Guest Post - Mannar Karyampudi

Mannar is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about communication.

Magic of Persuasion

Steve Jobs stewards the Apple story successfully despite the product’s seemingly obvious flaws or missing functionality. Most of Apple’s products have been stunning successes not just because they were good products, but they were backed by powerful persuasive techniques. 

According to Aristotle, the three core elements that one should to possess in order to be persuasive

1    Ethos

2    Logos

Pathos

Ethos is about empathy & emotional appeals; Logos is about credibility and trust while Pathos is about logical appeals.  Ethos happens to be most intriguing of all persuasive techniques, and also my favorite amongst the others. Elements of persuasion in emotional zone go beyond any logical or rational explanation. Once you convince someone by tapping their emotional region of the brain, it has the potential to override rationality and logic.

Do any of these things resonate with Steve Jobs? 

Steve Jobs had earned the credibility in technology industry but logic was not always on his side. Is it possible to justify selling a product that costs in twice or thrice as much when compared to the competition, when in reality Apple Products were only marginally better? This I think is where the power of emotional persuasion comes into play. Steve Jobs, more often than not, was at his best with his emotional appeals.

Below in an excerpt of Steve Job’s speech in one of his keynotes

“You always had to be a little different to buy an Apple computer.” 

 

“I think you had to think differently when you bought a Mac.  It was a totally different computer and used a totally different part of your brain”

“I think the people who buy them do think differently; they are the creative spirits in the world.  They are the people who are not just out to get a job done, they are out to change the world and they are out to change the world using whatever great tools they can get.”

“Because a lot of times people think they’re crazy; but in that craziness we see genius and those are the people we’re making tools for”

Does Emotional persuasion really work?

Everything that was said about Apple users being creative etc. should not go down well with a rational mind. All that Steve Jobs says is easily disputable / dismissible, and yet he succeeds in selling the story. To start with, Steve Jobs was very sure of himself and was not afraid to be rude. This might seem counter intuitive, but this quality in some sense is emotionally very persuasive, persuasive because of passion with which he holds on to his beliefs. People who brought Apple products really believed in what is being said about them.

Our decisions and choices that we make are driven more by emotional power than rationality. And it is not surprising that even research on decision making establishes that, decisions usually are rationalized after they were made, whereas the actual process of decision making itself relies heavily on emotions. Steve Jobs was very successful at persuading/convincing users to buy try its products, because the idea of using its products were emotionally rewarding.

Why emotional persuasion is important?

AArron Walter in his book ‘Designing for Emotion’ points out 2 important side benefits if one successfully taps the left side of the brain. 

1) People will forgive shortcomings, follow your lead, and sing your praises if you reward them with positive emotion.

2) Great content delivered in an emotionally engaging manner is like kryptonite for user apathy.

Emotional persuasion is a very important technique to sustaining loyalty; however this is not supplementary to Pathos and Logos, but more of a complimentary one. Having said that Emotional persuasion can always be a double edged sword, as much as people respond positively to emotional persuasion, they also tend to react strongly in a negative way if not done right. Hence care should be taken while trying to wield this technique.