Marian Friestad

Who they are

This page records the public professional record only. Nothing adverse is recorded and no motive is attributed.

Her University of Oregon faculty page lists her as Professor Emerita of Marketing in the Lundquist College of Business. It describes her research as covering emotional responses to advertising and service encounters, memory for advertising, and how laypeople and experts develop and use knowledge about persuasion. Her wider career was not surveyed for this page.

Key papers

Friestad, M., & Wright, P. (1994). 'The Persuasion Knowledge Model: How People Cope with Persuasion Attempts.' Journal of Consumer Research, 21(1), 1-31. doi:10.1086/209380.

The paper is the reason she appears on this site. Its abstract was read through a bibliographic record; the full text was not read for this page.

Key ideas

The paper argues that research on persuasion had overlooked people's own knowledge of persuaders' aims and methods, and of how to handle them skilfully. It presents a model of how people develop and use that knowledge when they face a persuasion attempt, and draws out what it implies for how consumers use advertising and sales efforts to form attitudes towards products and towards marketers.

Persuasion knowledge, as the term is used on this site, covers beliefs about the persuader's tactics, about how effective and appropriate they are, and about the person's own goals in coping. Persuasion Knowledge holds the concept; Margaret Campbell and Amna Kirmani's 2000 study tested when it is used on a salesperson.

What the model contains

The 1994 paper treats a person's knowledge of persuasion as knowledge in the ordinary sense. It is built up over years of meeting advertisers and salespeople, and it is drawn on when a new attempt arrives. In the terms this site uses, it covers three kinds of belief: beliefs about the persuader's tactics, beliefs about how effective and how appropriate those tactics are, and beliefs about the person's own goals in coping with the attempt.

The paper's contribution was to put the target of persuasion into the account. Earlier work, as the abstract describes it, had overlooked what people already know about persuaders' aims and methods and about how to handle them. The model asks how that knowledge is developed and how it is used when someone tries to move a person.

A worked example

The Tupperware customer in Cialdini's Influence said she hated being invited to the parties, had all the containers she needed, felt she had to go when a friend called, and felt she had to buy something once there. Cialdini comments that such customers “appear to be fully aware of the liking and friendship pressures.” That is persuasion knowledge at work, in plain view: she has a working account of how a host's friendship is used and she can state it. The model describes what she holds. It does not by itself say when the knowledge is called up, or what calling it up buys, because the paper leaves both questions open.

How later work picks the model up

Two later studies cited on this site take the open questions in turn. Campbell and Kirmani (2000) asked when consumers use persuasion knowledge on a salesperson, and found that it depends on whether an ulterior motive is inferred. Chan and Sengupta (2010) asked what remains of a flatterer's effect once the motive has been seen, and found that a favourable implicit attitude persisted after the stated one fell. Research on disclosure labels, including a 2020 meta-analysis of 61 papers, also uses the model to explain why labelling content as sponsored raises recognition of advertising. Each of these is a test of one part of what the 1994 paper proposed.

What this page leaves out

Only the abstract of the 1994 paper was read for this page, through a bibliographic record. It states no sample sizes or effect sizes, because the paper is a conceptual model and not a single experiment. Nothing is said here about her current work or the rest of her record beyond what her faculty page lists.

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