Counter Arguments In College

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We will do this through a peripheral route because students are generally mentally fatigued to be able to engage in the central route to persuasion. Although many students demonstrate cognitive complexity, we believe our message will resonate with our target audience because they are students living busy schedules. College has been proven to be one of the most stressful times in a person’s life. Managing the different responsibilities of school, Greek life, and athletics causes students to find different ways to complete their required daily tasks.
Although there are counter arguments to our message, we are prepared to refute them. People may believe energy drinks are more effective than coffee due to the larger amounts of sugar and caffeine; …show more content…

Although energy drinks are convenient and can supply people with a quick burst of energy when burnt out, it can also lead to weight gain, cardiac arrests, and vomiting (HRF, 2014). The two-sided arguments used to build the campaign are in effort to acknowledge the potential counter arguments and to offer a sense of choice and freedom to UMD students. According to Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory (1957), people tend to readily remember information that is consistent with their beliefs, and therefore it would lead to not paying much attention or being able to retain things that cause more dissonance. Again, if students believe that consuming energy drinks are harmful, which is what our survey seems to suggest, then students would remember all the negatives versus the positives. First, we present any possible counter arguments, followed by the argument we put together. The order in which we place is vital. Placing our argument last will potentially resonate with students and will help retain the information. We plan to approach the consumption problem by appealing to their emotional attachments towards physical appearance and logic to support claims. This relates to Aristotle’s pathos and logos methods of persuasion (Brizee, Driscoll, & Ethan, …show more content…

Our spokespeople or groups will engage in face-to-face interaction with students coming in and out of beverage vendors that sell energy drinks. For example, the Stamp convenient store and Footnotes Café in Mckeldin library are two locations with high traffic flow on a regular basis. To gain more visibility around campus we will create flyers and posters with anti-energy drink messages placed along the walkways and sidewalks, without the need of spokespeople. In order to become more flexible with student schedules and for practicality, establishing a social media presence is the best channel we utilize to reach our audience. This is because doing so would have the highest yield of views to our message. In particular the social networking site Facebook, which is comprised of 71% of online adults (Pew Research Center) and Instagram, which is a image heavy platform and skews towards women (Smith, 2014). Our formative research did not directly address what would be the best avenue to distill this message in our audience because solid data exists surrounding site engagement from college aged students. In particular, 89% of Internet users who use social networking sites are between the ages of

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