Noel Capon

Persuasive Effects of Sales Messages Developed from Interaction Process Analysis

Abstract:
In a field experiment three salesman employed six alternative messages in attempting to sell a magazine subscription to student subjects randomly selected from the registrar's listing at a major university. Three conversational and three nonconversational messages, developed from Bales's Interaction Process Analysis, were employed in a telephone selling paradigm, designed to minimize extraneous nonverbal communication. Each salesman contacted prospective subjects (n = 78, 73, 118) until he had completed 42 sales attempts, 7 per message, for which a postquestionnaire was administered. Using an anlysis of variance framework, few main effects were observed, but the significant interaction effects (p < .01) between salesman and sales treatment indicated that perception of and success of the salesman could not be separated from the sales message. The results supported balance theory and the perceived similarity hypothesis, but not the extended perceived similarity hypothesis.

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