Visual Rhetoric - Persuasion with image

Question: Use a print advertisement that you believe persuades the reader rhetorically. Explain your case using the concepts learnt.

According to Blair, an arguer using visual argument benefits from two factor: The first is the ease of evoking emotions with visuals; it does not rely on the cooperation of the audience to ”exercise its sympathetic imagination", nor being dependant on the audience's capability to imagine. The second is that the visual can, through the use of symbols, evoke involuntary reactions that has to be consciously countered by the recipient (2004).

So let us look at an advertisement from a rhetorical perspective.

“Bad smell makes everything looks bad"

Daktarin powder, is used as a treatment to fungal infection of the skin such as ringworm, athlete's foot and fungal nappy rash. However, in this advertisement, the rhetoric approach is for Daktarin powder to be advertised not as a medicinal product but as a product that removes bad smell. It become a solution for the problem of bad smell even though it is not exactly made for it. For an advertiser, selling the powder as a medicinal product would be less effective than to sell it as just toiletries.

McQuarrie and Phillips has this to say of rhetoric; "truth-seeking is not part of the mandate of rhetoric or advertising" (2008, p.7). The advertiser's main goal is to sell the product as effectively as possible; truth comes second, so rhetoric will be used primarily to increase sale. If the consumer sees foot problem as a health problem, he or she will most likely seek help at health professional, which usually means the hospital. But if it is seen as less health-related and more towards a social-related problem, then it will fall to the same category as bad smell, or yellow teeth, in which case the solution may not be limited to the hospital and they would be more likely to look for remedies outside of the formal health institution. The industry turns smelly feet into a social problem and then provide their products as a solution to it.

Moving to the image itself, at first glance it appears to be a gathering of outlaws in a saloon. Then readers may spot one man sitting with his bare feet on the table. Also they may notice that everyone else is looking at the person, or his feet, to be exact. This shift the focus of the reader to the feet. What is wrong with it?

The first propositional premise, in this syllogism is: If someone covers their face, they are up to something bad. And everyone in the room covered their face. The reader would probably take the covered face as a signifier of villainy. This is reinforced by the dark tone of the advertisement and mean face expression of the characters in the image.

Scanning the whole advertisement, they would then read the words at the bottom corner last. This leads to the conclusion of this rhetoric; that the readers would realized they have wrongly labelled the people in the saloon as bad people. This is the part of this rhetorical argument that seeks the participation of the audience. The reader would have to agree to the "everyone were labelled as crooks" part. "...Everything looks bad" will echo with the thought of most readers. As for the "you're got it wrong because of the bad smell", it makes readers halt, and prompts readers to scan the whole advertisement again. "Is there anything that supports this? Was I really mistaken?"

The reader then saw the presence of the bare feet, that signify bad smell. He would see the mask as being used to cover the smell of the feet, and the expression a grimace of disgust. Straight away, the reader realized it is more probably now that the "outlaws" could be just customers of the saloon who cannot stand the smell. This is the second premise that built the argument.

Thus, the argument in this advertisement can be considered an enthymeme. Aristotle regards deductive arguments as a set of sentences in which some sentences are premises and one is the conclusion, and the inference from the premises to the conclusion is guaranteed by the premises alone; "the construction of enthymemes is primarily a matter of deducing from accepted opinions" (Rapp, 2010).The first premise in the advertisement was "thrown in your face" but the second premise, crucial to the argument, was hidden and can only be deduced by knowing the conclusion first. The reader has to take part in making the argument up.

To sum it up, this advertisement has employed rhetoric when constructing the visual and manage to shape a pretty convincing argument.

References:

Blair, J. A. (2004). The rhetoric of visual arguments. In Hill, C. A., and Helmers, M. H. (eds.). Defining visual rhetorics. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

McQuarrie, E.F. (Eds.) & Phillips, B.J. (Eds.) (2008). Advertising rhetoric: An introduction. Go figure! New directions in advertising rhetoric. New York: M.E. Sharpe

Rapp, C. (2010). Aristotle's Rhetoric. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved November 17, 2012  from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/