that you might accidentally fail to persuade people by mismatching your message to that person.

So, putting all these things together it's worth using emotions or reason in a way that matches your audience or the nature of the topic.

And this is something you might want to do some market research on to figure out for your individual topic what do.

Where do people stand. Do they have a more emotional reaction to it, or do they have a more rational reaction to it or just be smart.

Remember that people do things for their reasons, not yours.

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#stayinspired