The topic of the programme today is about the power of________and Rachel is invited to reveal the secrets of it.

M: Welcome to our modern world. On our show today, we’ re talking to Rachel Kim about the power of persuasion. All around us, there are advertisements trying to make us believe something, or persuading us to buy something. Fear not, however, Rachel is here to reveal their secrets and show us how to resist all this persuasion. Hi, Rachel. Persuading people is big business, isn’t it? Supermarkets and politicians, advertisers, and salespeople, they all take it very seriously. Don’t they?
W: Yes, they spend a lot of money coming up with psychological tricks to guarantee that even the most cautious among us are open to manipulation.
M: Let’s talk about supermarkets. How do they make us buy things we don’t necessarily want to buy?
W: Well, their first trick is to try to relax us by playing music, and by pumping the smell of freshly-baked bread into the store. Research has shown us that the smell of fresh bread makes people buy more.
M: I know. I’ve probably done that without even thinking about it.
W: Exactly. Most of the time, we’re completely unaware that it’s going on. It’s subconscious persuasion.
M: So what about the advertising industry? How do advertisements persuade us to buy certain products or watch certain shows?
W: There’s so much of it. These days, ads are everywhere from TV shows to websites to our cell phones. And no matter how much we think we know about what the advertisers are doing, they still end up winning. Generally, we still fall for the ad and end up buying the product, which more often than not is something we don’t need.
M: Yes.
W: When you get down to it, there are really only 2 types of ads—those that appeal to the thinking part of our brain and those that appeal to the emotional part. Generally ads that appeal to our emotions are usually much more successful. These emotional ads are often based on psychological theories about the mind. By that, I mean, advertisers know that images can reach our emotions at a level that we are not aware of, and so are much more powerful in persuading us to do things.