Communication Strategies, Psychology of Communication - Essay Example

Prof’s Some Possible Communication Strategies and Their Outcomes: a report on the psychology of communication Communication is obviously at the forefront of what any company needs to do to get their product or service to be well used and well loved. Advertisers have been developing communication strategies for centuries, but the fact remains that advances in the understanding of psychology in the past few decades have made great leaps in the techniques for communicating messaging to the general public. This report will outlay some of the general principles of communication, along with the current communication atmosphere for the general public, then move on to specific strategies that could set any business up for success. Ultimately the appropriate communication strategy depends on the product being sold and the company that sells it: what are the products strengths and weaknesses? What are the Companies? What is the image that the company wants to portray about both itself and its consumers? What kind of consumers is the company trying to sell to? Are they educated? What do they enjoy, and what do they value? Properly answering these questions is the key to any successful communication strategy – so ultimately the communication strategy will be up to you – this report can simply give guidance as to what communication strategy might do in some situations, and what the strengths and weaknesses about a particular communication strategy are. Firstly, it is important to understand that the communication landscape has changed drastically in the past decade, and many communication strategies that were previously universally successful are only intermittently successful now, and will completely miss some markets. This is because people are now in much more control than they have ever been of the kinds of media that they consume, largely because of the advent of the internet, and the proliferation of media (both legal and illegal) that have accompanied it. For instance, an advertiser used to know that most families would have very little to do on a particular time of day, and television was the primary form of entertainment. Thus by targeting a few television channels amongst a few time slots, there was a guarantee that their message would be seen by a vast number of viewers – they could essentially force their viewers to consume their marketing. This however, is obviously no longer the case. People can consume a vast variety of media now – at 7PM on a Tuesday night a family could be divided between vastly different forms of media consumption. Certainly one person may be watching a television show, but another may be watching a movie on their computer, while another plays video games and so on. And even the person watching a television show may not be doing it through the traditional method: they could be watching it online on the television channel’s website, or else having downloaded it illegally to via torrents or third party websites. The fact is, consumers now have absolute control over the media they consume, leaving the producers of media desperately scrambling for them. This means that the communicator must make their communication interesting in order to grab and hold people’s attention in this extraordinarily competitive mindset. A communications strategy that succeeds only when someone will sit still and listen to it, but is not interesting enough to actually encourage such behaviour, will necessarily fail in the new market of communications. So the first caveat of everything that comes below is that it is over a backdrop of communication landscape that requires innovation and interest, regardless of the communication style used. Frankly, this is not your grandparent’s communication era. A communication strategy can probably fall most broadly into two massive categories: appeals to emotion and appeals to reason. Now it may sound like one is inherently better than the other: some would argue that appeals to emotion are “under-handed” or tricky, trying to make an unreasonable point. Others could call appeals to reason pedantic, arguing that they are ineffective communication strategies as people fail to use reason when making many of their decisions. The fact is that neither of these are especially nuanced views of the appeals, and they are both somewhat wrong. A successful communication strategy will probably use both to some degree, as it is nearly impossible to convince someone only with reason (they will likely not feel the drive to act in the way conveyed by communication) nor by pure emotion (a moment to stop and think will likely undermine much of the communication strategy. The other broad category of thought that needs to be considered is the “energy” it takes to brake the momentum of someone who has their current beliefs. As a communicator, it is likely that you will be making an explicit attempt to alter someone’s beliefs or current behaviour (except in the rare cases where you may be trying to get them to sustain their current behaviour). This system is best described by the Emotional Likelihood Model (ELM). This model creates a matrix of the cognition level of the consumer, as well as their involvement in the product decision. It is important to note that in this case, the cognition level does not necessarily only relate to how intelligent the consumer is, but the cognition they are willing to devote to the decision being made – the smartest person in the world might still make a “low cognition” decision about the type of candy bar they want to buy, while a relatively low intelligence person might make a “high cognition” decision about the industrial lift system is most appropriate for their company. So when communicating, the main things to consider are the type of appeal being made (emotional versus rational) the type of consumer/consumption that is the target (high cognition versus low cognition) and the type of investment the consumer has in their decision, with high investment requiring a much greater deal of communications “energy” of some sort, while low involvement will require relatively less “energy.” Now that much of the basic, broad theory behind advertising strategies has been developed, it is possible to delve into some particulars of specific strategies and what they will entail. First, emotional communications. Communications based on trying to excite emotions have broad appeal – the fact is that everyone is vulnerable to emotional appeals to one degree or another. Emotional appeals can take on a variety of forms, but essentially hey all attempt to cause a physiological/cognitive change in a person to induce them to feel a certain way. This could be afraid, happy, sad, or so one, or also could be based on ideas of social feeling, such as acceptance, rejection and so on. Emotional appeals will often involve a narrative of some sort to attract the target’s empathy. This could narrative could depend on the type of communication being attempted – is this to reaffirm a group mentality amongst your clients, or to calm fears over a recent scandal at the corporation? These will all cause vast differences in the kind of emotional appeals that need to be used. Emotional appeals will have several important outcomes. Firstly, it is important to know the demographic that is being targeted with particular communication – though emotional appeals are universally able to succeed, they have been demonstrated to work somewhat better on women and older people than young men – probably because both of the former groups have better developed empathy (Stout and Rust, 65). Emotional appeals are also effective in several parts of the ELM matrix – if something is a very low involvement decision, than emotional appeals can be quite effective because people do not want to waste cognition on actually trying to decide what to do, but they can also be effective on very high involvement decisions if the decisions are based on emotions. For instance, a bank needs its customers to feel safe – a communication strategy that attempts to do this through cold logic will fail, whereas one that attempts to do so through an emotional appeal can succeed. Communications strategies that use emotional appeal on high-involvement, high-cognition, unemotional issues, however, are likely to fail, as they will cause the person on the other end of the communication to perceive an attempt at manipulation. Communicating with investors, for instance, by trying to get them into a group-acceptance mentality with the company they are investing in, will fail as investment is (or should be) a rational rather than emotional decision). To summarize: emotional appeals will involve a narrative that the other party can empathize with, and is best either for low-cognition, low engagement people/decisions, or decisions where emotions will play an important role in the decision making process, but not in high-cognition, high involvement decisions where reason should have primacy. The other major category of communication strategies obviously rest in the other major category of appeals: appeals to reason. These have quite different characteristics than appeals to emotion, and can have quite different outcomes. Rational appeals, unlike emotional appeals, focus on practical and utilitarian needs, and emphasize rational and comprehendible benefits of choosing a particular course of action. They emphasize facts and logic, rather than emphasizing things like connection, acceptance, fear and so forth. This type of communication strategy will often seem more dry than an emotional appeal, usually taking the form of education: this is what is currently going on, these are the specifics of a situation or product, and so on. Interestingly, however, a rationalism-based communication strategy can use many of the same elements that an emotional one would use – the difference is often more on the style than the substance of what is offered. For instance, if a recruitment officer for a prestigious school were trying to get a student to choose their school over another, they would probably base at least part of the argument on the prestige of their school. But this prestige could be framed in two different lights. If the recruitment officer chooses, for instance, to talk about the academic rigor, the excellent people that emerged from the school, the traditions, sense of belonging, the international renown and so forth, he or she would be arguing based on emotion, whereas if he or she noted the schools prestige, high standing, and the intensive education one would receive by going through it would improve job prospects though training and networking, this would be an appeal to reason. The recruitment officer could use the same central idea, and, through communicating it in different ways, could vastly alter the way the argument was perceived, and thus change the effectiveness of the argument. Rational appeals are often successful in nearly the opposite kinds of situations that emotional appeals will be. Rational appeals, by their very nature, require a high degree of cognition in order to understand and to process. They rely much more on the reciever’s abilities – anyone will be moved by an emotional argument, (though some people will be able to cognitively distance themselves from it) but only the people with a rational mind and a willingness to use it in decision making will be able to deal with rational arguments. These types of communication strategies are thus often best employed when dealing with issues with small emotional components, or issues in which people would try to distance their emotions: finance, technical expertise and so on. They also inherently rely on the argument being the best rational argument available: if, in an earnings statement to investors one rationally tries to argue that their money is best kept with the company, but other companies make that rational argument better, then the first company will never succeed. So rational arguments are best with high cognition, high involvement decisions – they have the ability to fight against the inertia of current practice, but only if the person on the others side is willing to meet half way, and make an effort to receive the communication. The communications landscape of today is very different from what one would have found a mere couple of decades ago. It is thus important that any communications strategy be innovative, and to the point – people will not wait for you to have your whole say. There are vastly complex theories behind communications strategies, but one of the things that must be decided on in the most fundamental level is the appeals one will try to make: to reason, or to emotion. They target different demographics, and different kinds of decisions. The fact is, however, that any communications strategy that does not take a little into account will likely not succed. Works Cited Stout, R.T. Rust. “Emotional feelings and evaluative dimensions of advertising: are they related?” Journal of Advertising, 22 (1) (1993), pp. 61–72 All other information is from the lectures of (course code) by Professor (Prof’s Name) at (University Name) Read More