Manipulation and Persuasion in Business Advertising

Abstract

The article analyzes the notions of persuasion, persuasive techniques, manipulation, its types, and their application in business advertising. Advertising has covered the way from informing a target audience to asking and convincing, from convincing to working out conventional reflexes, from working our traditional reflexes to the unconscious suggestion, and from the cold advice to the projection of a symbolic image. Advertisers have been consistent in making customers perceive a picture of a promoted product consciously and then make them buy it automatically.Advertising is so powerful that it can form and change the worldview and behaviour of people. That is why professionals in many spheres study and investigate the phenomenon of manipulative potentials of advertising. The term manipulation stands for the art of managing people's behaviour and thinking with afocused impact on the social consciousness, a type of psychological influence, a hidden inducement of people to perform specific actions, an invisible socio-psychological control of a target audience.A successful manipulation requires exploiting human beings' critical weaknesses, such as the limited capability of strategic reasoning, little awareness, susceptibility to cognitive biases, or potentially indirect social pressure.As to the to the persuasive techniques, the most effective ones are lexical (descriptive adjectives, clichés, coloured words, emotive and inclusive vocabulary, colourful words and descriptive language, loaded words; associations and connotations, subtexts, anecdotes), rhetorical and stylistic (rhetorical questions, argumentation, reasoning and logic, evidence: exaggeration, hyperboles, alliteration, metaphors, repetitions, similes, irony, pun) and the visual ones (iconic signs, graphs, tables etc.). Combined together they make advertisements eye-catching, bright, memorable, informative, thought-provoking, persuasive, and manipulative.Creating advertisements by borrowing methods from psychology has been quite successful. Psychology is an inseparable part of human being activity, including advertising and business. That is why knowledge of psychology, psycholinguistics, and NLP provides a better understanding of consumers' needs, desires, and preferences and positively influences a company's image and profits. At present, advertising is, on the one hand, an organic part of modern life. With its assistance, we find out about new products, goods, shops, and services. On the other hand, advertising is a means of massmedia communication that influences people by implementing modern psychology and psycholinguistics's practical methods and tactics. To achieve their set goals, advertisers use a unique language and select lexical units that create anxiety, fear of being late or missing a chance or a sale.