The SAGE Handbook of Persuasion

by James Price Dillard

The persuasion knowledge model presumes that consumers formulate coping strategies in order to decide how to respond to marketers’ persuasion attempts in a way that optimally aligns with their own goals. When creating such strategies, consumer targets are said to be motivated to utilize and allocate cognitive resources between three different knowledge structures: knowledge of persuasion, knowledge of the agent, and knowledge of the persuasion topic(s). A target’s knowledge of persuasion typically depends on three factors: experience, cognitive ability, and motivation. Experience and cognitive ability are straightforward; however, motivation can be influenced in a number of ways.

  Figure 19.1 The Persuasion Knowledge

  Source: “The Persuasion Knowledge Model: How people cope with persuasion attempts,” by M. Friestad and P. Wright, 1994, Journal of Consumer Research, 21, p. 1–31. Copyright 1994 by University of Chicago Press. Used with permission.

  It can be enhanced by factors such as unfamiliarity with the agent, similar persuasion behaviors having been observed in a different context, use of an uncharacteristic persuasion tactic, or belief that knowledge of the agent is outdated. It can also be deterred by factors such as difficulty in the identification of the agent, perceived leeway of a salesperson, or perceived irrelevance of the agent in the target’s personal, professional, and marketplace relationships. Cultural differences may also play a role in motivation. For example, individuals in independent self-construal (e.g., Western) cultures may interpret persuasion attempts predominantly in terms of a personal attitude on the persuasion topic, whereas individuals in interdependent self-construal cultures (e.g., Eastern) may interpret such attempts in terms of a personal attitude on the social relationship with the agent. Such different interpretations may lead to different persuasion responses.

  The interaction of the target’s coping behaviors and the agent’s persuasion attempt forms what Friestad and Wright (1994) refer to as the persuasion episode. The persuasion episode may include one encounter, such as a sales presentation, or multiple episodes, such as a series of television advertisements presented over time. Furthermore, consumers and marketers may switch roles, with the consumer becoming the agent and the marketer becoming the target when, for example, a consumer attempts to negotiate or bargain, or otherwise influence a firm’s selling tactics in any way. Regardless of who occupies which role, the model assumes that both agents and targets want to maximize the effectiveness of their persuasion production and persuasion coping behavior respectively.

  The persuasion knowledge model also asserts that consumers utilize persuasion knowledge to evaluate marketers’ persuasion behavior on two primary dimensions: perceived effectiveness and perceived appropriateness. Consumers judge persuasion behavior to be effective when it seems to have produced psychological effects that strongly influence purchase decisions. Consumers deem persuasion behavior appropriate to the extent it appears to be ethical or normatively acceptable (i.e., within the rules of the game), especially with regard to consumers’ relationship expectations. For example, if a marketer’s persuasion attempts are perceived as disrespectful or unexpectedly careless, it will likely lead to a negative consumer evaluation, potentially damaging brand equity and the reputation of the firm overall.

  The model also rests on the fundamental assumption that people are “moving targets.” In other words, the validity of a consumer’s knowledge about the marketer, the marketer’s persuasion tactics, and the persuasion topic will ebb and flow over time. A similar thing can be said for marketers, as their knowledge of consumers’ interests, preferences, and expectations is also likely to fluctuate over time. As a result, causal relationships between firm behavior and consumer responses are prone to changing over time as well, and, as such, must be reexamined every so often to ensure that they are still valid.

  Tests of the Model

  A number of studies have provided support for key components of the model. For example, one key component is the notion that consumers have well-developed knowledge structures about persuasion tactics and that people generally understand the motives of persuasion tactics. Consistent with this proposition, research suggests that lay people do have clear knowledge of persuasion tactics of advertising, and the beliefs of lay people about how advertising works are actually quite similar to those of academic marketing scholars (Friestad & Wright, 1995). Moreover, these persuasion knowledge structures are evident in middle school children. Children’s knowledge of advertising tactics tends to increase with age, and knowledge about these tactics is positively correlated with skepticism toward advertising (Boush, Friestad, & Rose, 1994; for a review, see Wright, Friestad, & Boush, 2005).

  Another aspect of the model that has received support is that consumers make spontaneous, active inferences about agent tactics when consumers encounter persuasive appeals. People use simple cues such as perceived effort a company puts into an appeal as a signal of the company’s belief in their product (Kirmani & Wright, 1989) and that these inferences can result from cues as simple as the size of an ad (Kirmani, 1990). Consumers also have schemas (and thus expectations) of tactics used for various product categories and that these schemas guide processing of the persuasion attempts (Hardesty, Bearden, & Carlson, 2007). Moreover, consumers use their knowledge of persuasion tactics and underlying motives to form strategies to cope with marketers’ persuasion attempts, and aspects of the consumer (their relationship with the marketer and their experience with persuasive tactics) guide which strategy is employed (Kirmani & Campbell, 2004).

  The general notion that consumers understand the motives of companies as well as salespeople, and that consumers have schemas and expectations about persuasion tactics, has important and sometimes counterintuitive implications about the effectiveness of persuasion attempts. We know from the elaboration likelihood model and other similar persuasion models that consumers often do not pay close attention to persuasion attempts. In persuasion knowledge terms, in these instances, consumers may not have a persuasion knowledge schema fully activated. Thus, one would expect that when knowledge of persuasion tactics is low, persuasion would likely proceed through the peripheral route to persuasion. However, the process of activating persuasion knowledge may lead to central route processing, which in some cases may lead to decreased persuasion. Consistent with this reasoning, DeCarlo (2005) showed that when persuasion knowledge was activated by increasing the salience of ulterior motives, attitudes towards a salesperson were actually more favorable, and purchase intentions were lower when the strength of the sales message arguments were weaker (mildly positive) than when they were stronger, but the reverse was true when salience of ulterior motives was low.

  Other research also supports the notion that the activation of persuasion knowledge can have a detrimental effect. For example, take the case of flattery in personal selling. A substantial amount of research has shown that flattery can have positive effects on attitudes toward the flatterer in a variety of domains (Gordon, 1996). However, the persuasion knowledge model suggests that if this flattery comes from a salesperson, and persuasion knowledge (e.g., ulterior motives) is activated, then flattery may actually backfire. In fact, research suggests that this is indeed the case. Flattery by salespeople can spontaneously activate suspicions of ulterior motives, oftentimes even more than a situation warrants (sinister attribution error; Kramer, 1994), and thus decrease rather than increase persuasion (Campbell & Kirmani, 2000).

  Although the findings regarding detrimental effects of salesperson flattery fit nicely within the persuasion knowledge model, other research suggests that the process may not be that simple. In a provocative set of studies, Chan and Sengupta (2010) showed that flattery by marketers actually produces two attitudes, one explicit (of which one is aware and can control) and one implicit (outside a person’s awareness), which coexist with each other in memory. The explicit attitude, which is what most prior research has assessed, did indeed appear to be corrected for, or discounted. Explicit attitudes were always more negative than i
mplicit ones. More importantly, implicit attitudes were much stronger predictors of behavioral intention than were explicit attitudes. These results suggest that even though consumers are knowledgeable of persuasive tactics and attempt to correct for them, they may not always be successful, even though their responses on attitude scales suggest they are.

  As the research reviewed clearly shows, persuasion knowledge can be easily activated by environmental cues. One implication of the model, and a challenge for marketers, is to understand how to navigate consumers’ propensities to activate persuasion knowledge. For example, one marketing persuasion tactic that has seen a large increase in usage is product placement (Shrum, 2004, 2012), which is the practice of inserting branded products into films, television, programs, and other media (McCarty, 2004; McCarty & Lowrey, 2012). One question that has worried advertisers is which placements are most effective. Placements can vary greatly, from simple, subtle background placements to more overt placements that include a shot of the brand name or even a mention in the dialogue. Although effectiveness may depend on how it is measured (e.g., via recall, attitudes, etc., Law & Braun-LaTour, 2004), the persuasion knowledge model makes some predictions about this process. If prominence of a placement in film is sufficient to cause viewers to notice the placement, it may activate persuasion knowledge and thus reduce brand attitudes. Consistent with this reasoning, Cowley and Barron (2008) found that prominent placements produced more negative attitudes for those who were high in program involvement (and thus more likely to notice the placement) than for those who were low in program involvement. Thus, not properly managing consumers’ persuasion knowledge activation can be detrimental to the goals of particular marketing tactics.

  In sum, the key contribution of Friestad and Wright’s persuasion knowledge model is that consumers are active and often knowledgeable participants in marketers’ persuasion efforts, and that their persuasion knowledge, motivation, cognitive ability, and goals are all factors that should be taken into account when examining the effectiveness of any marketing attempt at persuasion. Furthermore, the interaction between marketers’ persuasion efforts and consumers’ strategies for coping with those efforts is one that is constantly changing, as the persuasion knowledge of both consumers and marketers varies over time. Finally, the model is useful for both the targets and the agents. It provides agents (marketers) with an understanding of how consumers react to persuasion attempts and guidance on how to minimize persuasion knowledge activation. For targets (consumers), it provides a model for how they may actively discount or correct for persuasion attempts, how they may actually overcorrect in some situations, but also how their corrections may ultimately not be sufficient (Chan & Sengupta, 2010).

  Nonconscious Processing and Persuasion

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  The three theories just reviewed represent the primary theoretical models that have impacted marketing, advertising, and consumer behavior research over the last few decades. These models continue to be tested and refined, particularly the elaboration likelihood model and persuasion knowledge model. However, in the most recent years, the area of research that has had perhaps the most provocative impact is the role of nonconscious processing in consumer judgment and decision making (Bargh, 2002; Dijksterhuis, Smith, van Baaren, & Wigboldus, 2005). As a number of scholars of nonconscious processing have noted, there are different aspects of awareness that may play a role in how environmental features may influence consumer outcomes outside of consumer awareness, and lack of awareness of any one of these may lead to nonconscious effects (Chartrand, 2005). Three particular aspects are important: awareness of an environmental stimuli, awareness of the automatic processes that influence behavior, and awareness of the actual outcome.

  A good example of lack of awareness of environmental stimuli is through subliminal presentation. The notion of subliminal persuasion is one with which most students and scholars of persuasion are very familiar, and the potential use of the concept has long been a fear of many lay people. Interestingly, the reason for this fear is captured by the persuasion knowledge model: people worry that they will not know they are being persuaded, and thus their persuasion knowledge will not be activated, leaving them vulnerable to the persuasive communication.

  Although there have been quite a number of scholarly writings dismissing the notion of subliminal effects in general and subliminal persuasion in particular (Pratkanis & Aronson, 1992), we now know that subliminal effects are actually fairly easy to produce, at least in the lab (for a review, see Dijksterhuis, Aarts, & Smith, 2005). Examples include the mere exposure effect, in which subliminal exposure to various stimuli increased liking for those stimuli in a linear function of frequency of exposure (Zajonc, 1968), subliminal exposure to positive versus negative symbols prior to a supraliminal presentation of an image that influenced liking for the image (Murphy & Zajonc, 1993), subliminal exposure to stereotypical information that influenced behavior in the direction of the stereotype (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996), subliminal presentation of threatening stimuli that induced anxiety (Robles, Smith, Carver, & Wellens, 1987), and subliminal conditioning of attitudes (Krosnick, Betz, Jussim, & Linn, 1992), among a host of others.

  Some recent research has actually demonstrated subliminal persuasion in a setting conceptually similar to the lay notion of subliminal advertising. Strahan, Spencer, and Zanna (2002) primed thirst by subliminally exposing participants to either thirst- related or non-thirst-related words. Although they did not find any differences in self-reported thirst, those subliminally primed with thirst drank more of a liquid whose brand name suggested a thirst-quenching attribute (Super Quencher) than of a liquid whose brand name suggested a non-thirst-related attribute (PowerPro). A second study replicated the same general effect by showing that subliminally primed mood (via sad faces) caused participants to prefer a music choice that was described as mood lifting to music described as powerful. Thus, these studies suggest that although subliminal priming may not create needs (i.e., make someone thirsty), priming the goal (quench thirst) can influence choices that can help achieve the goal.

  Although the specter of nonconscious persuasion has always been held in fear and fascination by consumers, nonconscious influences on behavior do not require subliminal presentation of the primes. As Bargh has pointed out a number of times (cf. Bargh, 1992, 1999; see also Chartrand, 2005), if people are unaware of how the prime may affect them, they are just as likely to be influenced. For example, when people walk into a store, they may be aware of music being played (supraliminal presentation). What they may not know, however, is that the tempo of music can affect the speed with which consumers shop. Slow music causes people to go slower in their shopping, fast music causes them to shop faster (Milliman, 1982).

  Thus, consumers may not know that department stores are playing slower music to get them to shop longer (and thus spend more money), whereas fast food stores are playing faster music to decrease customer dining time and increase customer turnover. As another example, when consumers go into a grocery store to buy some fruit, they are clearly aware of the sign that advertises two lemons for $1. What they are unlikely to be aware of, however, is that the number chosen in the advertisement influences their buying behavior independent of need. Thus, consumers will tend to buy more items when those items are advertised as four lemons for $2 than when they are advertised as two lemons for $1 (Wansink, Kent, & Hoch, 1998). This effect results from an anchoring and adjustment process (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), in which the applications of the primes are conscious, but because consumers are unaware of the primes’ effects, consumers have no more ability to combat the primes’ effects than they do when primes are presented outside their awareness.

  Another example of how conscious environmental primes may influence nonconscious, goal-directed behavior can be seen in a set of experiments by Chartrand, Huber, Shiv, and Tanner (2008). Chartrand et al. primed groups of participants with different goals (value vs. image) via a scrambled sentence task. Late
r, participants were given a fictional scenario in which they had to choose between a pair of socks that represented a good value (Hanes socks at $6 for two pairs) or a good image (Nike socks at $5.25 for one pair). When participants were primed with the image goal, they were much more likely to choose the Nikes (48%) than when they were primed with the value goal (18%).

  Finally, conscious environmental primes can exert an influence on consumer behavior if consumers are unaware of the actual outcomes of their behavior. Brian Wansink and colleagues have developed an extensive program of research that looks at how simple environmental cues influence eating habits despite conflicting goals (Wansink, 2010). For example, people tend to eat more when the same portions are served on larger plates or bowls than when they are served on smaller ones. The larger plates make the amount of food on the plate look smaller relative to the size of the plate, and thus people underestimate how much they are actually consuming (Wansink & van Ittersum, 2006).

  New Directions in Persuasion in the Marketing Place: The Next Big Thing(s)

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  So what’s next in commercial persuasion? From our vantage point, we see the field progressing in three different areas that have some degree of overlap and synergy. These are a continued intensive investigation of nonconscious processing and persuasion, a renewed focus on the role of mood in persuasion (and consumer decision-making in general), and the incorporation of social cognitive neuroscience into the study of persuasion and decision-making processes.

  Nonconscious Processing and Persuasion

  In our opinion, the previous review of nonconscious processing and persuasion barely touches the surface of research currently being conducted. As we noted in the previous section, what makes consumers so fearful of subliminal advertising is the notion that they may not be able to defend against an unwanted persuasion attempt. However, stimuli need not be outside of conscious awareness to persuade: Supraliminal primes may also influence attitudes and behavior without consumers’ awareness if they are not aware of the influence of the prime on their attitudes and behaviors.