Effectiveness of Persuasion Tactics in Advertising
An effective advertisement is usually a complex combination of multiple persuasion tactics, carefully chosen in order to make the strongest impact to the target audiences. Voted the Best Commercial of 2011, Chrysler's "Born of Fire" is a great example of how the study of persuasion makes a commercial effective in real life. I will look into the reasons that make this ad so successful by analyzing three features that I find most important, including expertise, use of celebrity and positive emotional appeal evoked by similarity. These persuasion tactics function differently but they work together as a whole and aim at a rather broad target group of audiences.
The most directly used persuasion tactic in the Chrysler ad is expertise. As a dimension of credibility, expertise is one of the foundation source characteristic for a speaker to successfully persuade the audience by increasing the their willingness to believe whatever the speaker says or does.
Advertising
English: Eminem performing at the DJ hero party on...
2007 Dodge Ram 1500 at the Walter P. Chrysler Muse...Expertise in advertising is usually achieved through a person with high credibility who is renowned for his/her achievement, knowledge and familiarities within the field that the product is from. Chrysler, as a car-making company, wants people to consider their name as the real expert in the car industry and their marketing team clearly understands how important it is to find themselves a high credibility source that tells people how professional they are. The creative ad producers in Chrysler chose what they find the perfect source: the motor city itself - There's no one more credible than the origin of the car industry in the US. Chrysler achieved great credibility by not only taking advantage of Detroit's high extrinsic credibility in car industry but also dramatizing the city's expertise as the ad goes on and thus built an even higher intrinsic credibility.