Persuasive Messages

1. Questions to ask when gauging the audience's needs during the planning of persuasive messages include:
-Who is my audience?
-What are my audience members' needs?
-What do I want them to do?
-How might they resist?
-Are there alternative positions I need to examine?
-What does the decision maker consider to be the most important issue?
-How might the organization's culture influence my stategy?

2. Demographics and psychographics need to be taken into consideration when analyzing your audience. Demographics includes factors such as age, gender, occupation, income, education, etc. Psychographics includes personality, attitudes, lifestyle, and other psychological characteristics. These are important so that you do not undermine your persuasive message by using an inappropriate appeal or by organizing your message in a way that seems unfamiliar or uncomfortable to your readers.

3. An emotional appeal calls on feelings or audience sympathies. Logical appeal uses reasoning with logical support.

4. A logical appeal uses analogy, induction, and deduction as reasoning.

5. The AIDA model is the most commonly used variation of the indirect approach. It organizes your presentation into four phases: attention, interest, desire, and action. The limitations of the AIDA include: it talks at audiences rather than with them, it is build around a single event rather than building a mutually beneficial long-term relationship.