Kraft Takeover of Cadbury
Final Assignment

In this essay I will be discussing the chain of events that took place in the takeover negotiations between Kraft and Cadbury, how the stock exchange was going up and down constantly through the negotiations, how each side tried to find an signs to either life up the price or offer less, as well as how each group tries to persuade others to get what they want and what kind of psychological persuasion theories did my group use on others such as the Narrative paradigm persuasion method which resulted in Cadbury’s shareholders gaining the highest possible price, and how other groups used some methods on us in order to persuade us.
Throughout the discussion the attitude changed several times of Cadbury shareholders, As the advisors we should monitor and understand these attitude changes so that we do not lose our jobs. Social judgment theory is the best theory to address to describe how difficult people can be, which shows why it is appropriate in this difficult takeover. Social judgment theory is a way to understand how the other thinks to persuade and understand them. The social judgment theory has some key principles. Categorizing judgments by which we evaluate persuasive positions. That’s the most important principle to start working and persuading others, the second principle is after categorizing of judgments you should file the received persuasive information accordingly with the correct category. So it is simply explained that we determine which category a given position belongs in. the implications of this principle in relation to persuading others is direct. For example if someone positions the received information as rejected then it will not be persuasive. It is generally found that if you think that everything else is equal it is easier to influence someone with larger latitude of acceptance rather than larger latitude of rejection. The odds are better that you will express a position that the receiver can live with. By contrast, with large latitude of rejection it is much harder there are fewer things that the receiver will accept so it has to be dealt with much more care because there will be lots of things that have negative affect or change the attitude negatively.
Social judgment theory’s third principle is the level of ego-involvement that has direct relation with the size of rejecting or accepting latitudes. Ego-involvement means how much the person care about the decision or sometimes how important the issue is to self-identity. The more ego involved the larger the rejecting latitude will be. So as Cadbury shareholders the ego-involvement is really high because they care about the decisions from many aspects. Firstly, the company is a family company and by selling it will become commercial. Secondly, there are lots of amounts of money to be involved, finally the future of their family company and their future and their wealth all these factors cause their ego-involvement to raise and raise therefore there rejecting latitude is larger causing is to be very careful when approaching them.
Especially when there was a problem between the shareholders and the board and the board lost trust in them this shows how ego involved they are and we needed more and more understanding and categorizing to handle the situation. The fourth principle is controlling the distortion of incoming information to fit our categories of judgment. The theory holds that we will distort incoming information depending upon the “anchor position”, the anchor position is the one position in the latitude of acceptance that we find to be the most acceptable.
Principle 5 is moderating between our anchor positions and the one advocated will cause us to change. Social judgment theory shows that persuasion cannot occur if new information is judged to fall within the latitude of rejection. Slowly dividing the theory and categorizing the situation we can conclude that if the person is ego-involved in