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5 - Developing Effective Persuasion Campaigns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2013

William McGuire
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
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Summary

Most attitude-change work done by myself (chapters 2 and 3) and by others (chapter 4) is basic research undertaken for relevance to theory, but much of it has practical relevance as well, providing guidance for constructing persuasion campaigns in fields as diverse as advertising, marketing, politics, law, religion, and public health. I have often been consulted about such campaigns, by the marketing and media sectors in the 1960s and 1970s and by the public health sector in the 1980s and 1990s. This consultation usually produced in-house reports but has resulted also in some practical-application publications, often on how the findings of basic attitude-change research can be applied to designing more effective public health persuasion campaigns. Some of these publications were tailored to a specific topic, such as prevention of harmful addictions (McGuire, 1970b, 1974d, 1991b, 1992d, 1995) or improved nutrition (McGuire, 1982c), while others were more general regarding explicit target (McGuire, 1966a, 1971, 1976b, 1977c, 1978b, 1980b, 1980f, 1981c,1982b, 1984b, 1986g, 1989f, 1994b). Others were on tangential issues, such as how to search the attitude-change literature more cost-effectively (McGuire, 1978c, 1978d), the modest evidence for mass media impact (1974e, 1976d, 1986b, 1988b, 1992a), or the design of warning labels on products (McGuire, 1980g). From these varied applied publications, 5 kinds of work will be discussed in this chapter: (1) institutional versus personal approaches to influencing the public; (2) my 7-step “RASMICE” procedure for developing a persuasion campaign; (3) the communication/persuasion matrix as a way of carrying out RASMICE Step 6, constructing the persuasive communication; (4) 16 partial views of the person, each suggesting appeals to be used in this Step 6 communication construction; and (5) evaluation of mass media impact size.

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Chapter
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Constructing Social Psychology
Creative and Critical Aspects
, pp. 136 - 179
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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