By Jeff van Booven, Production Associate
When creating content, developing credibility is a key aim. There are three main areas for building credibility: logical, ethical, and emotional--or respectively, logos, ethos, and pathos. By attending to all three of these areas, your content will have better viability and engender better trust with your end user.
When creating content, developing credibility is a key aim. There are three main areas for building credibility: logical, ethical, and emotional--or respectively, logos, ethos, and pathos. By attending to all three of these areas, your content will have better viability and engender better trust with your end user.
Logos
Logos, or logic, is the most important of the three. At a bare minimum, it calls on you to get your facts straight. Nothing will turn off a reader quicker than factual errors. Logos is more than that though. It calls on the author to apply logic properly, avoiding logical fallacies—a simple Google search will introduce you—and to make a fair attempt at both gathering and applying evidence fairly. Showing the reader that other arguments and concerns have been taken into consideration helps to build their trust in you and your product.
Ethos
Ethos, or ethics, is about building your own credibility. It asks, why should anybody trust you? Developing credibility through logos and pathos helps to build personal credibility, but more than anything, demonstrating a clear grasp on the matter at hand is key. The reader is looking to you to present them with information they don’t have and subsequently desire. For example, if you’re buying a car, do you want a veteran mechanic from an independent shop or the marketing guy for Chrysler? Think for a moment why you might prefer the mechanic over the marketer. For one, the mechanic clearly has better credibility to evaluate the product, but he also is free of conflicts of interest. Lastly, a basic command of the medium is an important step to building your own personal ethos.
Pathos
Pathos, or emotion, is perhaps the most conflicted forms of credibility when it comes to marketing, particularly as it is practiced today. While good writing and emotional credibility would suggest you avoid using emotional appeals, particularly of the sentimental variety, I assume most of us know the power of the emotional appeal in order to promote a product or cause. Spend enough time watching television and you’ll see the sad puppies set to sad music. You can’t get much more sentimental than that, but most advertising does tend to rely on such tactics of cheap emotional appeals to some degree—what is technically called sentimentality. While I would argue to avoid using sentimentality to manipulate the audience, doing so would be disingenuous when we all clearly can see how effective it is in marketing. However, from time to time, your audience may surprise you with their ability to see through such manipulative attempts, so it may be best to use it sparingly and in tempered manners.
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