Motivated audiences and engagement strategies

¶ … motivated audience has positive attitudes about the speaker and/or the topic. Motivated audience supports the speaker. They too can be moved inspired, stimulated and enthused through the persuasive efforts of the speakers: with a motivated audience a speaker directs and maintains their support.

It takes a skill to have this motivated audience. It seems to time that there must be two major determinants present: firstly, that the audience has need, o has some sort of contingency that it wishes the speaker to address. Secondly, that the speaker is skilled enough to arouse this needed. The first need not be present, but the second needs to be present for the speaker to bring it out and reinforce it. A boring or tedious speaker may simply squash any possible present motivation.

Speaking, it seems to me, has much in common with salesmanship. A marketing professional too endeavors to sell something. The way he does so is by attempting to show prospective buyer that the client needs the product or service that he, the seller, is offering. The seller endeavor to show client his need even though client may be unaware of that need. The seller then proceeds to show that he has a product that can fulfill that need, and that buyer can find that same product (with all those benefit) at no other location. The seller tries to make the buyer motivated to the extent that the buyer will leap out of his seat and be prepared to offer almost any price for that item.

The speaker has corollaries to the marketing professional. There are some speeches that are excluded from that description, but in other speeches the speaker wishes to persuade the audience to adopt some sort of action or some sort of perception. To do so, he must motivate them and this is not simple given the fact that the audience is usually variegated, diverse mix of people who may be attracted to different belief values and opinions and may have different perspectives to not only the speaker but also to each other.

One of the most memorable pieces of advice that I have read about producing a motivating speech comes not from books on public speaking but from books on writing.

The author recommends that the writer should proceed in the following way:

Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so that they will remember it and above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light" (J. Pulitzer in Royal, 51)

The same conditions apply to the speaker. He has as difficult a challenge, in a different way, to the writer. He too must motivate his audience; move them in a certain direction. The best writer is someone who speaks in a natural tone. Writing and speaking are similar. And both are directed to moving the audience.

President Lyndon Johnson seemed to have understood this. People like to feel good about themselves. There are certain psychologies too that simulate people in different ways. Speakers tend to frequently incorporate logical fallacies in their speech (such as appeal to conformism (the 'bandwagon') or to ad hominem abusam, but this is because these elements psychology hook people. Johnson's speech (1965) was an appeal for equal voting rights for Blacks, but his speech, when analyzed, seems to have received its force from appeal to transcendental values:

"Should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation…. For with a country as with a person, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

Johnson ends his speech with the words:

God will not favor everything that we do. It is rather our duty to divine His will. But I cannot help believing that He truly understands and that He really favors the undertaking that we begin here tonight."