Ethos Pathos Logos

1. Introduction

An advertisement (or ‘ad’ for short) is anything that draws good attention towards different products and things. Advertisements can shape our perceptions of our environment and of ourselves. While we might pay close attention to a televised news program that outlines the key ideas of a presidential candidate, we probably give very little direct attention to the life insurance commercial that airs during the show’s break. However, the catchy jingle and the humorous slogan used in the commercial may replay in our heads long after the commercial has ended.

Thus, the advertisers spend much time, money, and effort in packaging their brief solicitations into very effective and persuasive messages. Advertisers use many subliminal techniques to get the advertisements to work on consumers. Many people don’t realize how effective ads really are. Some of the adverts floated in the different information media are presented in a manner that appears to be authoritative when indeed they are not. In some cases, companies may get the services of print media writers and editors to shape opinion on certain products through articles, hence deceiving the audience and misguiding the consumer.

2. Appeal

We say that advertisements are persuasive because they attempt to move us to action. Advertisements want us to do something like these advertisements want us to buy a product or a service. Within the bright, intriguing images and the colorful, fun font lies a persuasive argument.

The argument attempts to persuade the consumer that a particular product or service will, in some way, make life better for the consumer. Think of a deodorant commercial that seems to provide a life of excitement, friends, and, perhaps, even attention from the opposite sex. Consider a clothing brand advertisement that seems to give innate style, confidence, and affordability to consumers. Think about all of the advertisements that we come into contact with in each day. Following are the common appeals used by advertisers:

• a) Fear as a Motivator: Fear appeals focus on the negative outcomes that can happen because of an action or inaction. Advertisers use fear appeals to promote an immediate behavior change such as eating healthier or not smoking. Another fear tactic involves isolation. People will purchase a product to avoid isolation from others because of bad hygiene. Deodorant and toothpaste ads often employ this tactic.
• b) Humor Creates Emotional Connections: Humor appeals make consumers laugh and create an emotional link with the product. A well-executed humor appeal enhances recollection, evaluation and the intent to purchase the product. Advertisers link the product with the humor. For example, a humorous insurance ad hits the mark when the humor shows the consumer why having insurance is beneficial.
• c) Rational Appeals to the Practical Side: Rational or logical appeals focus on the consumer’s need for practicality and functionality in a product. Advertisers relay this message by focusing on product features and cost. These ads tell consumers the benefits associated with the purchase of a product. The advertiser then provides proof to back up the claims.
• d) Sex and Sensuality Sell: Sex appeals capture attention, but seldom promote product consumption. Effective sex appeal ads convey a specific message to the target demographic group. Beer advertisers often use sex appeal to promote their product to men. The typical scene involves several young, average-looking men in a bar. The men purchase the beer and gain the attention of an attractive young woman. Fragrance products use sex appeal to convey romance to women by indicating the use of the product will help her find the man of her dreams. Generally done by showing the woman spraying the fragrance and then capturing the attention of an attractive male who passes her on the street. Overly overt images subtract from the overall message the advertiser wants to convey.

3. Rhetoric Approach

For a strong appeal, ads use rhetoric whose appeal can be strong or weak. A good advertisement has a strong rhetorical appeal. It has ethos, pathos and logos. Apart from being appealing to the eyes, ads must also appeal to the other senses. Effective ads connect with the hearts of the audience. They do not just use logos or the logical appeal but also ethos and pathos.

• Ethos, or the ethical appeal, means to convince an audience of the author’s credibility or character. Ethos is the Greek word for “character”. These appeals work in ads by calling upon the credibility and the reputation of a particular company or spokesperson. Seeing the goodwill of the company could make consumers trust them and, therefore, this appeal helps to persuade consumers to purchase the products. The “Drink it to believe it” ad by Coca-Cola is a perfect example of “ethos”.
• Pathos , or the emotional appeal, means to persuade an audience by appealing to their emotions. Authors use pathos to invoke sympathy from an audience; to make the audience feel what what the author wants them to feel. A common use of pathos would be to draw pity from an audience. Another use of pathos would be to inspire anger from an audience, perhaps in order to prompt action. Advertisers use pathos to evoke specific emotions in the audience. Pathos tends to be used quite often in advertisements, as emotions are easily stirred in most target audiences through vivid images and touching stories. This is the most common rhetoric device used to persuade the Indian audience. An ad by an NGO against smoking says “You wouldn’t let your child smoke”, directly affects the audience emotionally.
• Logos , or the appeal to logic, means to convince an audience by use of logic or reason. To use logos would be to cite facts and statistics, historical and literal analogies, and citing certain authorities on a subject. For example, we might see an ad for toothpaste that promises to make our teeth “40% whiter than the other leading brands”. This line appeals to our ability to reason. It seems to make sense that the toothpaste must be effective if it works that much better than other toothpaste brands. Therefore, this statistic helps to persuade us that we should buy the toothpaste.

The following are some more specific strategies that advertisers use. Often, they overlap with the rhetorical strategies above.

• Avante Garde : The suggestion that using this product puts the user ahead of the times. A toy manufacturer encourages kids to be the first on their block to have a new toy.
• Weasel Words:“Weasel words” are used to suggest a positive meaning without actually really making any guarantee. A scientist says that a diet product might help you to lose weight the way it helped him to lose weight. A dish soap leaves dishes virtually spotless.
• Magic Ingredients: The suggestion that some almost miraculous discovery makes the product exceptionally effective. A pharmaceutical manufacturer describes a special coating that makes their pain reliever less irritating to the stomach than a competitor’s.
• Patriotism: The suggestion that purchasing this product shows your love of your country. A company brags about its product being made in America.
• Transfer: Positive words, images, and ideas are used to suggest that the product being sold is also positive. A textile manufacturer wanting people to wear their product to stay cool during the summer shows people wearing fashions made from their cloth at a sunny seaside setting where there is a cool breeze.
• Plain Folks: The suggestion that the product is a practical product of good value for ordinary people. A cereal manufacturer shows an ordinary family sitting down to breakfast and enjoying their product.
• Snob Appeal: The suggestion that the use of the product makes the customer part of an elite group with a luxurious and glamorous lifestyle. A coffee manufacturer shows people dressed in formal gowns and tuxedos drinking their brand at an art gallery.
• Bribery: Bribery offers you something “extra.” Buy a burger; get free fries. Bandwagon The suggestion that you should join the crowd or be on the winning side by using a product—you don’t want to be the only person without it!

4. Some Real-Life Examples

Advertisers use all of these to construct their arguments. Many ads will use a combination of all three rhetorical appeals to construct their arguments. All ads will vary somewhat in their use of rhetorical appeals. Much of the strategy depends upon the target audience being persuaded and product being marketed. Ads are specifically designed to appeal to a particular audience, so advertisers take great effort in designing the ad’s to meet the desires, needs, and wants of the target audience.

Consider some of the popular magazines available to us: Cosmopolitan, India Today, Champak etc. If we read through this short list, we can quickly decipher the target audience of each publication. Women make up the target audience of Cosmopolitan; men consist of the target audience for India Today; children constituting the target audience of Champak(only looking at the major target audience). For example, we are unlikely to find an advertisement for lipstick in the India Today magazine.

Likewise, we probably won’t find advertisements for Life Insurance in Champak. Understanding the target audience of a magazine and, especially, of the advertisement, is vital to understanding how the advertisement works to persuade its target audience. When we consider the target audience of ads, we must also evaluate the values, beliefs, and attitudes of this audience.

Some famous examples of the use of Rhetoric devices in advertisements are:

• Philips: Innovation & You
• Raymond: The Complete Man
• L’Oreal: Because you are worth it
• LIC: Zindagi Ke Saath Bhi, Zindagi Ke Baad Bhi
• Nirma: Washing Powder Nirma, Sabki Pasand Nirma!

All these ads have a persuasive language which directly or indirectly has a great impact on the customer’s mind. They use words and figures that affect the consumers emotionally and logically. The LIC ad quoted above is a life insurance advertisement and hence uses words such as Zindagi ke saath and Zindagi ke baad thus trying to assure the consumer about their future, hence pursuing them to buy the insurance. Similarly, the Raymond ad implies that wearing Raymond clothes guarantees style, confidence and “manliness” which is quite a subjective topic to talk about and can be perceived differently by different people.

Nike is known to have made some of the most interesting ads whose theme is mostly energy, courage and dreams. These ads are designed to appeal to people interested in sports. However, they appeal to a broader target audience and the reason is their use of creativity and imagination. Nike advertisements even if they primarily target sports lovers celebrate aspirations and victory. This is why a larger audience loves them. These ads are about ambition, achievement, success and goals.

5. Deceptive Advertisements

However, as consumers, we often do not stop and think about how these advertisements work and about how we are vulnerable to the deceptive messages that they send. We often want simple, easy solutions to our problems, after all. After we buy the product though, and realize it doesn’t do all that we thought it would do, we are left frustrated and, often, on the hunt for the next product that promises similar results. In addition to understanding how advertisements use rhetoric to persuade us to purchase products, we also evaluate the rhetoric of an ad to consider which values, attitudes, and beliefs the ad tends to perpetuate within our culture. In other words, in selling these products, how are the ads working to shape our perceptions?

5.1. Rhetorical Ad Analysis:

Let’s consider a typical makeup product ad that features a “beautiful” woman with a “perfect” complexion. She appears confident, happy, and desired. We have all seen these ads, and we recognize the women who are featured in them. Do these women seem to work to define “beauty” for our society? “Beauty,” is, after all, a subjective term that can be defined differently by different people. However, advertisers, overall, have worked to offer consumers a specific image in an effort to define “beauty” for us. They tell us how women should look to be perceived as “beautiful.” In this way, the advertisements not only work to persuade us to buy a specific product, but they also work to tell us who is (and, consequently, who isn’t) beautiful within our culture. Thus, advertisers often sell us ideas in addition to selling us products.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. http://www.indianhills.edu/_myhills/courses/ENG105/documents/lu05_rhetoric_advertising.pdf
2. http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson1166/PersuasiveTechniques.pdf
3. https://in.pinterest.com/jwilson3993/ethos-pathos-logos/
4. https://pathosethoslogos.com
5. https://www.yourdictionary.com/rhetoric
6. www.google.com
7. http://www.journalofadvertisingresearch.com/content/58/1/111

The article “Bare in Mind”, by Rick Reilly, effectively argues women that are in sports shouldn’t pose for nude pictures. Reilly uses strong Ethos, Pathos, and Logos, by building his credibility with convincing facts, reasons, and successfully made use of emotional appeals to his readers.

In this article, Reilly uses other people’s statements that settle his credibility and appeal to ethos. He uses Ethos by stating his credibility. In the article, it talks about how people are upset at Thompson for posing for nude. Reilly gives the Women’s Sports Foundation(WSF) a chance for them to give their opinions. “When you’ve spent half of your life looking down at the line at the bottom of the pool-and you’ve given up everything -it’s incongruent to take that body and use it for sex”(Reilly).

Including the statement of the WSF, helps Reilly’s credibility by letting the other side have the rights to give their opinions. WSF states that people should put to use something that they’ve worked so hard for. He uses ethos by giving the WSF the rights to speak about the picture, which helps boosts up the credibility.

Adding to his appeal of ethos, Reilly successfully makes an appeal to Pathos throughout the article. The article is filled with emotional words, and stages that creates a supportive image. “What a load of hypocrites”(Reilly). Right of a way a person can sense how that person is feeling. Reilly gives an example stating that “ Lance Armstrong, Dan O’Brien and Ricky Williams have all posed for nude, and I don’t remember de Varona rushing around trying to get them to put on a towel”(Reilly).

The person stating this is furious because all those men have posed for nude and nobody seemed to complain about it, but when Thompson posed for nude, everybody seemed to think that it was inappropriate or the picture send a message to the people. Reilly supports Thompson just like the men. His goal is to make his readers see the characters emotions. The feeling of anger that the person has towards the men is what makes the readers sympathize with the person who is angry, which appeals to Pathos.

Along with strong Pathos, Reilly uses strong logos, with so many facts. “ the Australian women’s soccer team and Katarina Witt and Brandi Chastain and 12 women U.S. track and field athletes, including middle-distance runner Nnenna Lynch and high jumpers Amy Acuff and Tisha Waller, and plenty others have posed in the buff”(Reilly). He points out facts about the women’s soccer team and also includes so many other people that prove that they all posed for nude once, and how they weren’t trying to be “hung up about getting liberated”(Reilly).

Reilly adds more facts about what they do for a living. “ Thompson is heading for medical school. Lynch is a Rhodes scholar. Waller is a churchgoing former elementary school teacher”( Reilly). By adding those facts, it supports that there are so many other people out there that are just like Thompson. The facts build an appeal to Logos and impress the reader that Thompson is not the only person who does what she does.

Overall, Reilly uses good writing in his article, good writing is when you are writing to an audience for some kind of reason. Reilly expresses other people’s thoughts confidently in his article. Depending firstly on his great pathos, Reilly also uses the ethos and pathos appeal to be certain that the message for the picture will appeal to the readers.

In “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr., uses logos, pathos, and ethos to support his arguments. In at least 750 words, explain which of these modes of appeal you personally find to be the most effective in King’s “Letter,” and why. Pick no more than two modes of appeal.

April 16, 196, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” a response to “A call for unity.” “A call for unity” was written by eight white clergymen stating that there was racial segregation that should be righted, but that was a job for the courts to handle, not everyday people.

King defended the idea that injustice is everywhere, not just in the courts. King uses all pathos, logos, and ethos in his letter to really get his message across. Though he uses all three very effectively, I believe King most effectively uses pathos and logos by giving illustrations of what African Americans faced every day, examples in history in which the law was not right, and the make-up of a just or unjust law.

One way I personally believe King uses pathos so effectively is by giving examples of what happens to African Americans frequently while the law stands by and does nothing. He talks about how mothers and fathers are lynched and siblings are drowned because white men felt like it. This made me feel the heart break that these people are experiencing. He also talks about a little girl who sees an advertisement for an amusement that is opening.

She cries when she’s told that she is not allowed to go because they do not allowed colored people in there. This shows the extent of racism even children are not spared. These illustrations made me upset at what African Americans had to deal with, and infuriated that the law was not doing anything about it. Pathos is used very effectively if I am feeling such emotions by just reading a paragraph.

I believe King uses logos most effectively by using examples in history of how the law was not right. He talks about how Hitler killed many and it was considered under the law “legal.” Hitler tortured people, tore apart families, destroyed towns in the name of “racial cleansing.” The law said it was perfectly fine, but morally that was very wrong. Hitler and his Nazis killed over eleven million people, and only six million were Jews. Hitler targeted not only Jews, but also Gypsies, homosexual, physically and mentally disabled, Poles, Jehovah’s Witnesses, socialists, and communists. Millions of these were children.

While this was legal, the efforts to save these groups from torture were considered illegal. No one was allowed to help any one of the groups out of a concentration camp or even out of the country. By comparing these two actions and the legality of both, I saw the logic of his argument. A law may be a law, but that does not mean it is right. This helps King’s letter be even more credible because of his use of logos in his illustration between Hitler and the relief organizations during the Holocaust.

In addition, King describes the differences between a just and an unjust law. He quotes Thomas Aquinas who states, “An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.” This means that laws that are beneficiary to only a small amount of people and have no religious or just outcomes for society as a whole are not good. King continues with the message that if the majority votes in a law and the minority has no say and the law benefits only the majority, then it is not a right law.

This to me was very logical and made me think about the unjust laws African Americans dealt with on a daily basis. Because they had almost no rights and were segregated, they did not have a say in many laws. The outcome of that was America had many laws that benefited Whites but hardly any that benefited African Americans. Reading this made me believe King even more, because of how logical and sound this letter is.

King does use ethos in his letter to the clergymen, and very effectively too, even though I found pathos and logos were more effective to me. One way King uses ethos is by quoting multiple historical figures in his speech in order to get to the point across that being an extremist is not necessarily evil. Some historical figures he lists are Peter, an extremist for the Gospel, Abraham Lincoln, an extremist for liberty, and Thomas Jefferson, an extremist for equality.

These men were great, and through seeing how these men were extremists, I see how the clergymen were wrong in saying that extremists are bad. Kings list of historical figures is effective in ethos because it made me believe that extremist can be very powerful and right.

In King’s letter, even though ethos was used very well, I believe pathos and logos are used most effectively with the illustrations of what African American faced every day, examples in history in which the law was not right, and the make-up of a just or unjust law. King describes what they had to face on a daily basis and the emotional toll it took on families, which is a prime example of pathos. Logos is shown through historical events were the law was not just like in the Holocaust. Logos is also shown when King describes the differences between a just and unjust law, for example if a law benefits only a small group and harms the whole, it is not a good law. All the components made King’s letter credible, emotional, and very persuasive.

Ethos, logos, and pathos are three persuasion tools used by Shakespeare in Mark Antony’s funeral oration over Caesar’s body. Ethos is appeal based on the personality or the character of the speaker, Logos is based on logic and or reasoning. Finally, Pathos is an appeal based on emotion. Antony uses these elements to turn the Roman crowd against the conspirator with a highly convincing speech.

Antony shows his credibility in a different way than Brutus does. Brutus shows his credibility through his tone of voice and his word choice. But Antony shows his credibility through the technique of blank verse. Blank verse was the way that people with authority spoke. Antony shows the audience that he was authority by using this technique. The most convincing use of ethos is when Mark Antony says “ Friends, Romans, and countrymen…” By starting his speech this way he shows that he is the same as everyone else he is “one of them” or one of the common people. He is also showing them that he is loyal and trustworthy.

In Brutus’s speech, he mentions that Caesar was killed due to his ambitious traits with no detail to support it. Antony, on the other hand, gives several logical arguments that prove that Caesar was not ambitious. Antony shows that Caesar was a war hero who brought back captives for ransom that benefitted Rome and not hurt Rome. “He hath brought many captives home to Rome” (Julius Ceasar Shakespeare 3:2). Antony shows that Caesar cried for the poor. “When the poor cried, Caesar cried too.

Ambition shouldn’t be so soft.” (Julius Ceasar Shakespeare 3:2). Antony shows that Caesar refused the crown 3 times. You all did see that on the Lupercal thrice presented him a kingly crown, Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?” (Julius Caesar Shakespear 3:2). Antony also proves that Caesar wrote a will that left money and land to the common people of Rome. “Than I will wrong such honorable men. But here’s a parchment with the seal of Caesar.” (Julius Caesar Shakespeare 3:2). All of these actions Antony proved that Caesar was no ambitious and that the conspirators were not noble in killing Caesar.

Antony unlike Brutus shows and spreads his emotions throughout the crowd. Antony says “Caesar was my friend, faithful and just to me.” This makes the audience feel sympathy for Antony. Antony starts to read Caesar’s will to the people and the will states that Caesar had given money and land to the people of Rome. By reading the will Antony makes the audience feel guilty. Another time that Antony conveys emotion to the crowd was when he shows the people Caesar’s wounds and the stab marks. Antony says “ this wound was made by Casca, this one by Brutus…” He makes the audience feel pity for Ceasar and anger towards the conspirators.

Mark Antony uses the persuasive techniques of ethos, logos, and pathos to convince the Roman citizens to turn against the conspirators. Mark Antony proves with facts, emotion, and credibility that Brutus was wrong about what he was saying about Caesar. In the end, Mark Antony was successfully able to get the Roman citizens on his side.