Intensifying / Downplaying Persuasion Technique

• Intensification can highlight your strengths.
• Downplaying can conceal your weaknesses.

Whilst there are many different strategies you can use in persuasion, in general these strategies can broadly be divided into two types : Promoting your strengths & hiding your weaknesses.

The first strategy involves intensifying or highlighting the features of something you want to promote. In other words, making it look better by talking about its good points.

The second strategy involves downplaying features you would prefer remain hidden, or changing how people perceive something so that it is seen in a negative light.

Using these two strategies you can shift someones attention away from what you don’t want them to see, whilst at the same time, focusing their attention on what you do want them to see.

A combination of these strategy can therefore enable a person to:

• Intensify their strong points.
• Intensify an opponents weaknesses.
• Downplay their own weaknesses.
• Downplay their opponents strengths.

Let’s have a look at these two persuasion strategies in more detail:

Persuasion Technique 1 – Intensification

When you want to intensify your own good points, or intensify someone else’s bad points, choose one or more of these tactics:

1 – Repetition

The simplest and often most effective way to intensify either the good or bad, is to repeat the same idea over and over again.

The way our brains work usually require us to be exposed to some information repeatedly before we begin to take notice or act on it.

However be careful when using this tactic, as an overuse of repetition may make you appear “big headed” or jealous/resentful of another person.

It is far better to spread repetition out over time, rather than cluster it together.

2 – Association

Association can be used as an intensification tactic to make something appear better or worse than it actually is. Positive association is frequently used in advertising, most notably by Nike, who use sports stars to advertise their products.

By associating a certain product with a certain sports star, the advertisers automatically absorb that fame, credibility and respect for themselves and their product, thereby making the product seem more appealing.

Negative association involves associating a person or product with something negative. This tactic is often used in war, whereby one country accuses another of associating with bad people or things (i.e. terrorists, bad leaders, weapons etc…) to paint a negative picture of that country in the mind of the public.

This occurred in the Iraq war, whereby Iraq was associated with weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein.

3 – Composition

One of the easiest ways to intensify a message is to change its content. This could involve focusing only on the good points about yourself, or focusing on the negative aspects of another person.

Persuasion Technique 2 – Downplaying

When persuading, you very rarely want to focus attention on your own weaknesses. For similar reasons, you very rarely want to promote the strong points of a competitor.

Rather you would much prefer to downplay your own weaknesses, and downplay your competitors strengths. Here are three tactics that you can use for downplaying:

1 – Omission

Omission simply means leaving out damaging information. For example, you give your girlfriend a diamond necklace, but you don’t tell her you stole it.

The result is that you present a half truth, or biased information, that makes something look better than if the full details were revealed.

2 – Diversion

Diversion is like a magic trick. You shift the focus away from what you don’t want the audience to see, by doing something that distracts their attention.

For example, your partner is angry at you for missing a date last week, so you give them a gift and they forgive you.

3 – Confusion

The final way to downplay your own limitations, or your competitors strengths, is to create confusion. This can be done by presenting lots of evidence contrary to a certain opinion.

This tactic is very common with medical companies.

Often you will find companies sponsoring research which supports their own product, and/or sponsoring research which disproves alternatives.