Rhetoric: an overview

May 31, 2010 By David Crankshaw

Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, provides a comprehensive framework for moving your audience to change their mood, change their mind, and change their willingness to act. I’m writing a series of articles on the use of rhetoric in business-to-business Marketing. But sometimes with rhetoric it’s easy to focus on the trees and lose the forest.

This page will give you a view of the forest. It contains an outline of rhetoric based on the appendix in Jay Heinrich’s excellent book “Thank You for Arguing.”

Goals

  • PERSONAL GOAL- What is your goal in making your argument? What are you hoping to accomplish by winning the audience over? In business-to-business marketing, the goal is usually to get the buyer to move to the next stage in the buying process; to get the buyer to accept your choice or do what you want the buyer to do.
  • AUDIENCE GOALS – Ask your buyers to change their mood, change their mind, or change their willingness to act.
    • Mood – The easiest goal to achieve with your audience. Make your buyers receptive to what you have to say by stimulating their emotions.
    • Mind – This goal is harder. Ask your audience to make the decision that you want them to make.
    • Willingness to act – The hardest goal of all. Engage the audience emotionally at a deeper level and show them that taking action is easy to do.
  • ISSUE CONTROL – Argument can take place in the past tense, the present, or the future. Control the tense and you are more likely to control the argument.
    • Blame – past tense, the argument of the courts, guilt or innocence.
    • Values – present tense, demonstrative or tribal rhetoric, main topics are praise and blame.
    • Choice – future tense, what we will do, the rhetoric of business, focus is on what is advantageous for the audience.

Ethos: Argument by appealing to character

The basis for this argument is the strength of your reputation. Main aspects are your virtue, your practical wisdom, and your disinterest.

  • DECORUM – fitting in with your audience’s expectations about how to behave – the language you use and how you present yourself.
  • VIRTUE – demonstrating that you share the values of your buyers.
  • PRACTICAL WISDOM – showing the buyer that you’ve done it before and know how to do it again.
  • DISINTEREST – conveying the impression that you are putting the interests of the buyer ahead of your own

Logos: Argument by logic

Some think that argument should be nothing but logic, but experience shows that argument also needs emotion and character to be persuasive. Logos doesn’t just follow the rules of logic, it builds on what the audience is already thinking.

  • THE ADVANTAGEOUS – base your argument on what is good for the audience. Offer them a choice that is advantageous to them.
  • THE COMMONPLACE – a belief, value, or opinion that is commonly held by your audience. The commonplace is the starting point of your logic. Persuade your audience by starting with something they already believe.
  • DEDUCTION – argument by applying a general principle to a specific situation. Your premise (a fact or commonplace) is the proof of your argument. The choice you want them to make is the conclusion.
  • INDUCTION – moving in the opposite direction, using an example to make a general point. Use examples (fact, comparison, and story) as your proof. The evidence can lead to a premise or a conclusion.
  • CONCESSION – rhetorical jujitsu, conceding a point and using your opponent’s argument to your advantage.
  • FRAMING – define the issue in a way that favors your argument. Control the boundaries or the language used in an argument.
  • LOGICAL FALLACIES – learn how to detect them so others can’t use them against you (and so that you can use them yourself if the need arises).
  • RHETORICAL FOULS – intentional offenses that prevent an argument from reaching consensus or conclusion – examples include switching tenses, humiliation, innuendo, and inflexible adherence to the rules.

Pathos: Argument by appealing to emotion

Appealing to emotion can cause a change in mood, make the buyer more receptive to your logic, and persuade buyers to feel an emotional commitment to the choice or decision you’d like them to make.

  • SYMPATHY – showing your audience you understand how they are feeling
  • BELIEF – invoke the past experience of your audience (e.g. through telling a story) or create an expectation; your descriptions will invoke the emotions you want your audience to feel.
  • VOLUME CONTROL – toning down or ramping up an emotion to bring the audience along with you.
  • UNANNOUNCED EMOTION – don’t reveal in advance the emotion you want them to feel; your audience will simply resist.
  • PASSIVE VOICE – use the passive voice when you want to direct the anger of the audience away from you.
  • BACKFIRE – overplay your hand to calm your audience when they might be angry.
  • PERSUASIVE EMOTIONS – anger is persuasive, but short-lived; humor has a calming influence; appealing to the group’s identity is both persuasive and long-lived.
  • FIGURES OF SPEECH – many figures have been invented that use language to influence emotion – e.g. by twisting cliche’s, swapping words, inventing words, and editing out loud.

Circumstance and context

The Greeks called this Kairos, choosing the supreme moment. It depends on timing and medium.

  • PERSUADABLE MOMENT – waiting for the moment when the audience is most receptive to your argument.
  • SENSES – using the right medium for the right sense:
    • Sight for character and emotion
    • Sound for logic
    • Smell, taste, and touch for emotion
Filed Under: Power and Influence Tagged With: ,

Rhetoric: a framework to communicate with buyers

May 24, 2010 By David Crankshaw

Buyers are on a journey – from being unaware of a problem to solving the problem. Marketing Operations maps the buyer’s journey and finds ways to create value for the buyer at each stage.

Mostly you create value with your ideas – ideas that answer buyer questions and solve buyer problems. These ideas persuade your buyers to change how they think, feel, believe and act. They help buyers move from stage to stage in their journey.

How do we communicate our ideas in a way that the audience will hear, remember, and act upon them? Is there a general framework we could use that would apply to most situations – regardless of who the buyer is, where the buyer is in the journey, and what type of medium you are using to communicate to the buyer?

A few months ago I started reading about rhetoric, the art of arguing persuasively, to answer this question. The source that helped me the most was Jay Heinrichs. He has re-energized and re-invented rhetoric in a wonderful little book called “Thank you for Arguing.”

Whether you sense it or not, argument surrounds you. It plays with your emotions, changes your attitude, talks you into a decision, and goads you to buy things. Argument lies behind political labeling, advertising, jargon, voices, gestures, and guilt trips; it forms a real-life Matrix, the supreme software that drives our social lives. And rhetoric serves as argument’s decoder. By teaching the tricks we use to persuade on another, the art of persuasion reveals the Matrix in all its manipulative glory.

Rhetoric was the “essential skill of leadership” for the ancient Greeks and Romans. It was central to classical education for 2000 years.

After the ancient Greeks invented it, rhetoric helped create the worlds first democracies. It trained Roman orators like Julius Caesar and Marcus Tullius Cicero and gave the Bible its finest language. It even inspired William Shakespeare. Every one of America’s founders studied rhetoric, and they used it’s principles in writing the Constitution.

Over the next several days I’ll be exploring how rhetoric gives B2B marketers a framework to communicate persuasively at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

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Story structure: turn conflict into dramatic tension

May 17, 2010 By David Crankshaw

Every story must have a conflict, but it takes more than conflict to make a story. It’s the structure of the story that let’s you set the stage, introduce the conflict and resolve it.

According to Larry Brooks in his book “Story Structure – Demystified”:

But inherent to the notion of conflict is the architecture of how it is handled within the narrative. And that’s where structure comes into play. No structure, no story, either. Because structure is what turns conflict into dramatic tension, without which, again, you have no story. It’s the full circle truth.

Brooks is explaining story structure to writers of 300-page novels, but his ideas apply to any story, short or long.

He describes a four part structure: the setup, the response, the attack, and the resolution.

Part One: The setup

In the setup, the main character, or the hero, is living a life that is in balance. Brooks calls the hero an Orphan at this stage. The Orphan is someone we care about, but we don’t know what is going to happen to the Orphan. The first stage is about getting to know and learning to care about the hero.

At the end of Part One is the inciting incident. This is the incident which introduces the conflict or the obstacle. Once the hero has experienced the inciting incident, there is no going back. The hero cannot avoid addressing the situation. How the hero initially addresses the situation is the subject of Part Two.

It’s important not to set up the inciting incident or the conflict too early. You can foreshadow the inciting incident, but you want to wait until the reader cares about the hero before you put the hero into conflict.

Part Two: The response

Here the hero must face the consequences of the inciting incident. But at this stage the hero is not behaving very heroically. The hero is simply responding to the incident. The hero may try to run away, or use ways of responding that have worked for the hero in the past. In this stage the hero is a Wanderer. The hero is being acted upon by the antagonist or the circumstances, but the hero spends more time avoiding the obstacle than fighting it.

At the end of Part Two is another incident. In this milestone, the stakes get ratcheted up a notch. Circumstances force the hero to do more than simply respond using the old methods.

Part Three: The attack

Part Three is about the hero shifting from a Wanderer to a Warrior in response to the mid-milestone incident. The hero finds new strengths (internally or externally) with which to fight the obstacle. But even though the hero is now fighting back, the hero is not experiencing much success. This keeps the tension high, and the conflict unresolved.

Part Four: The resolution

In Part Four the hero becomes a Martyr. The hero begins to find a way to defeat the enemy, to overcome the obstacle. This is the stage where the hero becomes completely committed, where everything comes together.

At this stage, the writer cannot introduce any new information – characters or resources. This stage has to be all about using what the hero already has and knows to solve the problem, reach the goal, or save the day. It’s about tying up loose ends and bringing the conflict to a close.

Four parts – setup, response, attack, and resolution. Four stages of the hero’s development – orphan, wanderer, warrior, and martyr.

Once you internalize this structure, you’ll begin to see that every popular movie and book is structured around this sequence. They are popular because people everywhere understand this structure. Knowing this structure means that you can use it to tell the stories about your business – stories that people will read, remember, and act upon.

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The essence of a story

May 10, 2010 By David Crankshaw

What is the one thing that a story must have?

Conflict. Without conflict it’s just a series of events that no one cares about.

As Robert McKee says, a story is when life gets thrown out of balance. A customer rejects the terms of a contract, investors threaten to pull out of a deal, or the new version of the product has an unexplained failure. “The story goes on to describe how, in an effort to restore balance, the protagonist’s subjective expectations crash into an uncooperative objective reality.”

In other words, when there is a conflict between what you thought was going to happen and what actually happens.

When you communicate in business – whether it is to a buyer, an investor, or to your organization – your audience is most likely to listen, to remember and to act upon what you say if you communicate in the form of a story.

Yet look at most web sites or other business communication. What we read is the official story – the watered down, safe version – the one that is “carefully constructed to tell a version of events that is sanitized and thought to be unlikely to get anyone in trouble.” This version of the story has no conflict. Which is why so much business communication fails to engage the reader.

What are some examples of story that you could use to communicate with your buyers? Stories that have conflict and will keep their interest? Here are a few ideas:

  • The story of a customer that faced an obstacle and was able to overcome it using your capabilities.
  • How about the founding of your company? A founder sees a problem in the world, an obstacle. The founder realizes no else is doing anything about it and decides to build a company that can defeat this obstacle.
  • Or when you went to get funding or to find your first customers. They didn’t believe in the value of what you had created. You had to work and work to get the funding or to win your first customers?

When you start looking for it, you start to see conflict everywhere. Which is not surprising, Business is all about conflict, addressing conflicts, resolving conflicts. Think about what you talk about when you come home at night or when you are with your friends. It’s all the conflicts that you experience at work.

That doesn’t mean that you are going to tell all these stories to your buyers. It just means that conflict is everywhere, so stories are everywhere. And the stories that you want to tell your buyers are the ones that create value for them. The stories that answer the questions or solve the problems that the buyer has at that stage of their buying cycle.

If the buyer is wondering if they can trust you, tell a story that shows that you have similar values, that you are interested in helping them solve their problem, that you have done this before.

If the buyer is asking if you have the capabilities they need, tell a story about similar buyers and how your capabilities helped them overcome their obstacle.

If you want to arouse the emotions and energy of your buyer tell a story. It will bring together idea and emotion. It will engage their hearts and move them to action.

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