Personal selling approaches used in television shopping

Television shopping simulates a personalized selling situation: it combines salesmanship with parasocial interaction. Segments of two major shopping channels, Home Shopping Network (HSN) and Quality Value Convenience (QVC), were coded for the use of persuasion strategies by the host, co-host, or callers. The specific persuasion strategies coded were those identified by Cialdini, strategies that often cause a person to automatically say yes in a selling situation when they might otherwise say no. Although all strategies were evident, the strategy used most frequently in the 104 segments was social proof (35.5 percent), followed by scarcity (28.4 per cent) and authority (18.4 percent).