Page 57 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

50 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

What are the implications of attitude strength for social marketing ef-
forts? If the goal of a social marketing effort is to create long-term and en-
during change, then social marketers may seek to target audience members
under circumstances that favor central route processing. This might be ac-
complished by making sure targets are selected for whom the message is
personally relevant. Alternatively, marketers could increase elaboration by
using variables that increase message elaboration. Or, if ability is an issue,
a brand might provide multiple exposures to allow participants to process
the message over time. However, the collective evidence suggests that en-
during change and influence are more likely to be accomplished through
the central route.
The fact that central route persuasion leads to stronger attitudes does
not mean that the peripheral route is invariably undesirable. There may be
situations in which a momentary change in attitude would be enough to
instigate an important behavioral action. For example, a television com-
mercial might create an initial change that leads a consumer to engage in a
product trial, and that product trial could become the ultimate catalyst for
product adoption. Similarly, there might be cases where consumers are
simply not interested in engaging in careful processing of a message, which
means the peripheral route is the space a social marketer must work
within. Finally, there might be cases where a marketer has a compelling
cue but lacks strong arguments that are differentiated from the competi-
tion. These are all examples where the peripheral route to persuasion
might occur and be desirable. In cases where attitude change occurs
through peripheral route processes, there may be other means to increase
the strength of an attitude (see Petty & Krosnick, 1995; Tormala & Rucker
2007).
In summary, a social marketer should understand the implications of
the elaboration level not only for the initial degree of attitude change, but
also for the persistence, resistance, and influence of the attitude on
behavior.

Implications for Implicit Measures of Attitudes
After a long tradition of assessing the impact of persuasive treatments
on attitudes with deliberative self-reports of people’s attitudes (Eagly &
Chaiken, 1993; Petty & Wegener, 1998a), more recent work has assessed
change with measures that tap the more automatic evaluations associated
with objects, issues, and people (Petty, Fazio & Briñol, 2009; Gawronski
& Payne, 2010). Techniques that assess automatic evaluative associations
without directly asking people to report their attitudes are often referred to