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Business Communication: Building Critical Skills
Kitty O. Locker, Ohio State University
Steven Kyo Kaczmarek, Columbus State Community College
Kathryn Braun, Sheridan College
Adapting Your Message to Your Audience

E-Learning Session

  1. Know these five kinds of audiences. PDF DOCUMENT
    1. Primary audience -decides whether to accept your recommendations or acts on the basis of your message. You must reach the decision maker to fulfill your purposes.
    2. Secondary audience-may be asked to comment on your message or to implement your ideas after they've been approved. Secondary audiences can also include lawyers who may use your message-perhaps years later-as evidence of your organization's culture and practices.
      CONCEPT CHECK True or false: Because primary audiences decide to accept your recommendations or act on the basis of your message, secondary audiences are unimportant. CONCEPT CHECK
    3. Initial audience- receives the message first and routes it to other audiences. Sometimes the initial audience also tells you to write the message.
    4. Gatekeeper-has the power to stop your message before it gets to the primary audience. A secretary who decides who gets to speak to or see the boss is a gatekeeper. Sometimes the supervisor who assigns the message is also the gatekeeper; however, sometimes the gatekeeper is higher in the organization. In some cases, gatekeepers exist outside the organization.
      CONCEPT CHECK True or false: The initial audience and gatekeeper can be one and the same. CONCEPT CHECK
    5. Watchdog audience- does not have the power to stop the message and will not act directly on it, but has political, social, or economic power. The watchdog pays close attention to the transaction between you and the primary audience and may base future actions on its evaluation of your message.
      CONCEPT CHECK True or false: You will always know who the watchdog audiences are for your messages. CONCEPT CHECK
    6. For messages going to multiple audiences, writers should use the primary audience and the gatekeeper to decide on message detail, organization, level of formality, and technical terms and theory.
  2. The last 5 questions in PAIBOC relate to your audience. PDF DOCUMENT
    1. What are your purposes in writing? (P)Your purposes come from you and your organization. Your audience determines how you achieve those purposes, but not what the purposes are.
    2. Who is (are) your audiences? How do members of your audience differ? What characteristics are relevant to this particular message? (A)These questions ask directly about your audience.
    3. What information must your message include? (I) The information you need to give depends on your audience. You need to say more when the topic is new to your audience. If your audience has heard something but may have forgotten it, you'll want to protect readers' egos by saying "As you know," or putting the information in a subordinate clause: "Because we had delivery problems last quarter, . . ."
      CONCEPT CHECK True or false: It is OK to assume your audience is up-to-date on the topic of your message. CONCEPT CHECK
    4. What reasons or reader benefits can you use to support your position? (B)What counts as a good reason and what is a benefit depends on your audience. For some audiences, personal experience counts as a good reason. Other audiences are more persuaded by scientific studies or by experts. For some people, saving money is a good benefit of growing vegetables. Other people may care less about the money than about avoiding chemicals, growing varieties that aren't available in grocery stores, or working outside in the fresh air. (Reader benefits are discussed in more detail in Module 8.)
      CONCEPT CHECK True or false: The same benefits are likely to work for different audiences. CONCEPT CHECK
    5. What objections can you expect your reader(s) to have? What negative elements of your message must you de-emphasize or overcome? (O)
    6. How will the context affect reader response? Think about your relationship to the reader, morale in the organization, the economy, the time of year, and any special circumstance. (C)
  3. These eight other audience analysis concepts will also help you.
    1. Use empathy, or putting yourself in the audiences' shoes. Empathy requires you to imagine yourself as the audience and to anticipate and understand the audiences' emotional, psychological, and physical needs. Therefore, you must avoid being self-centered.
    2. Knowledge refers to how much the audience knows about a topic. Avoid assuming the audience knows as much as you do, even if you've interacted with that audience before.
    3. Demographic factors are such measurable, or quantitative, characteristics as age, race, income, family size, educational level, and so forth.For an example, see WEB LINK
    4. Values and beliefs are sometimes expressed as psychographics. These are more subjective, or qualitative, measurements, and include goals and lifestyle choices.
    5. Personality can be assessed in many ways but the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is perhaps the most popular. It uses four dimensions to identify personality: introvert-extravert, sensing-intuitive, thinking-feeling, and judging-perceiving. WEB LINK
      CONCEPT CHECK True or false: According to Myers-Briggs, being extraverted is better than being introverted. CONCEPT CHECK
    6. Past Behavior can help predict how people will react in similar situations in the future.
    7. A discourse community is a group of people who share assumptions about what channels, formats, and styles to use, what topics to discuss and how to discuss them, and what constitutes evidence. For an example, see WEB LINK
    8. An organizational or corporate culture is revealed verbally in the organization's myths, stories, and heroes and nonverbally in the allocation of space, money, and power. For an example, see WEB LINK
  4. Use audience analysis to adapt your message to the following five aspects. PDF DOCUMENT
    1. Strategy
      • Make the action as easy as possible.
      • Protect the reader's ego.
      • Decide how to balance logic and emotion, what details to use, and whether to use a hard-sell or soft-sell approach based on the specific audience, the organizational culture, and the discourse community.
      • Choose appeals and reader benefits that work for the specific audience (See Module 8).
      • Modules 7, 11, and 13 show how to emphasize positive aspects, decide how much information to include, and overcome obstacles.
    2. Organization
      • Since most managers are intuitive types, it's usually better to get to the point right away. The major exceptions are
        1. When we must persuade a reluctant reader.
        2. When we have bad news and want to let the reader down gradually.
      • Make the organizational pattern clear to the audience. Modules 9, 23, and 24 show you how to use headings and overviews. Module 20 shows how to use overviews and signposts in oral presentations.
    3. Style
      • For most audiences, use easy-to-understand words, a mixture of sentence lengths, and paragraphs with topic sentences (see Modules 15 and 16).
      • Avoid words that sound defensive or arrogant.
      • Avoid hot buttons or red flag words to which some readers will have an immediate negative reaction: criminal, un-American, crazy, fundamentalist, liberal.
      • Use the language(s) that your audience knows best. In Quebec, messages are normally presented both in English and in French. In the Southwest United States, messages may be most effective printed in both English and Spanish.
      • Use conversational, not "academic," language.
        CONCEPT CHECK True or false: Using jargon is OK if your audience(s) will understand it. CONCEPT CHECK
    4. Document Design
      • Use lists, headings, and a mix of paragraph lengths to create white space.
      • Choices about format, footnotes, and visuals may be determined by the organizational culture or the discourse community.
      • See Module 5 for advice about effective document design.
    5. Photographs and Visuals
      • Use bias-free photographs.
      • Photos and visuals can make a document look more informal or more formal. Think of the difference between cartoons and photos of "high art."
      • Some cultures (e.g., France, Japan) use evocative photographs that bear little direct relationship to the text. Most U.S. audiences expect photos that clearly related to the text.
  5. Problem: Analyze the Wendy's International Web site WEB LINK. Discuss in detail who you believe are the primary, secondary, initial, gatekeeper, and watchdog audiences for the site, the assumptions the writer(s) have made about that audience, and how each of the five aspects are addressed. Do you believe the site demonstrates good audience analysis?
    CONCEPT CHECK Why or why not? CONCEPT CHECK
  6. Go to the Self-Quizzes if you would like to test your understanding of this module.




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