The Application of Persuasion Theory to the Development Of Effective Proenvironmental Public Service Announcements

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 2000 by Renee J. Bator, Robert B. Cialdini

Communicators have relied on concrete, vivid messages to be more personally meaningful, more emotionally arousing, and as a result more influential. Nisbett and Ross (1980) defined vivid information as likely to draw and hold our attention and to stimulate the imagination to the extent that it meets three criteria: (1) it grabs us emotionally, (2) it is specific and triggers our imagination, and (3) it is immediate in a sensory, temporal, or spatial way.

Rhoads (1994) investigated this issue to determine what type of vivid message is most persuasive. He predicted that an effective message should vividly portray its thesis but avoid adding vivid, irrelevant details. Rhoads found that a message that emphasized the main point with vivid details, without vivifying extraneous details, was rated more positively than messages that vivified irrelevant details in terms of liking, interest, and agreement. He speculated that adding extraneous details might undermine the persuasiveness of messages by distracting the participants from the main point of the communication. Based on this research, an effective PSA should demonstrate the main argument of the message with a vivid description while avoiding vivid surrounding details that may distract from the message. For instance, an antilittering PSA that demonstrates social disapproval of littering should not present attention-drawing versions of a park environment (the beach, the swimmers, or the attractive landscape), but rather it should vividly demonstrate how people socially disapprove of a litterer.

Retrieval Cues

Recall of a message is crucial if the target is going to respond to it at the appropriate time in the desired manner. One group of researchers studied more than 200 energy conservation programs of California utility companies and found that the recall rates for these messages were often as low as 7% (Condelli et al., 1984). Considerable research has investigated this issue from an advertising perspective. Keller (1987) noted that because consumer decisions do not usually take place during exposure to an advertisement, memory is an important aspect of successful advertising. Advertising encoding cues are pieces of verbal or visual information that are initially included in an advertisement that establish a connection between the brand and the advertisement's message. Keller's research on memory factors in advertising opens with an industry example of encoding/retrieval cues that he states helped motivate his research. In the 1970s, Quaker Oats had a highly popular advertising campaign for Life cereal with its classic "Mikey" commercial. To profit from this well-liked message, Quaker included a small, still photo from the commercial on the front of the Life cereal package. Researchers have since found that effective recall is enhanced by strong similarity between the stimulus in the message and a matching (retrieval) cue in the natural environment (Craik, 1981; Tulving, 1979). Retrieval cues in the behavioral setting enhance recall of brand claims and lead to more positive brand reactions (Keller, 1987).