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Article summary Persuasion in Consumer Communication for Sustainability (CPT23306)
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Summary Articles CPTPost reading Lecture 1
Bakir, V., Herring, E., Miller, D., & Robinson, P. (2019). Organized Persuasive
Communication: A new conceptual framework for research on public relations, propaganda
and promotional culture. Critical Sociology, 45(3), 311–
328. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920518764586
Learning objectives:
- Define what persuasive communication is
- Distinguish persuasion from manipulation and propaganda
Organized persuasive communication (OPC): a generic short-hand term used in this article to
refer to all organized persuasion activities (including advertising and marketing,
propaganda, public relations, organizational communication, information/influence
campaigns, psychological operations, strategic communication, and a whole host of other
overlapping terms)
Deception, Incentivization and Coercion
- Deception: the action of deceiving (bedriegen) someone
- Incentivization: offering or providing benefits
- Coercion: threatening or actually inflicting costs
Incentives and coercion are important elements of many OPC strategies
Example deception:
- Fake news providers create deceptive and outrageous stories and headlines (clickbait) to
generate user attention and viewing time, which converts to digital advertising revenue
for fake news providers.
- The 2016 US presidential election campaign battle between Donald Trump and Hillary
Clinton, fake news stories, ranging from outright lies to those embracing more subtle
deceptive forms (omission, distortion and misdirection) spread across the internet
Example incentivization:
- During elections promised tax cuts are frequently used as a method of securing votes by
persuading people who otherwise would not be inclined to vote for that candidate.
- Cultural and educational exchange programmes associated with public diplomacy
involve provision of benefits that encourage recipients to be favourably disposed toward
the country/state providing them.
Also, incentivization can have a coercive dimension: The US message to Nicaraguans
during their 1990 elections which, according to Chomsky (1990) was to vote for the US-
backed candidate or face continuing US economic warfare the potential lifting of the
sanctions was incentivization and the threat of their continuation was coercive.
Example coercion:
- These strategies are integral to military ‘information operations’ where, for instance,
‘hearts and minds’ operations frequently involve the integration of OPC with military
force: here officials recognize ‘that the success of non-kinetic effect is amplified by
threats of kinetic activity’ (where ‘kinetic’ means military force)
- The use of radio broadcasts and air-dropped leaflets aimed at encouraging enemy
combatants to surrender during the war The persuasive effect of these propaganda
leaflets revolved around the implicit threat: surrender or die
In sum, strategies of deception, incentivization and coercion are recognizable persuasion
strategies, and they occur across political, social and economic events within democracies.
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,However, existing literatures only minimally engage with these forms of persuasion, as we
will now show
PR, Propaganda Studies and Promotional Culture: Failing to Get to Grips with
Deception, Incentivization and Coercion
1. PR (and related subfields): the range of persuasive communication activities captured
in labels such as advertising and marketing, public relations, organizational
communication, influence/information operations, psychological operations and
strategic communication
2. Propaganda studies: At some point in a chain of reasoning a hidden, misleading, or
otherwise unexamined presupposition will affect the outcome in a way not assessed
by the propagandee
3. Promotional culture: Building upon an understanding of promotion and persuasion in
the commercial realm, promotional culture has sought to understand all OPC
activities through the lens of commercial advertising and promotional activities
1. Public Relations and Related Fields: You do Propaganda, We do PR
Highly manipulative OPC (i.e. propaganda), occurs rarely in contemporary liberal
democracies and belongs either to authoritarian states, the early 20th century or the
‘enemy’
Two reasons why PR scholarship tends to ignore deception, incentivization and coercion
concern:
- Deliberate attempts to distance PR from propaganda
- A tendency among some to conflate all persuasion with manipulation
2. Propaganda Studies: Propaganda is All Around
Deception: Black and White Propaganda.
- Black propaganda: where the ‘source is concealed’ (verborgen) when the source is
concealed or credited to a false authority and spreads lies, fabrications and deceptions.
Black propaganda is the ‘big lie’.
- White propaganda: where the source is undisguised (open) involves dissemination of
truthful information from an undisguised source
- Grey propaganda: everything inbetween
the distinction between truthful white propaganda and untruthful black propaganda is
unproductive because it implies that absence of falsehoods and an undisguised source
equals truthfulness.
3. Promotional Culture: An Advertising, Marketing and Branding Saturated World?
The Conceptual Framework
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,The framework explicates all forms of persuasive activity, ranging from consensual through
to non-consensual, and incorporates both non-manipulative and manipulative persuasive
communication. Most importantly, it provides a systematic conceptualization of different
forms of persuasive communication including categories of dialogical, non-deceptive and
deceptive OPC as well as persuasion working in relation to socio-political, economic and
physical contexts via incentivization and coercion
Consensual Organized Persuasive Communication
Consent: informed and freely given agreement with something, be it a view or an action by
that person or someone else
Voluntariness principle: moral and legal positions in relation to the legitimacy of actions rest
upon whether an individual is acting freely or is, alternatively, coerced When someone is
persuaded under false pretences, incentivized (gestimuleerd) via promise or providing of
benefits, or coerced through threats or actual infliction of costs (including withdrawal of
benefits), consent is not freely given
Consensual OPC must meet two requirements:
- Absence of deception
- Absence of incentivization and coercion
1. Dialogical Consensual Communication
Two-way dialogical communication: consensus/mutual understanding whereby actors ‘seek
to reach an understanding in order to coordinate their actions by way of agreement’
‘communicative action’ is genuinely two-way and does not involve deception, incentivization
or coercion.
Communicative action: two-way consensus building toward cooperative goals
Teleological action: one-way persuading others of one’s own views
Four essential ideal speech conditions for ‘communicative action’ to occur:
- No one capable of making a relevant contribution is excluded
- Participants have equal voice
- They are free to speak their honest opinion without deception or self-deception
- There are no sources of coercion
Communicative action is genuinely two-way and does not involve deception,
incentivization or coercion
Example: citizen juries that enable citizens to reach informed consensus on issues with the
intent to influence policymaking
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, 2. Strategic (One-Way) Consensual Persuasion
Teleological action, involving strategic attempts to persuade, is not consensual because it
violates the ‘ideal speech’ conditions, principally because it involves strategic (one-way)
persuasion thus violating the condition that ‘participants have equal voice’.
We argue that persuasion through ‘teleological action’ can be consensual providing it is free
from deception, incentivization and coercion strategic (one-way) consensual persuasion is
not as consensual as dialogical consensual communication, but it has enough consensual
elements to classify it as consensual (i.e., it is free and informed).
Examples:
- Anti-smoking campaigns are in some respects strategic consensual persuasion. They
are not deceptive (smoking is harmful), and frequently involve both reasoned and
emotional arguments regarding smoking risks. Importantly, just because an anti-
smoking campaign invokes fear, this does not necessarily make it coercive: coercion
involves forcing someone through issuing credible threats such as ‘Unless you do what I
want you to, I will harm you.’ This is different from providing information on harms to
health. At the same time, mildly coercive strategies are also employed as a part of
drives to cut harms from smoking (e.g. smoking bans).
- OPC aimed at mobilizing a population for war can also be consensual: if a country faces
real threat, then a campaign for military action to defend it could in principle be non-
deceptive and non-coercive.
- In an election campaign, if democracy is to be realized, OPC should be non-deceptive,
non-coercive and avoid incentivization
- An OPC campaign seeking to challenge human causes of climate change, perhaps
funded by the fossil fuel industry, would be deceptive if it over-represented the views of
the small minority of scientists who question the overwhelming scientific evidence that
fossil fuel combustion is the key source of climate change and ignored scientists who
accept the state of the evidence. This OPC campaign would be non-consensual because
it would be deceptive about the scientific evidence and thus those who accepted it
would have come to believe something under false pretences
For the information to be consensual it must contain the relevant information that can allow
a rational and informed decision to be made. This means that critical information should not
be omitted or distorted in a way that leads an individual to be persuaded when otherwise,
with the included or undistorted information, they would not be.
Non-Consensual Organized Persuasive Communication (Propaganda)
1. Deception: persuasion via lying, distortion, omission or misdirection non-consensual
because it violates the requirement of informed consent; the target of persuasion is
unable to reach an informed decision because of inadequate information.
Deception through lying: making a statement that is known or suspected to be
untrue in order to mislead.
o To support lies, disinformation may also be used, whereby forgeries and staged
events are used
o Communicators know that, when exposed, lies can damage credibility and so
tend to be motivated to mislead in other ways
Deception through omission: withholding information to make the promoted
viewpoint more persuasive
o It is deceptive because those involved know people would be less likely to be
persuaded if they knew the full picture.
o Deception through omission can also occur through disguising the source’s
identity.
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