Experience-based authority argumentation in direct-to-consumer medical advertisements: An analytical and empirical study concerning the strategic anticipation of critical questions

In a direct-to-consumer (DTC) medical advertisement an advertiser aims to convince consumers to use a medical product, such as a dietary supplement, a freely obtainable pain killer or a prescription drug. Such advertisements sometimes feature endorsers who claim to have experienced the desirable effects of a product and advise others to try the product as well. This dissertation concerns the strategic manner in which advertisers can use this kind of "experience-based authority argumentation" in American printed DTC medical advertisements.
Using the pragma-dialectical argumentation theory as a theoretical framework, the first part of the dissertation deals with the ways in which advertisers can anticipate the critical questions that a consumer might ask about such an experience-based authority argument. The second part concerns two experiments that were carried out to investigate whether readers of DTC medical advertisements differentiate between reasonable and unreasonable ways of anticipating such criticism.