Indirect AIDA Pattern of Persuasion

When you consider the tens or hundreds of thousands of TV commercials you’ve seen
in your life, you understand how they all take the indirect approach because they
assume you will resist parting with your money. Instead of taking a direct approach by
simply saying in seven seconds “Come to our store, give us $100, and we’ll give you
these awesome sunglasses,” commercials use a variety of techniques to motivate you
to ease your grip on your money. They will dramatize a problem-solution scenario,
use celebrity endorsements, humour, special effects, jingles, intrigue, and so on.
You’re well familiar with the pattern from having seen and absorbed it many times
each day of your life, but when you must make a persuasive pitch yourself as part of
your professional duties, you may need a little guidance with the typical four-part
indirect pattern known as “AIDA”:

Figure 27.3: Each element of the AIDA strategy explained (Business Communication, 2019).

A – Attention-getting Opening

When your product, service, or initiative is unknown to the reader, come out swinging
to get their attention with a surprise opening. Your goal is to make it inviting enough
for the reader to want to stay and read the whole message. The opening can only do
that if it uses an original approach that connects the reader to the product, service, or
initiative with its central selling feature. This feature is what distinguishes it from
others of its kind; it could be a new model of (or feature on) a familiar product, a
reduced price, a new technology altogether, etc. A tired, old opening sales pitch that
appears to be aimed at a totally different demographic with a product that doesn’t
seem to be any different from others of its kind, however, will lose the reader at the
 opening pitch. One that uses one of the following techniques, however, stands a good
chance of hooking the reader in to stick around and see if the pitch offers an attractive
solution to one of their problems:

 Focus on the solution’s benefits:

o Imagine cooling down from your half-hour sunbath on the white-sand
beach with a dip in turquoise Caribbean waters. This will be you if you book a
Caribbean Sun resort vacation package today!
o What if I told you that you could increase your sales by 25% in the next
quarter by using an integrated approach to social media?
o Consider a typical day in the life of a FitBit user: . . .
 Focus on the problem scenario:
o Is your hard-earned money just sitting in a chequing account losing
value from inflation year after year?
o Have you ever thought about investing your money but have no idea
where to start?
 Surprising quotation, fact, or statistic:
o Yogi Berra once said, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it!” At
Epic Adventures, any one of our Rocky Mountain hiking experiences will elevate you
to the highest of your personal highs.
o The shark is the ocean’s top predator. When you’re looking to invest
your hard-earned money, why would you want to swim with sharks? Go to a trusted
broker at Lighthouse Financial.
o Look around the room. One in five of you will die of heart disease.
Every five minutes, a Canadian aged 20 or over dies from heart disease, the second
leading cause of death in the country. At the Fitness Stop, keep your heart strong with
your choice of 20 different cardio machines and a variety of aerobics programs
designed to work with your busy schedule.

The goal here is to get the reader thinking, “Oooh, I want that” or “I need that”
without giving them an opportunity to doubt whether they really do. Of course, the
attention-gaining opening is unnecessary if the reader already knows something about
the product or service. If the customer comes to you asking for further details, you
would just skip to the I-, D-, or A-part of the pitch that answers their questions.

I – Interest-building Background

Once you’ve got the reader’s attention in the opening, your job is now to build on that
by extending the interest-building pitch further. If your opening was too busy painting
a solution-oriented picture of the product to mention the company name or stress a
central selling feature, now is the time to reveal both in a cohesive way. If the opening
goes “What weighs nothing but is the most valuable commodity in your lives? —
Time,” a cohesive bridge to the interest-building background of the message could be
“At Synaptic Communications, we will save you time by . . . .” Though you might
want to save detailed product descriptions for the next part, some descriptions might
be necessary here as you focus on how the product or service will solve the
customer’s problem.

The key to making this part effective is describing how the customer will use or
benefit from the product or service, placing them in the centre of the action with the
“you” view (see unit 13):

When you log into your WebCrew account for the first time, an interactive AI guide
will greet and guide you through the design options for your website step by step. You
will be amazed by how easy it is to build your website from the ground up merely by
answering simple multiple-choice questions about what you want and selecting from
design options tailored to meet your individual needs. Your AI guide will
automatically shortlist stock photo options and prepare text you can plug into your site
without having to worry about permissions.

Here, the words you or your appear 11 times in 3 sentences while still sounding
natural rather than like a high-pressure sales tactic.

D – Desire-building Details and Overcoming Resistance

Now that you’ve hooked the reader in and hyped-up your product, service, or idea
with a central selling feature, you can flesh out the product description with
additional evidence supporting your previous claims. Science and the rational appeal
of hard facts work well here, but the evidence must be appropriate. A pitch for a
sensible car, for instance, will focus on fuel efficiency with litres per 100 km or range
in number of kilometres per battery charge in the case of an electric vehicle, not top
speed or the time it takes to get from 0 to 100 km/h. Space permitting, you might want
to focus on only two or three additional selling features since this is still a pitch rather
than a product specifications (“specs”) sheet, though you can also use this space to
point the reader to such details in an accompanying document or webpage.

Testimonials and guarantees are effective desire-building contributions as long as

they’re believable. If someone else much like you endorses a product in an online
review, you’ll be more likely to feel that you too will benefit from it.
A guarantee will also make the reader feel as though they have nothing to lose if they
can just return the product or cancel a service and get their money back if they don’t
like it after all. Costco has been remarkably successful as a wholesaler appealing to
individual grocery shoppers partly on the strength of a really generous return policy.
 Rhetorically, this point in the pitch also provides an opportunity to raise and defeat
objections you anticipate the reader having towards your product, service, or idea.
This follows a technique called refutation, which comes just before the conclusion
(“peroration”) in the six-part classical argument structure. It works to dispel any
lingering doubt in the reader’s mind about the product as pitched to that point.

If the product is a herbicide being recommended as part of a lawncare strategy, for

instance, the customer may have reservations about spreading harmful chemicals
around their yard. A refutation that assures them that the product isn’t harmful to
humans will help here, especially if it’s from a trusted source such as Health Canada
or Consumer Reports. Other effective tricks in the vein of emotional appeal
(complementing the evidence-based rational appeal that preceded it) include picturing
a worst-case scenario resulting from not using the product. Against concerns about
using a herbicide, a pitch could use scare-tactics such as talking about mentioning the
spread of wild parsnip that can cause severe burns upon contact with skin and
blindness if the sap gets in your eyes. By steering the customer to picturing their
hapless kids running naïvely through the weeds in their backyard, crying in pain,
rubbing their eyes, and going blind, you can undermine any lingering reservations a
parent may have about using the herbicide.

A – Action-motivating Closing

The main point of your message directs the reader to act (e.g., buy your product or
service), so its appearance at the end of the message—rather than at the beginning—is
what makes an AIDA pitch indirect. If the AID-part of your pitch has the reader
feeling that they have no choice but to buy the product or service, then this is the right
time to tell them how and where to get it, as well as the price.

Pricing itself requires some strategy. The following are well-known techniques for
increasing sales:

 Charm pricing: dropping a round number by a cent to make it end in a 99

because the casually browsing consumer brain’s left-digit bias will register a price of
$29.99 as closer to $20 than $30, especially if the 99 is physically smaller in
superscript ($29.99).
 Prestige pricing: keeping a round number round and dropping the dollar sign
for a luxury item. For instance, placing the number 70 beside a dinner option on a
fancy restaurant’s menu makes it look like a higher-quality dish than if it were priced
at $69.99. To impress a date with your spending power, you’ll go for the 70 option
over something with charm pricing.
 Anchoring: making a price look more attractive by leading with a higher
reference price. For instance, if you want to sell a well-priced item, you would
strategically place a more expensive model next to it so that the consumer has a sense
of the price range they’re dealing with when they don’t otherwise know. They’ll feel
like they’re getting more of a bargain with the well-priced model. Similarly, showing
the regular price crossed out near the marked-down price on the price tag is really
successful in increasing sales (Boachie, 2016).

If the product or service is subscription-based or relatively expensive, breaking it

down to a monthly, weekly, or even daily price installment works to make it seem
more manageable than giving the entire sum. Equating it to another small daily
purchase also works. The cost of sponsoring a child in a drought-stricken nation
sounds better when it’s equated with the cost of a cup of coffee per day. A car that’s a
hundred dollars per week in lease payments sounds more doable than the entire cost,
especially if you don’t have $45,000 to drop right now but are convinced that you
must have that car anyway. Framing the price in terms of how much the customer will
save is also effective, as is brushing over it in a subordinate clause to repeat the
central selling point:

For only $49.99 per month, you can go about your business all day and sleep easy at
night knowing your home is safe with Consumer Reports’ top-rated home security
system.

Action directions must be easy to follow to clinch customer buy-in. Customers are in
familiar territory if they merely have to go to a retail location, pick the unit up off the
shelf, and run it through the checkout. Online ordering and delivery is even easier.
Vague directions (“See you soon!”) or a convoluted, multi-step registration and
ordering process, however, will frustrate and scare the customer away. Rewards for
quick action are effective, such as saying that the deal holds only while supplies last
or the promo code will expire at the end of the day.

Sales pitches are effective only if they’re credible. Even one exaggerated claim can
sink the entire message. Saying that your product is the best in the world, but not
backing this up with any third-party endorsement or sales figures proving the claim,
will undermine every other credible point you make by making your reader doubt it
all (Lehman, DuFrene, & Murphy, 2013, pp. 134-143). We’ll return to the topic of
avoidable unethical persuasive techniques, but first, let’s turn our attention in the next
section to a more uplifting type of message.