Assignment 3: Analyzing Visual Arguments (650-700 words; TNR 12, double space) T
ID: 351491 • Letter: A
Question
Assignment 3: Analyzing Visual Arguments (650-700 words; TNR 12, double space)
Today the average person in the United States is saturated with advertisements on television, billboards, buses, buildings, magazines, and newspapers. Advertisements are usually used to sell commercial products, such as toothpaste, cereal, tissue paper, shampoo, soap, jeans, shoes, t-shirts, soft drinks, etc. How many of these products feature brand names? Why do people want Calvin Klein's name on their underwear, "Levi's" on their back pocket, or a favorite team logo on their caps? How does advertising these brand names influence our shopping habits? Why are some ads more successful in selling a product than others? All of these questions and many others will be pertinent to the writing of the next paper.
Because advertising works by appealing to viewers’ values and beliefs in order to persuade them to buy or support something, it is crucial that today's informed citizen carefully analyze the strategies used in advertisements. Through the critical analysis of various kinds of commercial communication, the informed citizen can address such fundamental questions as the following:
• What is the ad really trying to “sell”? This goes beyond the product or service being advertised to a set of values associated with a lifestyle or aspirations viewers are judged to hold in common.
• What visual and verbal strategies are used to convey the ad's message?
• Are the message and its visual and rhetorical means both honest and ethical?
Your job, then, is to write a thesis-driven rhetorical analysis that examines the effectiveness of a visual argument. Basically, you need to write about how the formal elements of an advertisement produce meaning.
Evaluation Criteria for the Essay
The visual analysis should
• identify the ad’s purpose, audience, and context (place and time)
• contain a clear and interesting thesis supported by specific, concrete details
• provide sufficient description of and insightful comments about the ad
• avoid stylistic errors that distract reader's attention; be organized logically
Explanation / Answer
Every day, consumers are exposed to over 5,000 advertisements, but only 12 will make an impression (Ellens, 2015). Knowing this, we may ask why does only a fraction of advertisements affect the consumer? This is a problem many marketers are facing, as consumers are becoming smarter, wittier and less resistant to marketing techniques. Marketers must now create advertisements that appeal to consumers in a different way. Simple informational or persuasive advertisements lack effectiveness and ultimately does not reach the consumer in the way the marketer intends it to. Marketers must now tap into consumers’ emotions and appeal to different feelings in order to evoke a reaction, which may be an increase in brand awareness or sales. Instead of educating consumers and giving them a reason to buy a product, marketers must now make the consumer feel personally attached. Emotional appeals can be described as a “method of persuasion that is designed to create an emotional response”. The more emotionally attached a consumer feels, the more likely the consumer will relate to the advertisement, remember it and be affected by it. Appeals do not always need to evoke a positive reaction within a consumer. Advertisements that are more easily recalled tend to affect consumers in a more negative way. Appeals can be in the form of humour, shame, fear and shock tactics. However, there is an on-going discussion about the effectiveness of emotional appeals and if they are more detrimental to the consumer.
Advertisements help a company to build brand image for its products. They connect the products with a specific emotion to enhance the effectiveness of the product. Advertisements evokes different emotional reactions in customer's minds such as joy, fear, shock, happiness, and satisfaction. Advertising agencies believe that positive message stimulates the feelings of customer to use the product through a sense of happiness or filialness. Customer’s minds are filled with immense happiness if products are displayed in a positive light. Negative emotional appeal also evokes the customer's feelings through an alternative route. They position the product as the necessity in the life of the customers and its absence might affect them. Negative emotional appeal is based on the nature and type of customer for a specific product category. The impacts of negative advertising is questionable that up to what level this appeal affect the customer's mind set to buy a product. The most common form of negative emotional appeal can raise emotions like shock and fear. These types of emotions are evoked quite frequently by healthcare service organizations. They try to grab the attention of prospective patients by creating a sense of fear or shock in them so that they are quickly pushed into action of buying their healthcare service. Advertising has become diverse and wider. Advertisements mainly fulfill two kinds of purpose which are to inform the customers and to influence their choices. Advertisements appeals for brand image creation for the products which are difficult to differentiate in the market. Mostly FMCG companies use such kind of advertising.
Choosing the right impact strategy is important for any product. Customers are very sensitive about their social status, requirements and psychological needs. Most of the customers buy a product to satisfy their emotional needs, therefore their feelings for the product matters a lot and mostly, they are prompted by positive emotions such as happiness or love. Fear is an emotional response which implies a sort of danger in case of missing something from their life. Advertisements use this fear to sell their products. Fear appeals are used to arouse emotional response to take steps to avoid threat or cause of fear. Researches have shown that induced negative feelings or moods such sadness, guilt, empathy and fear strongly affect the positive attitude towards the product image. The customer undergoes a specific response while executing negative appeal in the advertisements which includes their purchasing intention. Most of family based products where buying decision is taken by females of the house, uses negative appeal advertising. Females are more sensitive and are concerned towards the security of their families. The presence of any product to provide better health, safety or social status attracts them to buy that product. FMCG products which compete very closely in the market, use this advertising style. Negative advertising is the effort to gain market share by mentioning negative aspects of competitors' products or the negative impacts of absence of the product. Negative campaigns are mostly used in the marketplace where product ideas are very clichéd and there is fierce competition among the brands. Emotional appeal is the potential fallacy where manipulation of customers' emotions benefits the companies.
If one delves deeper into the present day marketing campaigns of different consumer products nowadays then it can be seen that the beauty and cosmetic industry is generating the biggest proportion of negative emotional appeals such as fear or dissatisfaction to sell their products. They are portraying the image of women in a skewed manner which is leading to depression which is again a mental condition and there are several unrealistic benchmarks that are being set by the brand campaigns for the young girls who are completely getting engrossed in those claims. The cosmetic items as well as bathing soaps portray women as being someone who needs to maintain a fair skin and well-toned body. Mostly celebrities are hired in order to establish the context for a perfect body and skin which can be achieved by the use of any particular product. As a result, the women population are watching the different aspects of ideal body and skin color they should pursue and create a sense of low self-esteem in them. They create an image of perfect woman in the minds of the young girls which they pursue throughout their life. Same can be said about the Barbie campaigns which are so popular throughout the world. Barbie has a figure which is unrealistic but there are millions of young girls who wants to have a body like Barbie. In fact, there has been hardly any Barbie with a darker skin color. These advertisements also reinforces the rift in the society among the white supremacist and the people of color. The emotional appeals which portray white people as superior are playing into the sin of aggravating racism among the people of the world. Another industry which deal with negative emotional appeal is cigarettes and tobacco industry. Mostly, the marketers in this industry represent smokers as a rugged macho man who has the capability to overcome any obstacle in their life. This kind of image for men has been popularized by the Marlboro man which became popular worldwide because of its appeal to the people led to the evocation of the ITC brand. However, it should be understood that this is a negative emotional appeal since cigarette smoking do not serve any of the purpose that has been mentioned by the marketing campaigns of the company. Moreover, it causes severe health problems for the people who consume tobacco and there is a worldwide campaign that is going on against the consumption of tobacco based products. Therefore, these cigarette campaigns are feeding on the aspirational mentality of all men throughout the world and thereby, creating an unhealthy environment world over. All these aspects need to be kept in mind while looking into the negative emotional appeals created by the advertising campaigns. In fact, it is justified to say that they create more harmful effects than positive effects when unleashed on full flow.