Persuasion, the process by which a person’s attitudes or behaviour are, without duress, influenced by communications from other people. One’s attitudes and behaviour are also affected by other factors (for example, verbal threats, physical coercion, one’s physiological states).

Below are five easy ways to create effective content that truly resonates with your audience.

1. Create an emotional connection. Strong social content makes fans and followers feel not something just for the brand, but about their own lives.
2. Teach them something.
3. Give them something.
4. Make them laugh.
5. Show them your softer side.

Loyal consumers engage in discrediting, discounting, and containment strategies to resist persuasion from competitors.

In order to reduce dissonance, individuals can change their behavior, attitudes, or cognitions, or add a new cognition. External forces of persuasion include advertising; the features of advertising that influence our behaviors include the source, message, and audience. There are two primary routes to persuasion.

Four clusters of resistance strategies are defined (avoidance, contesting, biased processing, and empowerment), and these clusters are related to different motivations for resisting persuasion (threat to freedom, reluctance to change, and concerns of deception).

Here are the top 9 ways that the mind resists persuasion and how to both break them down or sustain them.

1. Inoculation.
2. Forewarned is forearmed.
3. Reactance.
4. Reality check.
5. Counter-arguing and bolstering.
6. Resistance breeds more resistance.
7. Attack authority.
8. Being sharp and alert.

Effective managers are also able to resist inappropriate influence attempts from others….Resisting Exchange.

1. Scrutinize gifts and favors.
2. Reject manipulative bargaining tactics.
3. Stop bargaining.

To overcome resistance, many writers and speakers try to strengthen the positive aspects of their offer to make it look better. An alternative approach is to focus on why the audience is resistant. Reducing the unappealing features is a way to remove the audience’s objections.

What are the four parts of successful persuasive messages? gain attention, build interest, reduce resistance, and motivate action.

Modes of Persuasion

• Ethos. Ethos is a way of convincing your audience of your credibility as a writer. Some credibility can be, in a way, built-in.
• Pathos. Most simply, pathos is the appeal to our human emotions.
• Logos. Logos is the appeal to our logical side.

In order to persuade, your writing must appeal to its reader, evoking emotion and creating a call to action. Pathos refers to the use of emotions or values to move the reader to change opinions.

Pathos is an appeal to the audience based on emotion. Storytelling: Telling a story is one of the most powerful ways to make an emotional connection with an audience. Stories add meaning and stories are memorable.

Aristotle taught that a speaker’s ability to persuade an audience is based on how well the speaker appeals to that audience in three different areas: logos, ethos, and pathos. Considered together, these appeals form what later rhetoricians have called the rhetorical triangle. Logos appeals to reason.

Ethos is important for establishing the credibility of the story, and Logos is vital to get us to understand that this is a problem we need to do something about. However, no story can be truly effective without Pathos, the emotional appeal.