Persuasive Messages

1. Some question to ask when gauging the audience's needs during the planning of a persuasive message are...

- Who is my audience?
- What are the needs of the audience?
- What do I want them to do?
- How might the audience resist?
- What is the most important issue?
- How might the organization's culture influence my strategy?
- Are there are alternative positions that need to be examined?

2. Demographics and psychographics play a large role in categorizing audiences.

Demographics has specific information such as age, gender, occupation, income, education, and other quantifiable characteristics.

Psychographics has information such as personality, lifestyle, attitude, and psychological characteristics.

Both of these need to be taken into account when analyzing an audience so that the persuasive message will be appropriate for the audience's culture.

3. How do emotional appeals differ from logical appeals?

Emotional appeals attempt to connect with the reader's sympathies or feelings.
Logical appeals, however, are based on the reader's notions of reason; these appeals can use analogy, deduction, or induction.

4. The three types of reasoning you can use in logical appeals are:

- Analogy: You reason from a specific evidence to a specific evidence.

- Induction: You work from specific evidence to a general conclusion.

- Deduction: You work from a generalization to a specific conclusion.

5. An AIDA model organizes a presentation into four phases:

- Attention: find common ground with the audience.
- Interest: provide details so that the audience knows how the solution might benefit them.
- Desire: explain how the change will benefit the audience and answer potential objections.
- Action: suggest the specific action you want the audience to take, including a deadline.

The AIDA does have some limitations. First, AIDA is a methoda that talks at audiences rather than with them. Second, the AIDA method is built around a single event rather than on a mutually beneficial, long-term relationship.