3). Pick one concept from the reading this week and discuss it in detail.
In contrast to audience demographics, using psychographic information centers on psychological connection with your audience, such as, values, attitudes and beliefs. First, one must identify the standpoint of the audiences. Which refers to the location or viewpoint one interprets his/her world. An individual’s standpoint can stem from their culture, family or many other sociological influences. Furthermore, identifying an audiences’ standpoint helps the speaker recognize the audience in a more subjective way. Audience Values- “a value is an enduring concept of what is good, right, worthy, and important” (Coopman 83). In conjunction with standpoint, values play a large role on how the audience interprets a speech. The book uses an eye-opening example, comparing the advertising campaign of Apple deployed in the US compared to Great Britain. They concluded, what was view as hip and trendy in the US was perceived as smug and overbearing in Britain. Ultimately, knowing the values of your target audience will increase the effectiveness of ones speech.
I agree when you say that a person's values are incredibly important. To challenge that in a speech is not recommended. People will get upset, angry and possibly become combative if angry enough. Even if they are misinterpreting it, it is what they believe. If you don't know what your target audiences values are, then you most certainly cannot hope to give a successful speech. You will just offend someone with the lack of research and prepardnes that you have. I think that the mindset of someone from Britain is very different that someone in the US. A speaker from the US would have a lot of research to do prior and vice versa.
ReplyDeleteGreat subject. I wonder how a speaker would go about obtaining this information? It's not exactly something that you can find out easily unless you know you are speaking to the Mormon church or something. People usually keep their values a little more private, especially in the work places. This seems like it would be quite the task, yet could have devastating backlash. If someone went into a random audience speaking about teen pregnancy, or sexually transmitted disease, they would have no idea what values people had in that audience. It seems to me there is a guarantee you will have unhappy audience members regardless of how much homework you do because values are just one of those 'harder' things to have predetermined. If a person is lucky enough to know this ahead of time, they sould have a stellar presentation!
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