Book excerpt: Effective advertising is, almost always, persuasive advertising, and while not all advertising seeks to persuade, in a competitive situation those who best persuade are those most likely to win. This exciting new book seeks to explain the precise ways in which advertising successfully persuades consumers, setting out the strategies for advertisers to adopt and illustrating the theories at work. Offering not only a conceptual and theoretical grounding in persuasive techniques, this book also provides concrete empirical research that is uniquely incorporated into a marketing textbook format. The authors cover topics including: difficulties of persuasion, rationality and emotion in persuasion, positive reinforcement techniques and cognitive approaches to persuasion. To illuminate these theories, the authors include original case-studies on campaigns as diverse as Death Cigarettes, Mecca Cola, The Oxo Family and Renault Clio, as well as recent advertisements from BMW, McDonalds, Omega and Silk Cut. A genuinely fresh text on the art of persuasion in advertising, this book is essential reading for all marketing students and academics.