Chapter 4: The AUDIENCE: MOTIVATION

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Chapter Outline
Analyze Your Audience
Who are they?
What do they know and feel?
Motivate Your Audience

Punish or reward them

Appeal to their growth needs
Use peoples need for balance
Perform a cost/benefit analysis
Be sensitive to character traits

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Analyze Your Audience

Q# Define Motivation. How can you analyze your audience?
Rhetorical theorists refer to this ability as becoming reader or listener based,
audience centered, or using the-you approach.
The first step towards motivating your audience is to analyze them. Ask yourself:
1. Who are they?
2. What do they know and feel?
1. Who are they?
Someone who receive your message, a reader of your letter, a person you
are speaking with in meeting etc.
These people are your PRIMARY AUDIENCE.
Visualize and think about them.
Besides your primary audience, in business communication you may have a
SECONDARY AUDIENCE, sometime calls HIDDEN AUDIENCE.
Secondary audience could be someone who:
I.
II.
III.

Receives a copy of your memo.

Will be affected by decisions made at your meeting.
May have to approve or sign the letter you write.

In the above cases you need to write or speak carefully.

Finally especially, if youre primary and secondary Audience is in conflict.
Think about the KEY DECISION MAKER in your audience.
You know about Primary, Secondary and Key Audience based your personal
knowledge of them as INDIVIDUALS.
You can analyze their specific background, including their ages, educational
levels, trainings, opinions, interests and attitudes.
In many business situations, you must communicate with the people you do
not know personally.
In the above situations you can analyze what you know about them as a
GROUP. This includes:
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a)
b)
c)
d)
e)
f)

Their group characteristics

Norms
Traditions
Standards
Rules, and
Values

Motivating Your Audience

Theorists believe that there are following five techniques for motivating
audience:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Punish or reward them

Appeal to their growth needs
Use peoples need for balance
Perform a cost benefit analysis
Be sensitive to character traits

1. Punish or reward them

Researcher Walter R. Nord has found six reasons why threats may not work.
Imagine one of your employees spends too much time talking on the phone to
friends during the work day. So you write him a memo or call him in for an
interview and say: If you dont stop talking on the phone to friends, Ill fire you
then:
Your threat may work only when you are actually watching over your
employees actions.
Threats may get rid of one response, but not produce the desired response.
Threats may stop the inappropriate action even when it is appropriate.
Threats produce tension, making the work place less pleasant and
productive in general.
Threats tend to make people dislike you.
Threats provoke counter aggression.
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Sometimes they are clearly necessary, use threat and punishment with caution.
Consider using rewards as a way to change behavior
Many psychologists would argue that rewards are the most effective way to
shape behavior.
Rewarding certain behaviors is an extremely powerful way to get the
response you want
You are likely to be successful if your rewards include the following four
characteristics.
a) They must be important to the person who is being rewarded. Some
people might react to group acceptance, some to money and others to
recognition of the achievements.
b) Reward must be appropriate & sincere.
c) Effective rewards must be immediate.
d) Rewards dont have to be elegant.
One effective reward technique consists of breaking down large projects or
tasks into smaller components, & rewarding the participants at each step.
Most business communicators could be more successful if they used
punishment less and reward more often.

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2. Appeal to their growth needs

In most situations you simply wont be able reward your audience with tangible
prizes e.g., offer your customers free products, offer your boss money for
accepting your proposal.
Theories for effective rewards are Maslows Needs Hierarchy & Herzberg
Research
Maslows Needs Hierarchy
Personal Growth

Herzbergs Research
Growth Needs

Work itself (achievement)

Self-esteem

Advancement (recognition)

Group affiliation

Working relationships

Safety

Survival

Deficiency
Needs

Working conditions

Safety

Deficiency or Survival Needs are needs without which we cannot survive

such as food, water, sleep, shelter
Growth Needs are needs that enhance our lives.
Herzbergs business research shows that deficiency needs seldom motivate
people. Security, physical needs & even working conditions might be
perfect, but this wont motivate people. They need things like good
relationships & recognition.
Herzbergs research shows that the growth needs are the positive
motivators.
A research team from Columbia recently found that salary and other status
symbols were not rewarding to computer professionals.
If you want to motivate someone with rewards, consider the extraordinary
persuasive power of the growth needs e.g., trying to get people to work
together to devise a new plan.
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3. Use peoples need for balance

According to this theory:
People prefer a state of psychological balance (called consistency or free
from anxiety).
When they hear ideas conflicting with what they already believe, people
lose that state of balance & feel anxiety.
When they feel anxiety, people attempt to restore their sense of balance.
According to third step it is restoring equilibrium. You should be aware that
your audience may do so in any one of three ways.
I.

They may resist or deny the new information. In cases where the new
information conflicts with peoples important & well-established beliefs,
they are likely to resist your attempts at persuasion
As people move through life they build up a wardrobe of ideas and points
of view

II.

A second possible audience reaction is to devalue the information, thinking

something along these lines: He has no right to give me advice

If you have been successful, your audience will neither resist nor devalue
the new idea; instead they will accept it & establish a new equilibrium.
How can you use peoples need for balance to get them to accept your
idea?
To emphasize an anxiety or a problem they have that is causing them
imbalance, then offer a solution that will make them feel balanced.
III.

A third application of balance theory involves encouraging active

participation.

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4. Perform a cost/benefit analysis

Another way of thinking about what motivates people is to apply economic
idea to psychology
Just like money, goods, and services, behavior can be offered for exchange.
They communicator (like a seller) and the audience (like a buyer) take into
account both cost and benefit of the behavior.
Therefore, strong benefit will motivate your audience, and a high cost may
have the opposite effects.
You should not assume everyone act according to your cost/benefit
analysis. People will perceive costs differently:
a) Some people are more likely to take risks; loyalty, timing, fear, etc.
b) Some people are influenced by tradition to act against what might seem to
be in their best interest.
Using this approach, the following three tactics to increase the persuasiveness:
I.
II.
III.

Analyze both the costs and the benefits of the idea itself.
Analyze both the cost and benefits for audience.
Specify the benefits your audience will gain.

5. Be sensitive to character traits

Different people are convinced by different things. Just as engineers use electrical
theory to predict how machines work, communicators must use psychological
theory to predict how people work. Effective communicators analyze what will
motivate the people with whom they are communicating.
Four Cs Model is one way to analyze the character traits of the people.
Four Cs Model: Business personality traits
Four different cases illustrating how you might report exactly the same
information to each of four bosses

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Through
Procedures

To
Accomplish
Results

Tends to work alone

Comptroller
Commander

Changes
Status Quo

Maintains Status Quo

Collaborator
Crusader

Tends to work with group

Through
Affiliation

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To
Accomplish
Dream

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Audience 1

Your boss is bureaucratic.

Preferring to work alone & carefully.
Very consistent.
Likes facts & statistics.
Slow to decide & doesnt seem to like change.

The Comptroller
To motivate this boss, write in a matter-of-fact tone.
Incorporate a good deal of information, including method & data.
Instead of just stating one conclusion, offer various responses & your
conclusion from among them.
Emphasize tradition, process, and system.
Thats not the way we do things here.
Audience 2
Your boss is enthusiastic & idealistic.
Creative & is eager to change things based on his ideals.
Because of great enthusiasm, is sometimes prejudiced.
The Crusader
To motivate, adopt an enthusiastic & informative tone.
Emphasize how your ideas tie to his ideals or dreams.
Because he is motivated by ideas, you might include many points of view
and a lot of information.
Audience 3
Almost always works as part of a tea.
Does not like to make decisions to change things.
Avoid conflict and risk.

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The collaborator
Adopt a trusting & non-threatening tone.
You might include various options, but since the collaborator is less
interested in ideas themselves, you would avoid long, detailed, enthusiastic
explanations.
You might use testimonies from people you know he respects, or back up
your argument with statements from the organizational policies & goals
you know he agrees with.
Well, I cant really decide until I find out where she stands on that issue .
Audience 4

Likes action & results.

Bases decisions for change on results, not ideals.
Decisive & efficient.
Dominating.

The Commander
To motivate, adopt an efficient & result oriented tone.
Prefer a short summary format, stating your own conclusions &
recommendations clearly.
Motivated by results & power, emphasize the outcome for the company as
well as whats in it for them.
Whats the bottom line on that?

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