Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

Types of Audience Decisions 47

Does he want the journalists to decide to go along with upper management’s plan or to fi ght it? No

doubt this executive was surprised by the journalists’ angry response to his speech; it seems likely

his speaking experience was limited to delivering similar factual reports.

Notice, on the other hand, how empathetic and leader-like the second executive appears to be.

The second executive addresses the group’s values, their sacrifi ces, and the diffi culties they will face.

He knows his job is not simply to report the facts but to inspire and rally the journalists’ fl agging

spirits. To inspire the group, the second executive elicits what this text terms a rallying decision

from the journalists. Chapter 2 shows us how we can be more like the second executive. We too

can know what to say and when to say it, even when circumstances are most trying and diffi cult.

As we saw in Chapter 1 , to be effective communicators, professionals must fi rst be aware of

their audiences’ decision schemata. But how can professionals ever prepare for such a task when the

number of individual decisions their audiences make is seemingly infi nite? Physicists who want to

persuade their audiences to fund new research projects are often able to interact with them directly

to learn about their information requirements and concerns.^2 But many professionals do not have

the time or the opportunity to interview audience members, much less to conduct a Multi-Attribute

Utility Analysis, build a linear model, or conduct a think-aloud study in order to discover the deci-

sion schema of their audience. Instead, professionals need a classifi cation scheme that makes sense of

the bewildering array of audience decisions and helps them produce the numerous documents and

presentations, and orchestrate the many interactions, required to elicit those decisions.

Chapter 2 proposes a scheme that classifi es a large number of audience decisions, as well as the

documents, presentations, and interactions designed to elicit them, into 13 major types: oversight ,

compliance , staffi ng , employment , exonerative , rallying , investment , lending , usage , sourcing , budgetary , borrow-

ing , and policy decisions. For example, a student’s decision to apply an instructor’s lesson, a patient’s

decision to follow the doctor’s orders, and a customer’s decision to try a free sample after hearing

a salesperson’s product pitch can all be classifi ed as usage decisions—decisions to use or try out

certain products, services, or information. And all usage decisions require communicators to address

similar decision criteria and thus to deliver similar types of information. Moreover, the instructor’s

lesson, the doctor’s orders, and the salesperson’s product pitch can all be classifi ed as documents,

presentations, or interactions whose communicative purpose is to elicit a usage decision. Interest-

ingly, a growing number of scholars agree that the most productive way to classify any form of

communication is according to its communicative purpose.^3

The major benefi t of such a classifi cation scheme is that it can help professionals predict the

information or content their audiences expect them to provide. In contrast, knowing the format of a

document, presentation, or an interaction—such as an email, an impromptu presentation , or a team meet-

ing —says little about the content the audience expects. Although letters to the editor are formatted as

letters , they are usually exhortations advising needed change. The contents of letters to the editor are

more similar to the contents of political speeches than to the contents of many other types of letters.^4

Likewise, knowing the source of a message says little about the content audiences require. For

instance, knowing that an attorney generated a particular document says little about an audience’s

content expectations given the many different types of documents attorneys generate. In the same

way, simply identifying the audience to whom a message is directed tells practically nothing about

the content required in it. For example, consumers, one of salespeople’s primary audiences, are

asked to make compliance, investment, usage, sourcing, staffi ng, exonerative, borrowing, and rally-

ing decisions. And again, each decision type requires professionals to provide quite different types

of information to their audiences.

In addition to helping professionals predict the information or content requirements of their

audiences, the scheme can also be used to classify genres , or categories of discourse to which various

documents, presentations, and interactions belong.^5 Business genres, for example, include business