Ian Pancho

Santa Rosa Rm 2263

552 University Rd
Santa Barbara CA 93106
ipancho@ucsb.edu

March 21, 2020

Writing 2 Publishing House, Inc.
1234 Gaucho Rd., UCSB

Dear Mrs. Feldman,

My paper, entitled “Psychology and Marketing: A Beautiful Relationship,” focuses on the

psychological effects of marketing, involving the disciplines of “psychology” and
“communication.” It will discuss and compare the discourse used in the academic articles I
found across both disciplines. I believe your journal is the appropriate location for my paper
because it will see how the authors of my sources communicate and organize their ideas
supported by their findings, evidence, and concepts within their fields.

The paper blends the majors I currently study: psychological and brain sciences and
communication. I study them because they complement each other in a way that can be applied
in the real-world. The sources I used came from the UCSB Library database, thus giving me
credible academic articles and books. My desire to pursue marketing as a career was also a factor
in my research. Thus, my career-driven attitude makes me a well-qualified candidate for your
journal and the academic study of discourse within those communities.

The paper’s sources are peer-reviewed articles from expert authors in their fields. Popular
publications, such as magazines, are seen as credible; however, the incorporation of academic
articles was my main goal for this paper since popular publications are intended for a general
audience. Your journal is a credible organization within academic discourse studies; thus, I made
sure to craft my paper to live up to your standards of publication.

Thank you for your time in reading my letter. I intend to conduct a follow-up phone call on
March 31st at 2pm to see if you are interested in setting up an interview to further discuss the
potential publication of my research. Additionally, documents, such as an annotated bibliography
with more sources, are attached should you want to explore the paper on a deeper level. Once
again, thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Ian Pancho

Enclosure: “Psychology and Marketing: A Beautiful Relationship”

Ian Z. Pancho

Rachel Feldman

WRIT 2

21 March 2020

Psychology and Marketing: A Beautiful Relationship

How can two things be drastically different and appeal to different audiences yet

complement each other? Take, for instance, cookies and milk: how do two foods with different

purposes fit each other like pieces in a puzzle? Despite the universal purpose of a cookie and a

glass of milk, they complete an unintentional puzzle. Now, apply this idea to academia and real-

world examples; for example, the disciplines of psychology and communication. Psychology is

the study of human behavior and mind. Communication is the spread of ideas from one entity to

another through messages, visuals, or sound. One can clearly notice the interconnected nature

between these two because the communication of ideas can affect human behavior in various

ways. An instance of this is someone communicating to their friend that a chocolate chip cookie

tastes better with a glass of milk, thus prompting the friend to try out this theory for themselves

(ultimately affecting their behavior). Essentially, psychology and communication possess a

cookie-milk relationship. These disciplines are layered with different levels of complexity for

scholars to analyze, which ultimately creates discourse communities. John Swales, author of

“Reflections on the concept of discourse community”, mentions that “discourse community” has

a complicated definition, but scholars use the term as “a way of recognizing that communications

largely operate within conventions and expectations established by communities of various

kinds” (Swales 4). They are intensive disciplines that consist of researchers and scholars using

jargon, presentation, evidence, and conclusions to share their findings. Every discourse
community has their own characteristics to present such findings, and psychology and

communication both have a community that evidently showcases this concept. In this essay, I

will discuss the intertwined relationship between psychology and communication, specifically

marketing, while simultaneously comparing their respective discourse communities’ way of

organizing and expressing research.

Researchers mainly make up the population of these communities in order to further

society’s understanding of psychology and communication. These researchers belong to their

respective discourse communities and write articles that undergo peer-revision, a process where

their summarized findings are reviewed by other experts within their field before being sent to a

journal editor for publication approval. The articles I found to represent both disciplines are

research articles. The communication-discipline article is “Persuasive messages, popularity

cohesion, and message diffusion in social media marketing” and written by Hueiju Yu, from the

advertising program in Chinese Culture University, and Hsi-Peng Lu and Yu-Ting Chang, both

from the Department of Information Management in the National Taiwan University of Science

and Technology. The psychology-discipline article is written by Gergana Nenkov, a professor

from Boston College focusing on consumer decision-making behavior; her article is “It's all in

the mindset: Effects of varying psychological distance in persuasive messages”. Based on these

article titles, it can be inferred that psychology plays a role in the communication of persuasive

messages. While both disciplines engage in scholarly writing to present their research, they have

their own techniques and similarities when expressing research — which is found through their

articles’ organization of the presentation of data and types of evidence.

To provide an introduction, both of my articles present their claims via an abstract, a brief

summary that includes a generalized claim. Chang, Lu, and Yu’s abstract states, “This research
investigates how persuasive messages… can lead internet users to click like and share messages

in social media marketing activities” (Chang et al. 777). Immediately, readers infer that this

article will focus on marketing while indirectly touching on psychology due to the captivating

influence of social media. These authors display their intention of appealing to an audience of

marketing researchers. They note that social media’s popularity provides a virtual playground for

marketing professionals. This exposes social media’s power to bolster the psychological tactics

of persuasive marketing posts seen online by social media users, who are the consumers.

Similarly, Nenkov includes her claim in her abstract, writing that persuasive messages in

marketing “can be maximized if their framing is matched to where target consumers are in their

decision making process at the time they evaluate the message” (Nenkov 615). Nenkov uses the

concept of persuasion as a foundation for her research in psychological marketing. Her claim

alludes to the impact of messages on consumers while they are in a certain mindset. This short

introduction outlines her ability to showcase her findings about this relationship and how they

contribute to the collective knowledge of both disciplines. Hence, it is from the abstract where

readers can develop an understanding of what each discourse community has in store for their

disciplines.

While authors follow the genre convention of including their claim in their abstract in

order to lay the groundwork for their findings — this ultimate similarity across both respective

discourse communities splits into its own way of presentation to give the communities their

defining characteristics. For example, in Chang, Lu, and Yu’s article, it is divided into five

sections, each with subsections crafting a fleshed-out article. The first section is an introduction

and the second being a literature review attempting to discuss the general idea of marketing

within social media. They proceed to introduce a research model in the third section that is a
flowchart explaining how the three types of persuasive messages (which are deemed

“persuasive” due to either their argument quality, post popularity, or post attractiveness) are

shared because their study “develops a theoretical framework according to ELM [elaboration

likelihood model]” (Chang et al. 778). This theoretical model is divided into each of its aspects

and explained to the readers. The model’s aspects are: persuasive messages, beliefs and attitudes,

and behavioral intention. Judging from these section titles, the model exposes the psychological

backbone of social media marketing. It explains that social media posts are shared based on

either their usefulness or personal preference of the user, which both fall under the “beliefs and

attitudes” section of the model. The article then applies the model to a research study by

researching a Taiwanese cooking community site called iCook, “this research targets iCook’s

fans on Facebook and analyzes how articles affect like and share intention” (Chang et al. 779). In

this section of the article, it explains that it conducted the research through a questionnaire and

supported it with statistical evidence and analysis. From this research, it builds the fifth section

as the discussion, which summarizes and concludes their findings. This section effectively

presents their findings to the respective discourse community by concluding that marketing

managers need to “plan marketing approaches according to fans profile” (Chang et al. 782). This

article is a recommendation to marketing teams. It highlights how psychology plays a role when

appealing to certain audiences that base their share or like intention on either the usefulness of a

post or their own preference. Overall, the authors’ way of organizing their article is based upon

its content, much like their theoretical model. It is as if the entire article mimics its own creation

in order to indirectly persuade their intended audience to agree with their claims on social media

marketing. This organization style serves its discourse community through the unique
conventions that contribute to the collective knowledge of the relationship between psychology

and communication.

In contrast, Nenkov’s article emphasizes her research on experimental psychology and its

relationship to marketing, thus representing the psychological discourse community. Her article

discusses the psychological-orientation of persuasive messages in marketing and is organized

into four sections: her hypothesis, two experimental studies, and her conclusion. She introduces

the concept of psychologically distanced and close messages affecting the pre- or post-decisional

mindsets of consumers. She mentions that a psychologically distanced message “emphasize[s]

issues related to the future or to consumers nationwide” and should be associated with a

consumer in a predecisional mindset, where the individual is deciding whether or not to pursue a

goal; in contrast, a psychologically close message, one that emphasizes the present or individual,

should be incorporated with a postdecisional mindset, one that decides how to achieve a goal

(Nenkov 616). This claim serves as the foundation for her next two sections that include her

experimental studies. Her claim posing as a recommendation can be interpreted as a convention

used in the psychological discourse community. Nenkov is explicit with the fact that psychology

plays a role in communication and shows that through her blunt style of defining her keywords

and claim. The conventions of the discourse community are further characterized by her

experiments with groups of adults. These experiments employed “different mindset

manipulations, utilize[d] different targets… and look[ed] at different outcomes of persuasion”

(Nenkov 618). This research focuses on the behavioral implications of different messages on

different mindsets and touches on communication’s impact on human behavior through

psychological research methods, thus providing substance to characterize the psychology

discourse community. Additionally, the author assumes the reader is familiar with statistical
jargon, such as “confidence interval”, to follow the flow of the article (Nenkov 624). The

incorporation of another discipline showcases the idea that this particular discourse community is

reliant on the intersection of various disciplines to conduct experiments. This indirectly alludes

to psychology’s tendency to intertwine itself with the disciplines it analyzes. However, she does

not lose sight of the goal of analyzing the relationship between psychology and marketing. Her

final section concludes that her findings “have important implications for creating targeted

persuasive messages…” (Nenkov 626). She wants to paint her article as a recommendation for

creating compelling messages in product marketing. This article supports its claim through

experimental data and logical reasoning in order to create a convincing argument that certain

psychologically-orientated messages should be paired with certain mindsets. Ultimately, her

analysis of her psychological experiments causes her to draw conclusions from her data, thus

showcasing a scientific-driven theme among the psychology discourse community.

While both articles are independent of each other, they recognize the relationship

between communication and psychology, and express their own recommendations to their

respective discourse communities on how to apply the relationship between these two disciplines

in real world marketing applications. A combination of jargon, statistics, organizational style,

and ways of conducting research characterize each respective community, recalling Swales’ idea

that a discourse community has its own conventions of communication. Both articles discuss the

psychological effects of marketing yet organize their findings in different ways to pay homage to

their community. In so doing, they possess a dynamic that completes an unexpected academic

puzzle. The relationship these disciplines have is a beautiful and complex connection; one that is

unexpected, but perfectly pairs like cookies and milk.

 Works Cited

Chang, Yu-Ting, Hueiju Yu, and Hsi-Peng Lu. "Persuasive Messages, Popularity Cohesion, and

Message Diffusion in Social Media Marketing." Journal of Business Research 68, no. 4

(2015): 777-82.

Nenkov, Gergana. "It's All in the Mindset: Effects of Varying Psychological Distance in

Persuasive Messages." Marketing Letters 23, no. 3 (2012): 615-28.

Swales, John. 2016. “Reflections on the Concept of Discourse Communities.” OpenEdition

Journals, March, 7–19. http://journals.openedition.org/asp/4774.