To think or not to think: Elaboration Likelihood Model

Understanding persuasion is a matter of bread and butter for marketers.

Even so, when I did a really small survey about some basic models of ‘Persuasion’ among branding, research and advertising professionals, I found that they weren’t aware of them - and that there was a healthy interest on the subject matter.

Although academic literature is scorned among practitioners as theoretical, and therefore: unusable, I believe that usability of something will be known only on application. And in order to apply, one must actually know it. So, here’s an attempt to put some of the academic kind of thinking which can actually be used if an attempt is made.

I’d like to make a beginning with an extremely robust model in persuasion theory called the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM - Petty and Cacioppo, 1986). This is an offshoot of the information processing genre of literature which deals with how people process information in their minds. Cutting out all the nitty gritties of the research per se’, I’ll just etch out what the model proposes. To understand in further detail, how they came to form such conclusions, you can read up on their published papers available online at http://www.psy.ohio-state.edu/gap/ . As a precursor, I might add that, the task, if undertaken, would require some basic understanding of attitude theory, experimental methods and some basic statistics.

In a gist, ELM comes from a whole bunch of studies by Petty and Cacioppo and several other researchers of attitude, who contend that attitudes are formed when people process information and information is processed either centrally (elaborately, taking into consideration all information that is central to the issue in contention) or peripherally (using secondary clues such as attractiveness of the presenter of information). They contend that the central route produces stronger attitudes, more enduring than those produced by the peripheral route. This translates into an understanding that if you want viewers/ listeners to have strong attitudes, you must present good arguments and give them a chance to process elaborately. Attitudes here refers to ‘predisposition towards the object in contention’ – basically in terms of favorability - Do you like it or not like it, do you think it is good or not good etc…

Attitudes are said to be important because they drive behavior. If you like brand A more vs. brand B, chances are, given a choice, you would buy A.

The model further explains that when people have the motivation (interest, relevance of subject matter) and ability (knowledge of subject matter and context such as level of distraction) they tend to process information better. This gives us more fodder for thought - if the advertising message is such that it appeals to consumer personally – basically target correctly - and gauge their level of knowledge before making the pitch so that they actually understand, and provide it in a situation with as less ‘noise’ as possible, then, maybe you can cause strong attitudes. Hence, this model not only tells us when strong attitudes are created, it also tells us how to create them. And most of the logic of this model is pretty straight forward and we can’t really dismiss it as too simple – ‘cos the application is tough!

This model borrows heavily from cognitive psychology and is about how people actively process information. Hence cognition, aka, thinking becomes a central issue in ELM. While the central route is about thinking elaborately and high on cognition the peripheral route is more about appearances, with less amount of critical thinking which, in a way, can be translated as ‘feel’ factors. Although the ELM researchers don’t talk about feelings and emotion so much, they contend that these cause biases in processing information. The model is robust because it is simple and hard to dispute. When I first started reading up the large volume of literature and all the papers written in this research, I couldn’t find a thing to fight it with – they had an explanation for everything I picked bones with – one might argue that maybe I didn’t have the talent to find the bones, and they wouldn’t be too wrong. I am sure, one with more observation and logic skills could find a skeleton in the ELM closet.

Although ELM side of the story is only one side of a multi-dimensional issue - the cognitive side ( the other sides will be presented in another posts), what we learn is that, for advertising to be effective we must cause central processing which will lead to stronger attitudes, assuming they are favorably disposed.
And we know that in practice, we use peripheral cues (prettier models, unnecessary distracting humour, and incoherent information) all the time – to get attention – meaning we sacrifice strong attitudes at the altar of SENSATIONALISM. Maybe we do this because……hmmmm…. we don’t want consumer to hold enduring attitudes towards our brands?