Marketing Related Messages

Receivers of a message are often greatly influenced by the nature of its source; when an audience perceives a communicator as credible, then they are more likely to accept their view. If, on the other hand, the audience believes that the communicator has underlying motives, particularly ones of personal gain, then he or she will be less persuasive than someone the audience perceives as being objective. A recent development of this has been to pay influencers within social media environments to promote specific products and companies, where such payment has been made apparent there is nothing Wrong. But some major international brands have been discovered to be paying those blogging tweeting or running apparently independent websites without making this clear in an obvious attempt to leverage this phenomenon.

Some advertisers use candid television interviews with homemakers in order to enhance their credibility and eliminate intent to persuade, sometimes asking consumers to explain why they buy aparticular brand or asking them to trade their chosenbrand for another. Another method used by companies to increase Credibility is to have the product endorsed by an expert with appropriate education and knowledge on a given subject. This source will be more successful in changing audience opinions. Specialized sources of information are often perceived as expert sources, and are successful due to the fact that messages are aimed at selected audiences, for example the use of sports professionals as promoters for brands.

The credibility of a source is also a function of its perceived status or prestige. The higher the perceived status of a source, the more persuasive it will be. If a receiver likes a source, it will be more persuasive. It is clear that age, sex, dress, mannerisms, accent and voice inflection all affect source credibility and subtly influence the way an audience judges a communicator and his/her message.

A source high incredibility can change the opinion of receivers, but available evidence suggests that this influence disperses in a short time after the message is received. It has also been observed that where an audience initially receives a message from a low-credibility source, their opinion change increases over time in the direction promoted by the source.

This is referred to as the sleeper effect. Another aspect of this is that when a high-credibility source is reinstated, for example by a repeat advertisement, it has been found that audience agreement with the source is higher after a period of time than if the source had not been reinstated. For a low-credibility source, reinstatement results inless agreement with the source than with no reinstatement, and it is said that under these circumstances reinstatement negates the 'sleeper effect.