Marian Friestad

Everyday persuasion knowledge

Laypeoples everyday persuasion knowledge is one of their most valuable sociocognitive resources. People draw on their beliefs about persuasion to cope with other peoples attempts to influence them and to fashion their own persuasion attempts. Because persuasion-related tasks are so important in everyday life, the acquiring and sharing of persuasion expertise is an ongoing sociocultural process. In this article we discuss how beliefs about persuasion tactics get diffused within a culture, the role of researchers in that diffusion process, and the murky meaning of expertise in the domain of persuasion.

Remembering ads: The effects of encoding strategies, retrieval cues, and emotional response

Abstract This study uses the encoding specificity principle ( Tulving & Thomson, 1973 ) and the distinction between episodic and semantic knowledge to test predictions about the effects of processing goals and retrieval cues on memory for emotional and neutral TV commercials. Subjects viewed five emotional and five neutral ads embedded in programming. Encoding instructions asked subjects to either (a) evaluate each product or (b) “just watch” as they viewed the ads. Retrieval cues were either the opening scene of each ad (executional cue) or the product category (categorical cue). Both recall and response-time measures were used to index ad memory-trace accessibility. The results showed that when encoding and retrieval conditions were compatible (evaluation instructions with categorical cue, and just-watch instructions with executional cue) ad memory traces were retrieved more rapidly than when encoding and retrieval conditions were incompatible. In addition, subjects who “just watched” emotional ads were able to retrieve those ad memory traces more rapidly when given an executional cue compared to a categorical cue, whereas subjects who evaluated neutral ads at encoding recalled more ads, and retrieved them more rapidly, when given a categorical cue compared to an executional cue. Finally, we show that searching memory first with an executional cue and then with a product-category cue leads to an increase in ad recall for both emotional and neutral ads, whereas searching first with a categorical cue and then with an executional cue leads to a decrease in ad recall for neutral ads.

Salespeople’s Emotions: An Initial Theoretical Inquiry into the Emotions of Industrial Products’ Salespeople

Consumer behavior literature about moods and emotions has grown over the last few years (Gardner 1985), but advances in understanding the importance of moods and emotions in industrial settings has lagged. This paper applies the findings of research about emotions to salespeople. It synthesizes the literature and provides direction for future research.