Social Marketing Propaganda Effectiveness on Attitude Change Essay

Social Marketing Propaganda Effectiveness on Attitude Change - Essay Example The notion that a crowd takes over the will of a person much like the suggestions of a hypnotist command the unconscious of the hypnotized are promoted in trying to analyze crowd behavior, (Wichers, 1996). Â  The science of social influence addresses the issue of how and why people change their thoughts, feelings, and behavior of other people through such processes as conformity, persuasion, and attitude change compliance and yielding to social forces and most importantly, the study of social influences aims at developing mechanisms to resist unwanted and undesirable social influences. Jowett & O'Donnell, (2006) agree that time separates the study of propaganda from the political ideologies that hovered over academe in the cold war period and there is a clear revival of interest in the importance of the roles played by propaganda in the many aspects of the modern life, not necessarily related to international intrigue and military campaigns as the first world war changes the traject ory of social influence research. ...On the other hand propaganda and Social marketing are similar in ideologies as social marketing is the taking into action and control measures aimed at influencing the acceptability of social ideas and involving considerations of product planning, pricing, communication, distribution, and marketing research which is all aimed at influencing individual thinking abilities and perception towards a product, (Kotler & Zaltman, 1971). In this definition, the ideology of propaganda and social marketing are pushed forward by ideology rather than pulled by magnetic consumer focus and hence the ideas that define social marketing artifacts are rare. In the United States and Britain the war was marked by a period of patriotism and after the war, many people became disillusioned by the results coming to feel that they have been duped by the propaganda behind it. Based on human behaviour, the Zeitgeist of the times encouraged the belief that social influence a nd mass propaganda was all-powerful based on the suggestion theories from psychoanalysis or behaviorism’s belief in malleable human behavior where researchers and scholars began documenting this belief as well as attempting to find ways to inoculate citizens from propaganda, (Pratkanis, 2007). Weak effects of these variables on social influence as on the other hand in the 1940 Presidential campaign it was observed that few voters changed their voting preferences as a result of the mass media content due to the period 1890 – 1914 witnessed the development of fully fledged advertising agencies (Cull, Culbert & Welch, 2003).