Advertising Rhetoric the Rhetoric of Essay

The rhetorical appeal to the reader's feelings is most obvious in the photograph, where feelings of freshness and health and yet of indulgence and luxury commingle, but can also be seen in the flirtations enticement to spend more time with the product as mentioned above. The attempt to appeal to the reader's intellect is minimal in this ad, though the prominently featured word "vitamin" in the product's title is certainly at least a partial intellectual appeal, telling the reader's that this product is healthy and beneficial as more than simply a beauty product. The content in the middle of the text passage also describes the product in a way that makes it sound like an extremely intellectually engineered makeup product. The reader's sense of self is appealed to by the suggestion that one's lips are not the best lips they can be -- the lips one was "meant" to have -- if they don't have this product on.

The primary and overarching rhetorical strategy employed by the creators of this advertisement is the use of persuasion, through both words and images. There is nothing that smacks of being intellectually misleading or disingenuous about the advertisement; the rhetorical strategy simply (though complexly) consists of persuading the reader that the product being advertised is the optimal lip product for color and health.This is accomplished through the visual metaphor of the product and a luscious, delicious, filling and healthy fruit smoothie, and through several textual elements. There is both authority and rapport established through the style used, where the reader is literally introduced to the product with a "meet this" intro and appealing to humor, while at the same time sounding quite officious and scientific in its delineation of the various vitamins and antioxidants delivered in the product and their benefit to the user (and reader, as the advertisement hopes). This combination of rhetorical strategies all falls under the larger umbrella of persuasion, which gives the advertisement only a single yet a very powerful focus.

There are a great many different rhetorical strategies that advertisers can employ, and this particular ad barely scratched the surface. No advertisement, of course, could include even a sizable proportion of the available strategies, nor would such an ad be effective. The narrow focus of the Clinique ad is a part of the reason it is effective; the features of the ad and the product to be made prominent have been carefully selected and each carefully and consciously accounted for, creating a rhetoric that does not lie, but that tells a very selective truth rather than providing pure information......