Rhetorical Appeal in Advertising
Question :
Last week you submitted an outline outlining use of rhetorical appeals in advertising. This week you expand the outline into a full essay, with a critical analysis of the advertisement included. You will need to support each of your main points about ethos, pathos, and logos in the advertisement. You will also need to expand to include your personal analysis in an additional body paragraph: is the advertisement effective? Why or why not? Are the rhetorical appeals used effectively? If not, how could the advertisement have been changed to appeal to a wider audience?
Answer :
Analysing Rhetorical Appeal in an Advertisement
This paper has been developed to analyze an advertisement and its effectiveness in delivering the message and getting the result. For the purpose of analyzing an advertisement, the advertisement of the American Red Cross organization has been selected. The advertisement depicts a girl standing with a blood pouch. It also contains a written message that is "Thank you for sharing a part of your life with me." The focus of this paper is to analyze the selected advertisement in light of ethos, pathos, as well as logos. Apart from this, a formal analysis of the advertisement has also been done. It identifies whether the advertisement is effective or not, whether the rhetorical appeal has been used in the advertisement or not, etc.
Ethos is one of the major categories of persuasive advertising technique that is used by the organizations to persuade the reader or audience of the advertisement to follow the intended message being delivered by the advertisement (Han et al., 2019). The selected advertisement has a girl with a blood pouch that shows she needs blood to save her life. The advertisement is using an ethical appeal to convince the potential audience of the advertisement to donate blood to save her (individual in need) life. It is our ethical responsibility to stand strong to support and help someone fighting with life to get back his/her life. However, the selected advertisement does not have used ethos directly. The main function of using ethos in the advertisement is to gain the trust of the audience and show credibility. Companies use a well-known public figure to show credibility and gain trust. But in the selected advertisement, the organization does not have used a celebrity figure instead of a girl standing with a blood pouch. But it is a social concern and showing a girl with a blood pouch is effective enough to gain the trust of the audience and show the credibility of the advertiser.
This is also a major category of persuasive advertisement and widely being used by the advertiser to convince the audience to believe in the intended message of the advertisement. It is a technique of persuasion that helps in convincing the audience through emotional appeal. It appeals to memory, sense, shared experience, or nostalgia (Oeppen, 2019). In the selected advertisement, the advertiser has significantly used emotional appeal in the graphics and language. The advertiser has used pathos directly in the advertisement to make an emotional appeal to the target audience of the advertisement to come forward to donate blood. In order to incorporate pathos in the advertisement, the advertiser has used a girl with a blood pouch that shows the donation of blood is necessary to save her life. It appeals emotionally to the target audience of the advertisement to donate blood to save a life. Apart from the graphics, the advertisement has also a written message "Thank you for sharing a part of your life with me" that is also emotionally appealing and motivating the target audience to donate blood. The written message of the advertisement is trying to establish a connection between the individual who donates blood and the individual who receives blood (Ghaisas et al., 2017). Thus, pathos has been directly incorporated in the advertisement that makes it effective enough to persuade the target audience.
Logos is also a persuasive technique that focuses on convincing the target audience to follow the intended message of the advertisement by using reasons as well as logic. It is also called logical appeal and it includes statistics, charts, facts, as well as graphs (Grant, 2019). The selected advertisement also does not incorporate logos directly. It has no statistics, charts, facts, or graphs that can show the logic or reason. But it can be found indirectly in the written message in the advertisement. The written message “Thank you for sharing a part of your life with me” has logos in it. It is showing that someone who was in need of blood got life after getting blood from someone and now he/she is thanking him for saving his/her life. It shows a logical reason to donate blood because donating blood saves a life.
Formal Advertisement Analysis
Analyzing an advertisement requires to consider several aspects of the advertisement. It helps in analyzing whether the advertisement is effective in delivering its intended message or not. In order to analyze the selected advertisement, the target audience, implicit message, graphics, language, as well as cultural significance will be considered.
Target audience: the target audience of this advertisement is the individual above 17 years who is healthy. It focuses on every individual who is capable as well as eligible to donate blood. Male and females both are the target audience of this advertisement. Males above 65 and females above 60 are not the target audience of the advertisement because they cannot donate blood.
The implicit message: the implicit message of the advertisement is to convince the target audience to donate blood to save a life. It is focused on motivating the target audience by appealing to them emotionally to come forward to save the lives of people in need (Rivera-Correa et al., 2017).
Graphics: the advertiser has used strong graphics in this advertisement that is effective enough to convince an individual to donate blood. It has used a girl with blood pouch to show that the girl is in need of blood to be alive or she is alive due to the blood she got from donner. It is convincing as well as influence.
Language: the advertiser has used strong emotional appeal in its language to motivate the target audience to be a part of the life savior of an individual. The language used in the advertisement showing the importance of the participation of donner. It motivates individuals to come forward to save a life.
Cultural significance: the significance of this advertisement is similar in every culture. It has no specific significance in any culture (Mawuntu et al., 2020). It appeals to every individual belonging from any culture to take part in saving a life by donating blood. Irrespective of the culture, society, and country the advertisement is appealing to every individual emotionally to help the people in need when and wherever possible.
The advertisement is very effective and emotional that significantly influences people to donate blood. The advertiser has significantly use pathos, ethos, and logos in the advertisement to make an emotional appeal to the target audience to understand the importance of blood donation and take part in it effectively. The advertiser has successfully incorporated ethos, pathos, and logos in the advertisement however ethos and logos are not directly incorporated in the advertisement but it is quite influencing. The advertisement has the ability to communicate with its target audience and deliver the intended message and motivate them to follow it. The graphics and implicit message of the advertisement has been designed effectively to attract the target audience. It targets both male and female of above 17 years old who can donate blood. It is significant in all cultures.
References
Ghaisas, S., Sainani, A., Anish, P. R., Suriyanarayanan, R., & Rajaram, P. (2017, May). Ethos, pathos, and logos to prevent sexual harassment at workplaces: a regulatory solution based on operant conditioning. In 2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ICSE-C) (pp. 222-224). IEEE.
Grant, A. J. (2019, May). Ethos, Pathos and Logos: Rhetorical Fixes for an Old Problem: Fake News. In InSITE 2019: Informing Science+ IT Education Conferences: Jerusalem (pp. 081-091).
Han, H., Shin, S., Chung, N., & Koo, C. (2019). Which appeals (ethos, pathos, logos) are the most important for Airbnb users to booking?. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.
Mawuntu, K. A., Pangemanan, S. S., & Tielung, M. V. (2020). COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF e-ADVERTISEMENT BETWEEN TOKOPEDIA AND SHOPEE. Jurnal EMBA: Jurnal Riset Ekonomi, Manajemen, Bisnis dan Akuntansi, 8(1).
Oeppen Hill, J. H. (2019). Logos, ethos, pathos and the marketing of higher education. Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, 1-18.
Rivera-Correa, M., Vargas-Salinas, F., & Grant, T. (2017). Statistical differences and biological implications: a comparative analysis of the advertisement calls of two Andean stream treefrogs (Hylidae: Hyloscirtus) and the evolution of acoustic characters. Salamandra, 53(2), 237-244.
