Expertise

We tend to trust expertise & authority.

None of us have time to learn everything in the world, so on many issues, we look to people with experience, expertise, and authority, whose advice and influence we can trust.

Therefore, some speakers will try to establish or remind people of their expertise & authority.

For example, this is an ad for a meditation app called Headspace. How does it seek to establish expertise and authority?

Headspace mediate running knox ad 2

How does this ad seek to establish expertise and authority?

There are, in a sense, two speakers.

Headspace is the main speaker, the one who wants to persuade the audience.

But Headspace want to establish their character by showing how other experts and authorities use their app, so they make an ad featuring a well-known American running coach acting as a speaker for Headspace. (This is called a testimonial ad; they are super common.)

What elements in this ad communicate expertise & authority?

"Knox, Running Coach": the ad provides almost no detail about Knox, but it says he's a running coach. That creates a certain level of authority. (But is he really a coach or is he an actor? You might not know!)
Visual composition: Knox looks calm and confident and he's draped in his shoes. Time and effort went into taking a nice photo. That creates a certain level of authority as well.
Brand identity: It's cropped off in this image, but the original ad has the headspace logo which is so well known that it creates a level of authority, too.

Here's another example.

Sites like Masterclass and BBC Maestro sell online courses taught by world experts. The authority and reputation of the expert are what make people take a particular course.

Here's the banner for a BBC Maestro course from Paula Scher, who is one of the giants of graphic design.

In terms of establishing expertise and authority, how is it similar to the Headspace ad and how is it different?

Paul Scher Maestro BBC

How is this ad similar to the Headspace ad and how is it different?

It has a similar visual composition: a strong portrait with relevant props.

The biggest difference is it adds more detail to Paula Scher's bio, name-checking a few of her most famous clients.

Why do they do this?

With Headspace, the speaker wants the audience to buy the app, not buy coaching from Knox. So they provide just enough detail for you to respect Knox enough to respect Headspace.

With BBC Maestro, the speaker wants the audience to buy Paula's course, which means selling Paula's expertise more forcefully.

To that end, if you were to go to the website, you'd find a video below the fold in which Paula talks about her course while intercut with big testimonials to amplify her expertise:

Another way to establish authority is to remind people how long you've been involved in something, the depth of your history.

For example, in 1915, an activist called Ann Howard Shaw was still fighting for the right for American women to vote. How does she establish expertise in this snippet?

When I came into your hall tonight, I thought of the last time I was in your city. Twenty-one years ago I came here with Susan B. Anthony, and we came for exactly the same purpose as that for which we are here tonight. Boys have been born since that time and have become voters, and the women are still trying to persuade American men to believe in the fundamental principles of democracy.

"The Fundamental Principle of a Republic"(1915)

How does the speaker establish expertise in this snippet?

"21 years" and "Susan B. Anthony".

Shaw establishes authority by stating that she has been in this campaign for 21 years and worked alongside one of its most famous leaders.

In our lesson on forms of evidence, we talked about Camel Cigarettes and their ad campaigns in the 1940s and 50s where they loved to show doctors smoking.

How does this Camel ad attempt to convey expertise and authority?

camels_private_practice

How does this ad attempt to convey expertise and authority?

Some of the authority comes from this specific man being a doctor.

However, this man is not a doctor; all the "doctors" in these ads were actors.

Some of the authority comes from force of numbers: doctors were surveyed by not one, not two, but three independent research organisations!

However, the surveys were basically fake, like the doctors.

That's not to say that a lot of doctors didn't smoke in the 1940s—they sure did, and they probably had throat cancers to prove it!

But the supposed expertise and authority in this ad for Camels is completely fake.

Let's play around with this concept.

Using this image as inspiration, imagine a speaker is trying to establish themselves as an expert or authority on an issue. How might they do it? What would they say or how would they present themselves?

Man fishing in manhole cover

Using this image as inspiration, how might a speaker establish themselves as an expert or authority? (3-5 sentences)

Sometimes people actively don't trust expertise & authority.

For example, they might feel that experts abuse their power and so are untrustworthy.

If that's the context, then a speaker might downplay their own expertise or develop a character based on attacking experts.

Persuasive levers 1: Character