 This video I'd like to talk about how persuasion is used in social campaigns and movements as well as political campaigns and movements and product campaigns and movements. So all different kinds of campaigns and movements, how they develop and some of the major persuasive strategies behind those. It's important to recognize that persuasion does play an important role in social movements and other types of campaigns because it's really the only tool that those organizations and those movements have at their disposal. If they had large amounts of weaponry or different things that would be, you know, not a social campaign, it would be a coup or something like that. It's more of a violent takeover, but social campaigns and movements, political campaigns and movements and product campaigns and movements really rely on persuasion to achieve their goals. So let's talk first of all about what makes a campaign. What are we talking about when we say campaign? Let's identify specifics here. First of all, campaigns systematically create positions. They don't just have one single thing about it, but they're very selective about what they represent and how they position themselves with the public and with the powers that be. So they systematically create these positions. They also intentionally design to develop over time. They are intentionally designed to develop over time. They're not an overnight thing. It's not a overnight success. These are things that unfold over the course of weeks and months and years oftentimes. When we look at things like the civil rights movement, it really is hard to pinpoint a specific start date and end date really, but we know that it wasn't all at once. It took place over the course of years. So they're designed to do that. They're designed to take time. They're designed to take hold over time. Social campaigns and movements will dramatize the artifact, inviting audience participation. By artifact, we mean whatever it is that that campaign is based around, whether it's a politician as a person, whether it's a an ideological movement, whether it's a product, whatever that artifact is, it's being dramatized in a way that that will bring people in. They will draw an audience in and invite them to participate and invite them to become a part of that movement. And finally, social campaigns are more sophisticated than other persuasive efforts. It's not the same as advertising, for example, where you just have the same idea, the same commercial, the same product shoved in your face over and over and over and over again. This is more sophisticated. This is more subtle. This is more intentionally designed to, again, to take time and to involve people in different ways. So it's more sophisticated than just the repetition of a sales campaign, for example. So there are really three different types of campaign and I've alluded to these already, so we'll just quickly talk about each of them. One is a product campaign. You can do product. Now, again, we're not talking about the same as a sales pitch where something is just hammered over and over again. We're talking about developing a campaign, really an idea around a product. So we think about, for example, some luxury automakers. You rarely hear them advertising a specific product, you know, a specific model of car or everything like that. It's really about the product itself, the brand itself, right? You know that it's good. It doesn't matter what one you get. They're all awesome, right? They're all luxury. They're all, you know, so there's this campaign around this idea of owning a Ferrari or Lamborghini or whatever. It's not so much about which one you have. It's about the fact that you have one at all and that says it all, right? So they have these campaigns around these different products, for example, without really specifically providing a sales pitch for any one specific product. You also have political campaigns, obviously. I mean, we call them campaigns. It's not hard to see them as campaigns and they do hold all the attributes of a campaign itself or a movement itself, right? And then ideological campaigns are the third type of campaign. And these are not surprisingly organized around an idea. So you have the Black Lives Matter movement. You have Occupy Wall Street. You have the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Rights Movement, the ERA, right? So we have all kinds of different movements that are based around these ideological premises. So and those are the most, probably what we would most commonly identify as social movements and social campaigns are around those ideological premises. So the components of a campaign are pretty straightforward. They have goals. They have strategies and they have tactics and they are kind of arranged in a hierarchical situation. You start with the goals, the organization starts with the goals. What are our broader goals here? What are we trying to achieve? And then you develop strategies based around how we're going to achieve those, how we're going to get to those goals, right? The strategies will lead us to those goals. The tactics then are how we're going to accomplish those strategies. So we use the specific tactics to accomplish strategies and to enact these strategies and then that will lead us to our goals. So really straightforward components of campaigns. There are a variety of ways that campaigns are developed and the way that they unfold. And we just want to highlight a few of the major developmental stages of campaigns are the major models that really illustrate these developmental stop, that really illustrate these developmental stages of campaigns. So we're going to take a look at these, the Yale Five Stage Development Model, Positioning Model, Communicative Functions Model, Social Movements Model, and Diffusion of Innovation. So the Yale Five Stage Model, not a surprise, has five stages. We start with identification, identification of a need, identification of a misjustice or identification of a particular product or candidate that we want to promote because it can be used for really all of those three different types of campaigns. Then we focus on legitimacy, getting people to take it seriously, getting people to recognize the legitimacy of this effort. Then we get participation. We start to, it can draw people in, dramatize that, right? Campaigns dramatize the artifact so that they can pull people in and we start to get more and more participation. We start to grow in that sense. Then penetration really involves reaching that critical mass of where we penetrate the social psyche and the social awareness in a broader sense, right? So we can think about Black Lives Matter, for example, has been around for several years. It's not a new effort, right? This is a social movement that has offices and organizations in a number of different cities and was growing and had moved through those first few stages of identification and legitimacy and participation, but really achieved penetration in the summer of 2020 following the George Floyd murder, right? So then it exploded. Then it became a serious moment. Then you started seeing, you know, the Black Lives Matter identified on streets, painted on streets and streets named after it and things like that. So then we get into the distribution. Once you achieve that penetration, then you get into the distribution of this idea, distribution of this product, distribution of this of this candidate, so to speak, on a broader level, right? And on a more broader scope or with a larger part of the audience, so to speak, or, you know, if you want to call it the audience or the public. So the Yale five-stage model, you know, pretty straightforward in identifying these five different stages. And if you look at most social movements, you can identify these, these stages or you can identify where it kind of fizzled out, which of these stages it kind of fizzled out. But successful social campaigns will move through all five of these models. For products, a lot of time, you have what we call the positioning model. This is again, most appropriate with a product campaign, but you have the positioning model and there are a variety of different positions that an organization can take, right, in terms of trying to position themselves with the public. First is being first. You can be the first to do something. You can, you know, and that's pretty self-explanatory, being the first to do something, being innovative, right? Organizations like Apple try and be the first to do something or to offer something, you know, and they're very successful at it a lot of times. So that's really kind of their position. They're the first. They're on the edge. They're the innovators. Being the best. You know, maybe I'm not the first, but I do this better than anybody else, you know, or as an organization, we do this as better than anybody else if you're thinking about, you know, cell phones, for example. Samsung isn't necessarily the first, but they're considered among the best. You know, they're the most popular anyway. If you want to go with the bandwagon effect and they're the best in that regard, to have some of the best sales, you know, compete with non-Apple phones and non-i-phones and those services and so you can be the best. You can try and position yourself in that way. You can be the least expensive. This is where Walmart has made their money, right? By being the least expensive. Those everyday low values, everyday low prices and so that they make their money on or their position on being the least expensive. You can go the other way and be the most expensive. You know, sometimes people say, well, I don't want the cheapest because that makes me seem cheap. I want the most expensive whatever regardless of whether it's any good or not. I want the most expensive so you can position yourself as the most expensive. You can position yourself as what we're not. We're not one of those organizations that does this. We're not these people. We're not, you know, sales people are not doing this. We're not, you know, over here. So, or you could be, you could be we're not Walmart. We're not Starbucks. We're not Amazon. We're not these things and position yourself as what you're not and in doing so identify with people who don't really care for those types of organizations or those types of positions so you could play the what we're not card. You can position by gender. You can appeal to men or women, right? To people of you can appeal to male or female. You can really try and focus in on one gender or the other. You can position by age. You know, position by age. You can you can say we're going to really shoot for this market and we're for, you know, senior citizens or we're for young people or we're for middle-aged people or whatever we can position by age and focus on people in that certain bracket. So, for products you can use this positioning model and one of these positions to really kind of identify yourself and persuade people through those positions. The communicative functions model here's more about politics. This is something you see a lot in politics and you'll see a lot of these terms, right? You're probably familiar with primaries, nomination, election, and we're not just talking about national level politics here though. For every political race, whether it's your local town council, whether it's president of the United States, whether whatever, you're going to see them move through these different communicative functions and communicative stages, right? The first is surfacing or winnowing, right? Where we're just trying to be known. We're trying to get on the stage, so to speak. Trying to have people recognize who we are and have people take us seriously as we talked about a little bit ago in that sense. So, we're just trying to get some name recognition and get on the main stage. Then we get into the primaries and so we're trying to eliminate some of our competition, some of our more similar competition, right? Some of our people who may be of the same political ideology as we are, maybe in the same party as we are, maybe have the same sort of ideas that we do. We're trying to eliminate some of our near competitors. Then we work, after we win the nomination, we become that name brand. We've worked to win that nomination. Once we earn it, then we have that power behind us of being the nominee. And then finally, in the election, we're going usually against somebody of different ideological stripes than us, right? And so, we have a different strategy that plays out there and different methodologies for reaching the community and the voting public, right? So, again, this is the communicative functions model. It really relates more to the political campaigns or movements. Finally, we have the social movements model, which not surprisingly is more connected with the ideological campaigns. And again, what we see in the social movements model is that social movements have organized groups. It's not just a random bunch of people walking down the street at the same time, even if they're shouting the same things. Social movements have organized groups. Again, Black Lives Matter didn't just pop up out of nowhere in 2020, didn't just have a bunch of people drawn to it. There were organizers that were working on this effort for years. They have organized offices, they have organized plans, they have organized name recognition, all of these things because they have organized groups around their movement. These groups are not institutionalized or recognized by those in power, so they're not part of the government. They're not part of whatever system it is they're trying to work against or not work against necessarily, but change and get to recognize their particular issues. So, they are not institutionalized or recognized really by those in power. Social movements attract large numbers of people and are large in scope. So again, they reach that critical mass. Eventually, social movements do, to be defined as a social movement, they reach that critical mass where they're starting to pull people in and starting to attract large numbers of people, larger than they would have before. So again, we see that in Black Lives Matter movement, for example, in the summer of 2020. They'd had success in the past. They'd had people marching with them, protesting with them and things, but never to the scope and the scale that they did in 2020. So they're really shot off and it took off and shot up in numbers in 2020. So they were reaching that viable social movement stage in doing so. They either promote or oppose social change, depending on what they're working for, but they're trying to either achieve social change or keep social change from happening. You see that on the two sides again in the summer of 2020. You have Black Lives Matter, but you also had another group that was opposing that kind of change. I don't know if they have a name that eventually ended up as the insurrectionists. Anyway, it's either in promotion of or opposed to social change. And they're moralistic. Social movements are moralistic. They're feeling about good and evil, right or wrong, good or bad. So there's some sort of moralistic attitude at play in social movements in some regard. The encounter opposition from those in power certainly do. Change is hard. People prefer the status quo, especially those who are in power. They want to keep power. They want the status quo to remain. So they encounter opposition. Social movements encounter opposition from those in power. And finally, they see persuasion as the ultimate tool to achieve their goals. They see persuasion as the ultimate tool to achieve their goals. So again, they're not relying on weaponry or machinery or different things like that. They're relying on persuasion more than anything as a tool to achieve those goals. So again, social movements model has really more to do with ideological movements than the other types of movements. And this last one, diffusion of innovation could cross all of these as well, cross all three of these in some way. So there's a couple stages in the diffusion of innovation. The first is information or knowledge. We need to be aware. We need to make people aware of the situation of the product or the politician. We need to make them aware and get them knowledge of that to bring it to their attention. Then we engage in persuasion, trying to persuade them as to why our view of things and our side of things is correct. Next is the decision adoption and trial stage, which is just what it sounds like. People are making decisions. They're adopting our persuasive efforts. They're trying things out, seeing if it holds up, seeing if it fits for them. And then finally, confirmation and evaluation where people get locked in then to the certain product or certain idea. So you see this lot with new products, for example, new phones that come out, smartphone comes out, the new one comes out, the new Galaxy phone comes out, the new S whatever comes out. And so people are, first of all, gathering information. They want to know what's the battery life? What's the camera power on it? What's all these types of things? What's the speed of the processors? And so we're gathering information. And at the same time then, Samsung is providing persuasion and salespeople are providing persuasion because they want us to buy this thing. So then you'll have some people try it out. People will take a test run with this thing. They'll make a decision. They'll either adopt it and have a trial run. And then eventually, if they find the product to be worthwhile, then they will confirm and evaluate it. They'll confirm that they are indeed pleased with that product and will become a user of that product. And they evaluate it and let people know what they thought about it. So there's just some models of the communication, of the social movement process and how it can work in different situations. But there are a couple other communication characteristics of social media, not social movements that I really want to share with you. The first is what we call symbolic convergence theory. And these are things that cross over all these different types of campaigns. But symbolic convergence theory tells us a lot of think about why people are attracted to certain campaigns and why they follow certain things. So symbolic convergence theory tells us that reality is socially based and socially constructed. Reality is, in fact, dependent on the person, in a sense. And we all kind of construct our own reality and are influenced heavily by our social surroundings. It also tells us symbolic convergence tells us that the shared inputs and interpretations are believed even over those of a respected authority. So we rely more on the people with whom we're socially involved. And we kind of follow along with them to construct that reality. And we depend on that and believe that, find that more believable and trustworthy even than that of a respected authority. So another example from 2020 is the idea of coronavirus. At the coronavirus thing, there were groups of people and pockets of people who had determined first of all that it was a hoax in general. And they certainly weren't going to buy into that. Despite the fact that doctors were telling them, this is real. This is serious. This is causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. They still felt like, nope, this is hoax. And even if they bought into the idea that coronavirus was real, they had trouble believing authorities and saying, when they said, wear a mask. People said, I don't have to wear a mask. It's my individual rights or it's this or that or whatever. And that filtered into their social group as well. When you have a group of people that are together, then one person says, oh, I see you feel strongly about that. So I'm going to follow along with that because our reality is socially based and socially constructed. And as a result, those relationships, those shared interpretations become so strong that they outweigh even the opinion of respected authorities. Finally, some symbolic convergence theory tells us that the resulting shared beliefs result in what's called a symbolic convergence of meaning, meaning everybody's on the same page, that we end up all on the same page. So believing the same things and for the same reasons and able to spout off those reasons and so forth. So there's another theory then that I want to throw at you called Hoffer's model, Hoffer's model. Hoffer's model then says that movements form around men and women of words. So men and women who are particularly effective with their words can form these moments of movements around them sort of a cult of personality. These people, the men and women of words, they rely on a few unifying devices to solidify status and gather people to their cause when we can identify the major unifying devices that these people use. They go back to them over and over again and sometimes in combination, but to use these particular types of unifying rhetoric and ideological bases. So a one is hatred. They spout hate with the white supremacist group. They figure out how to tap into people's hatred and they use that. They use imitation pretending to be someone else pretending to be something else. So they imitate some other group. So then they have persuasion and coercion. These people will use persuasion and coercion quite heavily. They'll identify leadership and identify themselves as leaders in particular. They're the best kind of leadership. They will promote suspicion and make people wonder. We saw this a lot in the 2020 campaign and the quote unquote big lie after the campaign about the election being stolen and so forth. Sowing the seeds of doubt through suspicion. And then finally action. They use that as a tactic as well as a technique and tactic to get people onto their side. We saw a lot of this and there's really no getting around the fact that this is really what happened with Trump supporters especially after the election that people, he used a lot of these methods. He raised suspicion. He used hatred in a lot of ways. He identified himself as a leader. It's the only one who could lead and protect us during this time and so forth. He used a lot of these that were identified in Hoffer's model. In general, we know kind of how these things form and what shape they take and what can come next that can be tracked. So it's up to us to then be aware of these things as persuaders and understand that the process works a particular way and so that we can be better informed about what group is in what stage and what they may be trying to get us to do and whether or not we want to go along with that then, but anyway, persuasion is the main tool of these social movements though. It is the primary tool through which they can accomplish their goals or not accomplish their goals. If you have any questions about persuasion in general, about persuasion and social movements or anything else related to persuasion, feel free to email me. I'm always happy to respond to emails. In the meantime, you don't be aware of social movements. Be aware of the power that they have. Be aware of the way that they use persuasion and just be, again, critical consumers of what we're getting from these groups. Lots of them have really good intentions and really good things going on and some of them are otherwise. So we need to pay attention and be aware of what these groups represent and what they mean to us in particular.