Understanding What Is Relevant to Your Audience

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Along with appealing to audience needs, you can also persuade listeners—especially neutral listeners—by anticipating their question, “How is this relevant to me?” The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), developed by Richard Petty, John Cacioppo, and their associates, is based on the belief that listeners process persuasive messages by one of two routes, depending on how important—how relevant—the message is to them (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986; Petty & Wegner, 1998; see also Kruglanski et al., 2006). When they are motivated and personally involved in the content of a message, they engage in central processing—they think critically about the speaker’s message, question it, and may seriously consider acting on it. When listeners lack motivation to listen critically or are unable to do so, they engage in peripheral processing of information, giving little thought to the message or even dismissing it as irrelevant, too complex to follow, or simply unimportant.

Along with appealing to audience needs, you can also persuade listeners—especially neutral listeners—by anticipating their question, “How is this relevant to me?”

Whenever possible, you want your audience to engage in central processing, as it produces deeper, more long-lasting changes in audience perspective than peripheral processing does. Audience members who engage peripherally can certainly be influenced, but they tend to pay attention to things other than the central message, such as the speaker’s appearance or reputation or any slogans or emotional manipulation used in the speech (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), which is less likely to lead to meaningful long-term changes in attitudes or behavior.

To put the principles of the ELM of persuasion into practice, consider the following points:

These steps will increase the odds that your persuasive appeal will produce lasting, rather than fleeting, changes in the audience’s attitudes and behavior (O’Hair, Stewart, & Rubenstein, 2007).