Goal Seeker and Persuasion Sentry: How Consumer Targets Respond to Interpersonal Marketing Persuasion (original) (raw)
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A Tale of Two Modes: When Do Consumers Approach Or Avoid Persuasion Attempts?
2010
Previous research suggests that prevention-focused consumers are more sensitive to potential threats than promotion-focused consumers, and therefore more vigilant against marketing persuasion (Kirmani and Zhu 2007). In three experiments, we demonstrate that persuasion knowledge, regulatory focus, and purchase relevance can influence consumers’ approach/avoid tendencies in the context of coping with interpersonal marketing persuasion. In particular, we identify conditions where promotion-focused consumers can be more suspicious about the salesperson’s ulterior motive than prevention-focused consumers.
Journal of Consumer Research
This article examines conditions that influence consumers' use of persuasion knowledge in evaluating an influence agent, such as a salesperson. We propose that persuasion knowledge is used when consumers draw an inference that a persuasion motive may underlie a salesperson's behavior. These motive inferences then affect perceptions of the salesperson. We propose that two factors, the accessibility of persuasion motives and the cognitive capacity of the consumer, affect whether consumers use persuasion knowledge. When an ulterior persuasion motive is highly accessible, both cognitively busy targets and unbusy observers use persuasion knowledge to evaluate the salesperson. When an ulterior motive is less accessible, cognitively busy targets are less likely to use persuasion knowledge, evaluating the salesperson as more sincere than are cognitively unbusy observers. Several experiments find support for the predictions. Copyright 2000 by the University of Chicago.
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2018
The availability of information and variety of online purchase options are increasing for consumers shopping for complex products (e.g., cars, real estate). This situation, and consumers' resulting sense of informedness, has led many to suggest that the need for business-to-consumer (B2C) salespeople is diminishing. Yet, despite these claims, many purchases-especially those associated with high prices and, therefore, high consumer involvement-still require consumers to interact with salespeople. This interaction, between consumers (at varying levels of informedness) and B2C salespeople, is the focus of the current study. Merging theories of consumer informedness and adaptive interpersonal influence, we suggest that the interaction between salesperson influence attempts and consumer informedness plays an important role in purchase decisions. To study this notion, Study 1 matches automobile shoppers' survey responses with objective purchase data from 480 sales interactions. Study 2 is a scenario-based experiment that investigates informedness and influence in a financial services setting. The findings of both studies suggest that understanding a consumer's informedness, and adapting the proper influence approach to it, is critical if salespeople are to influence modern consumers' purchase decisions and, thus, avoid irrelevancy. Keywords Informedness. Informed consumer. Sales. Seller influence tactics. Adaptiveness. Purchase decisions Over the last several years, the volume and variety of productrelated information in the consumer marketplace has increased dramatically (Edwards 2016; Labrecque et al. 2013), allowing consumers to easily self-inform prior to the sales interaction and without the aid of a salesperson (Bronnenberg et al. 2016; Edwards 2016). Many in the popular press have interpreted this change to signal the demise of the business-to-consumer (B2C) sales profession (e.g., Economist 2015; Mikado 2015). However, these Bdoomsday^predictions are nothing new. For over a century, pundits have referenced the significant changes of their day (e.g., railroad expansion, mass advertising) to propose the onset of an irreversible disintermediation process that would put an end to salespeople (see Zoltners et al. 2016). Yet, the fact remains that countless consumers each year engage with a B2C salesperson for high involvement, high expenditure purchases such as real estate, home durables, financial products, insurance, and more. Thus, the interaction between the salesperson and the consumer in the B2C context has changed-not gone away. In this work, we ask what types of behaviors B2C salespeople should engage in with such Binformed consumers^to continue to play a positive, valueadding role. We begin this work by framing what is of interest to the current study-cases where the consumer is making a nonroutine (Grewal et al. 2004), typically characterized by high consumer involvement (Laaksonen 1994) purchase, and Michael Ahearne served as Area Editor for this article.
Social Influence, 2008
It has been argued that the accessibility of persuasion motives elicits distrust in a communicator's underlying motives and leads to decreased persuasion success. However, this research highlights the fact that salient and positive communicator characteristics (here physical attractiveness) can temper consumers' attributions of selfish motives and lead to increased behavioral compliance when recipients are faced with direct persuasive appeals to get them to do something. This experiment demonstrates that recipients were more likely to comply with an attractive communicator's recommendation when she was forthright about her desire to change recipients' behavior than when she was not. The reverse was true for an unattractive communicator, a finding which indicates that the salience of persuasion motives is likely to become a liability when positive peripheral cues are absent. These effects on recipients' behavioral compliance were found to be mediated by the degree of selfish motives attributed to the communicator.
Consumers' Processing of Persuasive Advertisements: An Integrative Framework of Persuasion Theories
Journal of Marketing, 1999
In this article, the authors propose an integrative model of advertising persuasion that orders the major theories and empirically supported generalizations about persuasion that have been offered in the information-processing literature. The authors begin by reviewing this literature, placing particular emphasis on the assorted processes or mechanisms that have been suggested to mediate persuasion. To consolidate this material, the authors propose a framework that delineates three alternative strategies that people may use to process persuasive communications and form judgments, in which each strategy represents a different level of cognitive resources that is employed during message processing. In addition, the framework identifies a judgment correction stage that allows people to attempt to correct their initial judgments for biases that they perceive may have affected such judgments. The authors add to this by identifying particular processes that appear to mediate when and how these judgment formation and judgment correction processes operate. They also attempt to foster growth by specifying some of the critical issues and gaps in the knowledge that appear to impede further progress. Finally, the authors clarify how the proposed framework can inform the decisions advertising practitioners make about advertising execution and media factors. E very day, U.S. consumers are exposed to no less than 1000 commercial messages (Kotler 1997*). Regardless of their content and the techniques they employ, most messages share a common final goal: persuading target consumers to adopt a particular product, service, or idea. How do advertising messages influence consumers' judgments and preferences and thereby advance persuasion? A vast body of work has explored this question from various perspectives, seeking to develop a theoretical understanding of the persuasion process. Yet, to date, no single theory or framework that has been developed has been able to account for all the varied and sometimes conflicting persuasion findings. Presumably, this is because the complex process of persuasion is intricately dependent on a myriad of contextual, situational, and individual difference factors, whereas the theories remain relatively simplistic and narrowly developed. The inability of existing theories to accommodate all persuasion findings need not suggest, however, that these theories are inaccurate. Rather, we propose that these theories simply may represent pieces of persuasion processes that operate in certain conditions that are not always clearly specified. This view is consistent with the popular assump-*Authors were limited in the numberof references used in text, therefore, those references marked with an * are available at www.
Manipulation and Persuasion in Business Advertising
RESEARCH TRENDS IN MODERN LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE, 2021
The article analyzes the notions of persuasion, persuasive techniques, manipulation, its types, and their application in business advertising. Advertising has covered the way from informing a target audience to asking and convincing, from convincing to working out conventional reflexes, from working our traditional reflexes to the unconscious suggestion, and from the cold advice to the projection of a symbolic image. Advertisers have been consistent in making customers perceive a picture of a promoted product consciously and then make them buy it automatically.Advertising is so powerful that it can form and change the worldview and behaviour of people. That is why professionals in many spheres study and investigate the phenomenon of manipulative potentials of advertising. The term manipulation stands for the art of managing people's behaviour and thinking with afocused impact on the social consciousness, a type of psychological influence, a hidden inducement of people to perform...
Persuasive Conduct: Alignment and Resistance in Prospecting “Cold” Calls
Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 2018
Social psychology has theorized the cognitive processes underlying persuasion, without considering its interactional infrastructure—the discursive actions through which persuasion is accomplished interactionally. Our article aims to fill this gap, by using discursive psychology and conversation analysis to examine 153 “cold” calls, in which salespeople seek to secure meetings with prospective clients. We identify two sets of communicative practices that comprise persuasive conduct: (1) pre-expanding the meeting request with accounts that secure the prospect’s alignment to this course of action without disclosing its end result and (2) minimizing the imposition of the meeting to reduce the prospect’s opportunities for refusal. We conclude that persuasive conduct consists in managing the recipiency of the meeting requests by promoting alignment and hampering resistance. Overall, this article contributes to the wider discursive psychological project of “respecifying” psychological phen...
Putting persuasion (back) in its interactional context
Qualitative Research in Psychology, 2020
Persuasion is a ubiquitous presence in everyday life, with decades of research from across the social sciences, and, of course, particularly within psychology. Nevertheless, in this paper, we argue that we still know very little about actual manifestations of persuasive conduct ‘in the wild’. Taking a discursive psychological approach to the study of people in the settings that comprise their everyday lives, we respecify persuasion as a visible, situated, and interactive accomplishment, rather than starting from a conceptualisation of it as an outcome of invisible cognitive processes. Examining a corpus of business-to-business ‘cold’ sales calls we show how salespeople successfully secure meetings with prospective clients, and how these outcomes are tied to specific practices of turn-taking and sequential organisation, rather than being the result of the prior (unknowable) ‘intent’ of the prospect. We conclude that persuasion is not an elusive or mysterious phenomenon, but needs much wider scrutiny to describe and understand it in settings that matter to the participants involved.
Journal of Business Research, 2006
This study examines the relationship between a marketer's use of various attempts to influence a nonmarketing coworker and the coworker's perception of marketing as a credible source of high-quality communications. Research on this topic is important because both the distribution of market intelligence to other firm members and the organization's response to that intelligence depend on marketing's interactions with members of other organizational functions. Results provide general support for the effect of organizational environment and interfunctional dynamics antecedents on marketing's use of various influence strategies and on the outcomes of using those strategies. Implications and future research opportunities are discussed.