This qualitative study investigates the...

Rohaan — 2026-01-11T02:08:37Z

Persuasion constitutes a fundamental dimension of human communication, operating across linguistic, visual, and contextual modes to influence attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. As Beebe and Beebe (2013) note, persuasion does not merely seek to alter such orientations but can also serve to reinforce or consolidate them. Within advertising discourse, persuasive strategies are central to communicative design: they represent the rhetorical mechanisms through which advertisers employ carefully crafted language to construct appeal, stimulate consumer interest, and ultimately shape purchasing decisions. These strategies, however, are never culturally neutral. In the Jordanian context, characterized by a collectivist social orientation, advertising discourse is anchored in cultural values such as loyalty, social cohesion, and emotional reciprocity. Consequently, persuasive communication tends to privilege appeals to trust, sincerity, and shared identity over purely logical or evidence-based reasoning. Such patterns reflect how cultural frameworks mediate the linguistic and pragmatic realization of persuasion. Against this background, the present study investigates the persuasive strategies employed in OpenSooq advertisements, offering insight into how digital marketing in Jordan's rapidly expanding online marketplace mirrors broader socio-cultural norms. By examining how persuasion is discursively constructed within this medium, the study contributes to understanding the dynamic relationship between language, culture, and consumer behavior in Arabic online commercial communication.

Introduction

The study of persuasion has long occupied a central position in rhetorical and communication theory, tracing its origins to Aristotle's seminal The Art of Rhetoric (1991), where persuasion is defined as the capacity to discern the available means of influence in any given context. Aristotle identified three primary modes of appeal: ethos, logos, and pathos. Ethos concerns the credibility and moral integrity of the speaker, emphasizing the persuasive power of trustworthiness and ethical character. Logos, literally meaning “the word,” refers to the logical structuring of arguments and the provision of evidence to substantiate claims. Pathos, by contrast, appeals to the audience's emotions, mobilizing affective resonance to encourage belief or action (Beebe & Beebe, 2013). Although classical in origin, this triadic framework continues to inform contemporary approaches to persuasion and remains foundational to analyses of persuasive discourse.

Subsequent models have expanded Aristotle's rhetorical insights to include cognitive and contextual dimensions. Among the most influential is the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) developed by Petty and Cacioppo (1986) and later refined by Petty and Wegener (1999). ELM conceptualizes persuasion as an audience-centred process, emphasizing the recipient's role in interpreting, evaluating, and internalizing persuasive messages. It posits two distinct routes of persuasion: a central route, where persuasion results from deliberate elaboration and reasoned evaluation of message content, and a peripheral route, where persuasion occurs through intuitive or affective cues such as tone, confidence, or perceived expertise. For example, a consumer who purchases a data plan after comparing logical features and benefits engages the central route, whereas one persuaded by a confident salesperson's assurance of quality follows the peripheral route. The ELM thus highlights that persuasion is not simply a product of message quality but of cognitive engagement, varying according to the listener's motivation and capacity to process information.

While Petty and Cacioppo's (1986) Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) remains a cornerstone of modern persuasion research for its emphasis on cognitive engagement in shaping audience response, it has been critiqued for insufficiently addressing the cultural, relational, and multimodal dimensions of communication (Dillard & Shen, 2013; O'Keefe, 2025). These limitations become particularly salient in non-Western and digital contexts, such as Jordanian online advertising, where persuasion is embedded in social relationships and moral hierarchies rather than operating solely as a cognitive or informational process. To bridge this theoretical and methodological gap, the present study adopts Beebe and Beebe's (2013) framework, originally formulated for analysing persuasive strategies in public speaking, as an adaptable heuristic for examining persuasion in online commercial discourse. Although the framework was not designed explicitly for advertising, its conceptual foundations in rhetorical communication, especially its focus on audience-centeredness, credibility construction, and emotional resonance, render it particularly suited to the analysis of persuasive communication in Arabic digital environments. Both public speaking and online advertising hinge on the communicator's ability to establish trust (ethos), evoke emotional engagement (pathos), and deliver coherent, goal-oriented messages (logos) within socially situated contexts. The strength of Beebe and Beebe's model lies in its interactional orientation, highlighting the relational dynamics between message producer and audience, a dynamic that closely parallels the advertiser, consumer exchange in digital marketplaces such as OpenSooq. Furthermore, its analytical categories enable a systematic mapping of persuasive techniques across linguistic, pragmatic, and multimodal dimensions, extending its applicability beyond oral rhetoric to encompass the fluid, participatory discourse of online communication (cf. Scollon & Scollon, 2001; Herring, 2010). Through this lens, the present study reconceptualises Beebe and Beebe's model as a cross-contextual analytical tool capable of tracing how classical rhetorical principles are localized, hybridized, and culturally re-contextualized within Jordanian digital communication, where relational credibility often supersedes purely informational persuasion.

At the same time, it is important to situate this study within broader traditions of discourse and media analysis. Alternative frameworks such as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Genre Analysis have been widely employed to explore advertising and media communication, particularly in relation to socio-cultural positioning, ideological framing, and communicative purpose (Tahmasbi & Kalkhajeh, 2013; Fahad, 2016; Muhtaroğulları, 2021; Alalya et al., 2024). While these approaches have yielded valuable insights into how advertisements reflect power structures and cultural ideologies, the present research diverges in its rhetorical orientation. Unlike CDA, which conceptualizes discourse as a site of ideological struggle, or Genre Analysis, which privileges structural regularities and communicative conventions, this study views persuasion as a performative, interactional, and audience-driven process. By positioning Beebe and Beebe's rhetorical framework within the digital marketplace, the analysis foregrounds how classical persuasive principles are refracted through the Jordanian cultural lens, producing hybrid communicative forms where relational trust, ethical self-presentation, and communal ethos outweigh purely logical or data-driven appeals.

Within Beebe and Beebe's (2013) model, persuasion operates through three interrelated strategic dimensions: establishing speaker credibility (ethos), appealing to logic and evidence (logos), and eliciting emotional engagement (pathos). Among these, emotional appeal, which corresponds to Aristotle's notion of pathos, is particularly potent in shaping audience response, as it mobilizes affective alignment rather than rational deliberation. Persuasion, in this sense, transcends logical reasoning, transforming emotional identification into a motivational force that sustains attention, trust, and action. Each of these major strategies comprises multiple sub-strategies operating at linguistic, cognitive, and relational levels to reinforce persuasive impact. These sub-components, as delineated by Beebe and Beebe, provide a systematic basis for the present analysis. Drawing on this tripartite framework, the study investigates how credibility, logical appeal, and emotional resonance are linguistically realized and culturally mediated within Jordanian online advertisements. In doing so, it addresses the following research questions:

What are the most prevalent persuasive strategies that are featured in OpenSooq advertisements?
In what ways do cultural factors influence the persuasive strategies used?
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces Beebe and Beebe's (2013) model of persuasive strategies and provides an overview of the OpenSooq platform as the study's data source. Section 3 presents a critical review of the literature on persuasion in advertising discourse, emphasizing how existing models have overlooked cultural contextualization in online settings. Section 4 outlines the methodological framework, detailing the research design, data sampling and selection procedures, and analytical processes. Section 5 reports the results of the analysis, illustrating the identified persuasive strategies through representative examples from the dataset. Section 6 offers a discussion of the findings in light of the theoretical framework and relevant cultural dimensions. Finally, Section 7 concludes the paper by summarizing the key findings and highlighting implications for intercultural communication and digital marketing, followed by recommendations for future research.

Setting the Scene

This section sets the conceptual and contextual foundation for the study by outlining the theoretical framework and the communicative environment in which the analysis is situated.

Beebe and Beebe's (2013) Persuasive Strategies

Following Beebe and Beebe's (2013) framework, it is necessary to discuss their persuasive strategies in more depth. The first strategy is enhancing credibility, which centers on the speaker's perceived credibility and the effectiveness of their persuasive speech. In other words, the more credible the audience perceives a speaker to be, the more persuasive the speaker is. This strategy includes three elements: competence, trustworthiness, and dynamism. To be a competent speaker is to be fully informed about the subject matter. This involves anticipating potential questions your audience may ask and being ready to answer them clearly. For instance, if a speaker tries to persuade people to undergo a yearly medical checkup just by merely stating that it is “going to be good for their health, the message might not be sufficiently persuasive. However, if the speaker supports their argument with credible evidence, including medical statistics, the likelihood of persuasion is going to increase significantly, as they would believe it is fact-based and authoritative. Therefore, enhancing credibility reflects competence, which in turn contributes to more effective communication. Secondly, trustworthiness refers to conveying honesty and sincerity during speech. For example, an audience is more likely to trust recommendations on reducing travel expenditure to Europe by someone who has personally experienced such constraints rather than heard such information from a tour guide. This sub-strategy underscores experiential credibility as a means for establishing trustworthiness and, therefore, credibility with the audience. The final aspect of credibility is dynamism, which is a characteristic manifested through a speaker's energy. Charisma is one of the significant representations of dynamism. A charismatic speaker exhibits charm, talent, and magnetic qualities that are naturally appealing to the audience and enhance credibility, Beebe and Beebe (2013).

The second persuasive strategy is using logic and evidence. The foundation of this strategy lies in providing empirical evidence, such as facts and statistics, while adhering to a formal system of logical rules, allowing the audience to make logical inferences from the discourse. This strategy encompasses three types of reasoning: inductive, deductive, and causal reasoning. Inductive reasoning is arriving at a general conclusion through specific examples, i.e., it begins with particular instances and ends with general conclusions indicating probability rather than certainty. The goal of this type of reasoning is to discover novel insights. For instance, to reach a general conclusion that foreign cars are unreliable, one must provide multiple instances of mechanical failures in several foreign cars occurring across various users and circumstances in order to persuade the audience of this point of view.

Conversely, deductive reasoning operates in the opposite direction. Deductive reasoning begins with a general statement and proceeds towards a specific conclusion, indicating that something is definitively true or false. The goal of this sub-strategy is to reach precise conclusions by applying established knowledge where the certainty of the conclusion is drawn from the validity of the general statement. Structurally, deductive reasoning requires a major premise (the overarching statement), then a minor premise (a specific example related to the major premise), and a conclusion derived from these premises. For example, if someone asserts that the establishment of a large discount store in a small town, will lead to the failure of all the small business merchants in that town (major premise), and a particular large discount retailer intends to establish operations in a specific small town (minor premise), then the conclusion follows that permitting this establishment will inevitably result in the failure of local businesses..

The third type is causal reasoning, which is an interplay of cause and effect that concludes that a phenomenon occurred as a result of the other. This type of reasoning operates in two ways: from cause to effect and from effect to cause. In cause-and-effect reasoning, one moves from a known fact to a predictable result, exemplified by weather forecasts that predict future conditions according to the current atmospheric data. Conversely, effect-o-cause reasoning starts with an observed phenomenon and retrospectively identifies its probable cause, as when a major earthquake is attributed to a shift in a fault line in order to explain that event, for example (Beebe and Beebe, 2013).

The last persuasive strategy in Beebe and Beebe's (2013) framework is using emotional appeals. This strategy encompasses multiple sub-strategies. First of all, using concrete examples, which allows an audience to visualize the described scenarios, thereby evoking their emotions by describing how a certain city looked after a tornado destroyed it. In the second place, using emotion-arousing expressions. This technique entails using emotionally loaded words like freedom or slavery to arouse emotional responses from the audience. In the third place comes using nonverbal behavior and visual images, wherein the audience is to experience an emotion by using paralinguistic features such as voice and body language, like gestures. Besides nonverbal expressions, visuals of emotionally evoking scenes can be used to trigger emotions. In the fourth place is using appropriate metaphors and similes. For instance, when a speaker says that “life is a quilt where we stitch the pattern of our character, they are employing a metaphor to conceptualize life in a relatable way. Similarly, similes can achieve a similar effect through the use of comparison markers such as ‘like' and ‘as'. Sopory and Dillard (2002) argue that metaphors and similes can enhance a persuasive strategy by adding an emotional resonance. Fifth, as Beebe and Beebe (2013) suggest, using appropriate fear appeals can be a powerful motivator if used appropriately. Warning listeners against the consequences in case they do not follow a certain recommendation can lead to behavioral change. Sixth, appealing to a variety of emotions such as hope, pride, courage, and reverence can enhance the persuasive tone. For instance, evoking reverence by referring to sacred traditions or religious texts can reinforce audience behavior, especially when the appeal resonates with their deeply held beliefs.

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ICR Publications

This qualitative study investigates the...

Introduction

Setting the Scene

Beebe and Beebe's (2013) Persuasive Strategies