[SOUND] Hi, welcome back to the lesson on understanding your audience. At the end of this lesson, you'll be able to use appropriate strategies when dealing with different personalities. And also explain what the term, what's in it for me or WIIFM, FM in short means. To recap, in the last video we learned that it is the audience that determines what you should say and how you should say it. That is one key reason why understanding the audience is so important. Another key reason why understanding the audience is important is that it allows us to identify appropriate key messages to include in our message. Lets take a look at the following personality matrix. It argues that there are four different personality types in general. There is the promoter, a stimulator who is goal-driven, enthusiastic, innovative, and is a risk taker. The controller, someone who is decisive, takes charge, determined, results oriented, and efficient. The supporter, a team player who is a good listener, works well with people, a consensus builder who's really relationship oriented. And lastly the analyser who is thorough, detailed, rational, organized and is a good planner. Now, why does all this matter? Again, by knowing what personality your audience fall into, you have a better understanding of their characteristics and to us, a better chance of communicating more effectively with them. For example, promoters and controllers are known to be more dominant, while supporters and analysers are more easy going. Also, promoters and supporters tend to be more informal in communication. More importantly, analysers are known to be more rational and logical. So if you are a promoter seeking to persuade an analyser, using hard facts, strong evidence and proof will lead to a more favorable outcome. Likewise, supporters are known to be more emotional and favor the greater good of the community. Thus, if you are controller seeking to persuade a supporter, connecting with emotions and explaining the benefits to the larger community would see better results than using hard facts. Thus as we can see again, it is the audience that determines what you should say and how you should say it. When we understand the audience, we can determine appropriate key reasons for persuasion, whether to appeal to reason or emotion. After identifying the specific reasons, which reason should we include or exclude? Should we use all of the reasons or how do we determine which reason is the most important one? One strategy of doing so, is to use a popular but crude acronym, what's in it for me, of WIIFM. It is another way we can identify not merely appropriate reasons to persuade someone, but identify which ones are the most important. WIIFM stands for what's in it for me? Is a common concept employed in persuasion and negotiations, and it's often used to persuade the audience into taking a particular action. It is very much like dangling a carrot in front of a rabbit. By dangling the important reasons that matter to the audience, this creates a strong impetus for the audience to accept what you are saying and be persuaded by you. But before you can do that, you need to have at least a basic understanding of what motivates the audience. Therefore, understanding the audience is crucial. Let's take the example of a job interview. The purpose of a job interview is to persuade the potential employer to hire you. In a job interview you could talk about your secondary or high school education, your hobbies in life, your previous work experiences. But these experiences may or may not be relevant to what the employer is seeking. If you were to apply the concept of what's in it for me, the first question to ask is, what does the employer need? Always start by understanding your audience. From there, what can you offer that is of value to your employer? Branching out, we could ask, what particular skills are they looking for? Thus if you are asked the question of what is your greatest strength, instead of saying things that are not relevant to what the employer is looking for, you can tailor your answer so that the potential employer is explicitly given the benefits that he or she is looking for. So after conducting an audience analysis and you know that the potential employer is looking for a caring individual that is driven by social issues. Saying that your greatest strength is that you're good with money and you generate that sales revenue of more than $1 million for your previous company, wouldn't be as good as saying that your biggest strength is your passion and you enjoy volunteering to help others. Naturally, making truthful claims are as important as well, for the repercussion for making false claims is severe, and your credibility would end up destroyed as we learned in the previous module. So by thinking about what's in it for me, you are forced to emphasize the more important reasons that benefit the audience first. This leads to a clearer understanding of what you aim to achieve and results in more effective persuasion. We could even use what's in it for me to persuade ourselves. Why do we need to go to school? Why do we need to go to work? What's in it for you to do whatever that you are doing now? Thus, to understand our audience, in order to make our messages effective, we can conduct an audience analysis by asking three basic questions. Who is our audience? What do they already know? What do they think or feel about the subject? These three basic questions will help guide you in understanding your audience better. If you are communicating to a receiver, ie a single person rather than an audience, it would also be relevant and useful to find out if the receiver is a controller, analyzer, supporter or promoter. To understand your audience deeper, more questions can be added, such as how old is your audience or what interests or goals does your audience have. For a detailed audience analysis questionnaire, please see the reading on additional resources. Naturally, in a casual conversation with a colleague, there is no apparent need to understand the audience, unless you need to convince him or her. As mentioned, persuasion requires an in depth understanding of the receiver or audience. We tend to form certain mental assumptions about people without verifying them, and this may lead to ineffective communication. An audience analysis is particularly useful when you need to communicate with someone whom you don't know, someone whom you wish to persuade, or someone you want to negotiate with. An audience analysis can also help you gain valuable insights into the people you are communicating with. Which then determines how you should communicate, what kind of information to include or exclude, what strategy to use in persuasion. Thus, knowing the audience helps you create a writing plan that will be tailored to your audience with the appropriate tone, style, language, and content to maximize your effectiveness in communication. To end this lesson I would like to stress once more, it is important to know what you want to say, but it is the audience that determines what you say and how you say it. Thank you.
