Social Marketing Propaganda Effectiveness on Attitude Change - Essay Example

? Topic: Social Marketing Propaganda Effectiveness on Attitude Change and Persuasion Introduction Since time memorial, humans have been wondering why they do the things they do and to date explanations have been put forward to try and explain the happenings in the way events occur. Scientific exploration of social influence can be dated to events in the 19th century in trying to explain the way crowds do behave as well as the influence to individuals in acting on certain manners. According to Pratkanis, (2007), the theory of behaviour in groups is based on the group mind, that individuals placed within the anonymity ad invincibility of a crowd would display their unconscious personality and merge with the group to perform savage behaviours. The notion that a crowd takes over the will of a person much like the suggestions of a hypnotist command the unconscious of the hypnotised are promoted in trying to analyse crowd behaviour, (Wichers, 1996).  The science of social influence addresses the issue of how and why people change the thoughts, feelings and behaviour of other people through such processes as conformity, persuasion and attitude change compliance and yielding to social forces and most importantly, the study of social influences aims at developing mechanisms to resist unwanted and undesirable social influences. Jowett & O'Donnell, (2006) agree that time separates the study of propaganda from the political ideologies that hovered over academe in the cold war period and there is a clear revival of interest in the importance of the roles played by propaganda in the many aspects of the modern life, not necessarily related to international intrigue and military campaigns as the first world war changes the trajectory of social influence research. Social Marketing as Propaganda to Influence Consumer Thinking Social marketing is a concept that places emphasis on the consumer in a bid to please and satisfy their needs, which is majorly shaped by the fashioning of products and communication. Marketing is very much concerned with interpreting the consumer and mapping the products to suit their needs accordingly, surfacing their latent wants, the underlying desires which they cannot articulate fully and it can be largely said to be the idea of propaganda. On the other hand propaganda and Social marketing are similar in ideologies as social marketing is the taking into action and control measures aimed at influencing the acceptability of social ideas and involving considerations of product planning, pricing, communication, distribution and marketing research which is all aimed at influencing individual thinking abilities and perception towards a product, (Kotler & Zaltman, 1971). In this definition, the ideology of propaganda and social marketing are pushed forward by ideology rather than pulled by magnetic consumer focus and hence the ideas that define social marketing artifacts are rare. In the United States and Britain the war was marked by a period of patriotism and after the war, many people became disillusioned by the results coming to feel that they has been duped by the propaganda behind it. Based on human behaviour, the Zeitgeist of the times encouraged the belief that social influence and mass propaganda was all powerful based on the suggestion theories from psychoanalysis or behaviourism’s belief in malleable human behaviour where researchers and scholars began documenting this belief as well as attempting to find ways to inoculate citizens from propaganda, (Pratkanis, 2007). Weak effects of these variables on social influence as on the other hand in the 1940 Presidential campaign it was observed that few voters changed their voting preferences as a result of the mass media content due to the period 1890 – 1914 witnessed the development of fully fledged advertising agencies (Cull, Culbert & Welch, 2003). The resulting approach to persuasion states that influence is the result of the thought running through a person’s head as he or she processes persuasive communication and in this case the power of mass media is dependent on its ability to change cognitive responses, resulting into a model which the mass media is capable of producing a range of effects depending on the reception of its content, (Fryxell & Lundberg, 1998) Social marketing propaganda has since evolved to mean mass suggestion or influence through the manipulation of symbols and the Psychology of the individual in persuading the individual to have a certain opinion of an existing issue. It is a manipulative effort for the sources own benefit rather than the benefit of the individual receiving the information since it is explicitly bias. Propaganda might work in most cases due to its appeal to the ear and the reluctance of people to engage intellectually with any alternative or opposing views and hence the vulnerability in situations they do not have much knowledge and expertise on Although propaganda and social marketing may at times not be identical, marketing objectives are to attract and retain as well as reinforce and the message involved is to antagonize people actively. Propaganda will aim to strengthen belief, to make an intense appeal to the converted and since the two ideologies go together, they have been used to influence the thinking of consumers in deciding between choices. Social marketers pay for their publicity in form of advertisements and whether political or not, they purport to represent some unitary public interest (Herzstein, 1980). There is of course a legion of examples of such attention-getting devices; the outrageous public accusation is one. For example in 1984 two unemployed social revolutionaries published a pamphlet attacking McDonald’s, with chapter headings like – McDollar, McGreedy, McCancer, McMurder, McRipoff, McTorture and McGarbage. As The Economist then commented, the effect of the resulting lawsuit has been to publicize charges which even the most radical of McDonald’s customers in 70 countries would have dismissed. Another device, one which has great significance in the history of public persuasion, is atrocity propaganda. An example is a recent film of Greek abattoirs. In this video, sheep, goats and pigs were seen to have their throats cut without being stunned and so forth. The Success of Social Marketing in Persuasion The success of ideologies of social propaganda depends on the success of the media used to propagate it and the ability to reach the masses as public accusations on the media such as the above can generate a lot of interest especially from the social perspective and influence the thinking of individuals. On the other hand, a critical analysis and intellectual assessment of the issues raised would go a long way in getting to know the true position of the situation. In the case of consumer incitement to be biased to a certain commodity available in the market will call for mass media advertisements. These advertisements whether they give the correct information, exaggerated information or just propaganda will be left to the viewers to make a decision on the product being placed for their purchase. Reaching a wide audience has the benefit of increased chances to acquire more customers as not all those who get the information will always buy into the idea. The Macdonald’s case can be viewed as the best example as they have already created a brand name for themselves, if they decide to use propaganda to sell their products; it will be hard to convince the majority of consumers that what they say is not true. This can be attributed to the levels of trust already placed with them for the provision of quality products in terms of snacks and beverages. .According to Cottam, (2004), the power of situation is perhaps the most important discovery in the psychology discipline as in the late 1940s conformity results obtained were dependent on the nature of the ambiguous auto-kinetic stimuli employed on research and the reasoning behind it was that surely conformity would not occur if a group of people made obviously incorrect judgements of unambiguous stimulus. In the early 1960’s as well researches in trying to explain obedience to authority in terms of personality and culture based character traits and the resultant data revealed the Germans as the most obedient. Social phenomena bring about change the process through which attitudes are changed has been shown to have important consequences. Relative to attitudes that are changed through a relatively non-thoughtful process, attitudes changed through a thoughtful process are stronger in the sense that they are more likely persist over time and guide behaviour, (Mark, Donaldson, & Campbell, 2011). Nevertheless, it was also found out that at times attitudes changed through a non-thoughtful process may not guide behaviour at all thus the persuasion literature suggesting an important possibility that some general influence processes are more likely to result in attitudes that guide behaviour than other influence processes. Behaviour is conceptualised broadly in persuasion literature in that literature would clearly include individual behaviours such as change in practice by program practitioners an example being teachers beginning to mix whole language and phonics instruction after learning that combining the approaches is more effective in the learning process. In the social psychological literature, it is common to manipulate the quality of arguments contained in a persuasive message and to measure the thoughts that are generated during message exposure and the two convergent methods of determining through which route thoughtful or non-thoughtful, persuasion has taken place as individuals who engage in thoughtful elaboration are more persuaded and report more positive thoughts when a message contains strong as opposed to weak arguments. In contrast, for those who rely on less thoughtful, peripheral cues, argument strength has a smaller effect on attitudes and thoughts due to the fact that the more one thinks about strong arguments, the better they seem, the more positive one’s thoughts, and the more positive one’s resulting attitude. Hence it is true to say that increased elaboration of a message can increase persuasion when the arguments resents are strong and can decrease persuasion when the arguments presented are weak, (Mark, Donaldson, & Campbell, 2011). The two cases results in attitudes that are likely to guide behaviour as they were thoughtfully formed hence the social psychological literature provides support for the view that methodological quality, or more generally perceived credibility of evaluation findings can be important for evaluation use. According to LeVine, (1973), in the event that thoughtful attitude change is fostered, use is likely to be facilitated by the presence of strong arguments that are relevant to the issue and based on what the message recipient perceive to be reliable methods and that have implications – and thus lead to thought- that support the evaluations recommendations. On the other hand, consider the case in which recommendations are bolstered on weak arguments that are relevant to the issue and based on what the message recipients perceive to be reliable methods, but have the implications – thus leads to thoughts – that disagree with the evaluations recommendations. In such a case, thoughtful processing is likely to lead to unintended use of evaluation findings – not to support or act upon the evaluation recommendations but rather to make the wrong decision. This implies ignoring the recommendations due to flawed or poor reasoning, but relying on the implications of the findings themselves from well-conducted evaluation. Disadvantages of Social Marketing Propaganda In creation of social marketing messages, it is important to impact the correct message to the intended audience; failure to do this will have the wrong message passed to a large audience. A strong social marketing message should contain arguments such that when participants in a research are instructed to think about the message, the thoughts they generate are predominantly favourable while on the other hand a weak message contains arguments such that when the same participants are instructed to think about the message, the thoughts they generate are predominantly unfavourable. Hence positive thoughtful attitude change i.e. attitude change towards the advocated position occurs in response to a strong message when the profile of the issue-relevant thoughts elicited by the argument is more favourable than the profile available prior to message exposure (Stu?rmer & Snyder, 2010). Negative thoughtful attitude change i.e. attitude change in the direction opposite to the advocated change occurs in response to a weak message when the profile of thoughts elicited by the argument is less favourable than the profile available prior to message exposure and lastly no attitude chance occurs when the profile of thoughts is not more positive or more negative than the profile available prior to message exposure or is neutral as one could imagine would occur when arguments are irrelevant to the issue or the evidence is ambiguous or based on poor methodology, (MacInnis, Park, Priester & Society for Consumer Psychology, 2009 ). Argument quality constrains biased thinking as biased thinking entails a bias in the valence of thoughts that come to message recipient’s mind in such a way that they selectively search for and find the strengths in the arguments when they prefer to agree with the message but search for and find the flaws in arguments when they prefer to disagree with the message. General biased thinking appears to be more likely when the message contains information that is ambiguous or mixed rather than clearly strong or weak and here too, the social psychological literature provides support for the argument that methodological quality, or more generally perceived credibility can be important for evaluation use (Maio & Haddock, 2009). Conclusion Social marketing has provided avenues for business and market analysis to venture in to the research and development aspects in understanding and taking advantage of the forces of demand and supply as well as the tastes and preferences of the consumers in the psychological analysis of their buying habits. This is done in positioning and strategy formulation as the globalisation effect has led to the business world serving individual consumers from different backgrounds all over the world. Psychosocial analysis of behaviour has thus been a revolutionary concept in this millennium and its study is inevitable for the understanding of the way people think and projecting their behaviours worldwide in a dynamic manner. The past two decades has seen research on attitude flourish as the primary theme is attitude strength, some attitudes are held with great strength while others in less strength as they differ in terms of persistence over time, resistance to change, likelihood to influence information processing and the likelihood to predict behaviour, (Wilson, Lindsey & Schooler, 2000). As well the new millennium has been extremely exciting for attitude researchers as a number of key developments are being utilised which include technological developments that may make larger impressions, implicit measurements and brain imaging. Interestingly, research has revealed that in many domains, responses on implicit measures of attitude are often not consistent with people’s self-reported ratings of their own attitudes and similarly implicit, measures of attitude often predict different outcomes from self-report questionnaire measures, (Petty, Fazio & Brinol, 2009; Goldstein, 2002). Social psychologists are not the only scientists who study attitudes as more researchers on attitude have changed the obvious implications for understanding areas such as consumer behaviour, political science and health, marketers being keenly aware of the strategies that are most effective to elicit persuasion, and politics continually try to convince us of the need to vote for them to support their policies, (Haugtvedt, Herr, & Kardes, 2008). Further, research assessing how attitudes predict behaviour has important applied implications to the health psychologists as they adopt models such as the theory of reasons action in trying to predict the most reasonably rational behaviour in treating theory patient, (Elsevier, 1992). References Cottam, M. L. (2004). Introduction to political psychology. Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Cull, N. J., Culbert, D. H., & Welch, D. (2003).Propaganda and mass persuasion: A historical encyclopaedia, 1500 to the present. 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