Persuasion – Page 2 – understand-culture

Celebrity Endorsements

Celebrity endorsements help in the sale of many products in the United States. A famous person links themself personally to a specific product or service in an advertisement, explicitly or indirectly saying:

“I use this product. It is good. I like it. You will like it, too.” The hope is that potential customers will respond with “I like, respect, admire that celebrity. If it is good enough for them, it must be good enough for me. I‘ll buy.”

Golf champion Tiger Woods signed endorsement deals with General Motors, General Mills, American Express, Accenture and Nike. In 2000, Woods signed with Nike a 5-year, $105 million contract, which became the largest endorsement deal ever signed by an athlete at the time. Woods is frequently seen wearing Nike apparel during tournaments and has a building named after him at Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon.

Selfie Election

Facing a Selfie Election, Presidential Hopefuls Grin and Bear It. July 4, 2015. Jeremy Peters and Ashley Parker. New York Times.

“Press that white button! This right here,” the former secretary of state instructed a technologically deficient fan in New Hampshire who was fumbling to work an iPhone camera. Her patience thinning, Hillary Rodham Clinton took matters into her own hands and jabbed the button herself.

Who wants their babies kissed or their yard signs autographed anymore? This is the Selfie Election. And if you are running for president, you have no choice but to submit.

Candidates can now spend an hour exhausting a line of eager selfie seekers. Jeb Bush has perfected a technique suited to his 6-foot-3 frame: For his shorter fans, he will take the picture with his own outstretched selfie stick of an arm.

“They just have to put up with it, because how do you decipher who is a fan and who wants to fill their profile with pictures of them with candidates?” said Mr. Robinson, editor of The Iowa Republican, a political publication.

Senator Marco Rubio will indulge people who want selfies. But he often travels with a professional photographer who takes photos of him with voters as an aide trails behind, handing out index cards listing a website where supporters can go to download their pictures.

The benefit? Not only does the photographer speed the process and produce higher-quality images, but voters are asked to provide personal information on Mr. Rubio’s website. Before they can view their photos, Rubio supporters have told the campaign their name, their home and email addresses, which issues matter most to them and if they are willing to volunteer.

Business leader cults

The concept of cult is common in American society. A cult figure is a popular individual who has strong appeal, someone whose reputation is inflated in contrast to their success. The cult of personality or charismatic authority arises when an individual employs mass media in order to establish an idealized image of oneself to the public.

Many American companies – especially those operating globally – link their CEO personally with their products and services. These CEOs are the first and most important salesperson of the company. They maintain a personal dialogue with investors, customers, and key suppliers. They are a constant presence in the media. CEO as CMO – Chief Message Officer.

Some strive for and achieve a kind of cult status. See the late Steve Jobs – Apple, Bill Gates – Microsoft, Jeff Bezos – Amazon, Sergey Brin and Larry Page – Google, a few years back Jack Welch – General Electric, Lou Gerstner – IBM, further back Lee Iacocca – Ford.

The American comedian Bill Burr challenges this in a humorous and entertaining way:

Political Candidates

The essential link between message and messenger in American culture can be seen in the public behavior of elected officials. To be successful in the American political system a candidate often must embody their party’s political platform. The candidate is certainly more prominent than the party organization, and in some cases more so than its political platform.

The candidate is the Messenger-in-Chief, so to speak. Because they must connect with the voters on a personal level, the candidate’s character, personal life, their biography are examined carefully. American voters choose the candidate as person first, then the message as political platform.

Personal Branding

Personal branding is not new. People have always taken into consideration how they are perceived by those they are trying to persuade. It is natural that the marketing techniques used to sell products are being applied to selling a person, or a person’s skills, experience, value.

Books, seminars and companies advise individuals on how to best manage their reputation in the Internet. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and other forums and communities exert influence on how people are perceived. Perceptions are personal and subjective. Branding means presenting the messenger in the most positive light.

See what books Amazon offers on personal branding.

Unfortunate Selling Techniques

In the children’s book series, A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket (the pen name of American Daniel Handler), three recently orphaned children are initially placed in the custody of Mr. Poe, the banker who is in charge of the large fortune that they will inherit when Violet, the eldest, comes of age. Mr. Poe soon finds a distant relative who is willing to adopt the orphans, and the children move in with Count Olaf, their third/fourth cousin several times removed.

As it turns out, Count Olaf is not interested in raising the orphans, but only in stealing their parents’ fortune. After his first failed attempt to steal it, he has to go on the run to avoid the police, and the children are sent to live with a different relative.

Undeterred, Count Olaf will attempt to steal the orphans’ fortune multiple times over the course of the next several books, each time masquerading as a respectable member of the local community. In the first book, he is a count, in the second, he pretends to be a herpetological assistant, in the third, a retired captain, and so on.

Every time that the children discover one of Count Olaf’s disguises, they attempt to elicit the help of their legal guardian and/or the banker Mr. Poe. Even though the orphans point out mistakes in the count’s disguises, Count Olaf is so skilled at selling himself that the adults ignore the mistakes and contradictions in his product (his disguises) until they become extremely obvious.

American Teaching

Perhaps because of the high cost of tuition at American universities, Americans typically view students as customers and schools as businesses. As such, teachers will attempt to cater to the needs of their students – if a certain process doesn’t interest the customers (students), the teacher will change it in order to keep the customers attentive.

During their classes, if American teachers notice that students aren’t paying attention, they will often include several amusing anecdotes that they tell throughout the class to keep their students’ focus.

For example, during a physics class, it would not be uncommon for an American professor to stop the lecture to talk to students about how Herman Weyl (one of the early proponents of group theory) had an affair with Erwin Schrodinger’s (the physicist who’s best known not only for his quantum mechanics equation but also for his potentially dead cat) wife, or how Murray Gell-Mann (who won the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics) was so narcissistic that he once warned his cab driver not to cash his check, because he believed that his signature was worth more than his cab fare had been.

American teachers will also include anecdotal stories from their own lives if these stories have any relevance to the subject matter. For example, if the teacher is describing a discovery made at CERN, he/she might talk about a colleague who worked there.

“Man on the street“

Americans believe that complexity is only truly understood when it can be explained to the man on the street, meaning to the non-expert. To persuade in the American context means to use clear, transparent, straightforward language, spoken and understood by those of average education.

This is not a form of dumbing-down, but effective communication. Put differently, Americans believe that if you cannot make the complex understandable, then you have not mastered that complexity.

Personal Experience

Although Americans strive to be analytical, objective, scientific, what most persuades them is experience. For Americans experience is fact, real data, empirical, irrefutable. Theory, logic, rigorous analysis are seldom more convincing than hearing a person say: “I was there. I saw it with my own eyes” or “We tried the approach and it worked”.

Empiricism is the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. As a philosophy, it emerged with the rise of experimental science and was developed in the 17th and 18th centuries by thinkers such as John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. The idiom “seeing is believing” signals the belief that people can only really believe what they experience personally.

“I have not yet begun to fight”

These were the words of Captain John Paul Jones, an American immigrant who volunteered for service in the Navy. During the American Revolution, he was ordered to sail to European waters where he was expected to attack British ships and seaports and generally create havoc.

In 1779, following Jones’ attack on the coast of Ireland, he sailed a squadron of five ships north around the tip of Scotland to a position near Northern England. There, he met a large merchant convoy that was escorted by two ships in the British navy (including the impressive 44-gun Serapis) and immediately gave chase.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s58mlY1R6k[/embedyt]

It wasn’t long before the British ships gained the advantage, and Jones’ flagship, the Bonhomme Richard took critical damage and began to sink. Seeing this, the British captain demanded Captain Jones’ surrender.

However, rather than surrender, Jones responded with his now famous words “I have not yet begun to fight.” After this, Jones and his crew increased the ferocity of their attack so much that, despite their inferior ships, inferior training, and initially inferior position, they ultimately won the battle.