https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjQt2lEZIXg
After reading “What is a Rhetoric”, I have come to realize how different aspects of rhetoric is used daily in our lives. Through movies, books, music and especially commercials. When a company has the intention of selling a product to the consumer aspects of rhetoric such as rhetorical appeals of reason, values, and credibility all come in to use in one way or another. These appeals come from Aristotle’s “modes for persuasion” otherwise known as Pathos, Ethos, and Logos. Essentially when a company releases advertisements they are persuading the consumer that their product is the best of it’s kind and use the consumer’s feelings and intelligence against them. The 2017 Volvo advertisement linked above does a great job of using Pathos to intrigue the audience into looking into and purchasing one of their cars. At the beginning of the commercial, we are shown a mother and a little girl who seems to be between the ages of four to six having a conversation about her first day at school. One smart thing the producers of the commercial do to appeal to consumers is that they decided to use a child that has an extremely innocent face and long hair kind of resembling a really cute doll. A cute kid does the same thing to a consumer as a cute puppy, this makes the commercial more appealing to the eye and makes it more personal to what seems to be their target market: parents of young children. The commercial goes on to show the different stages of the little girl’s life through her own narration. Now the narration itself pulls at the heartstrings of an audience. Listening to a little child talk in their own silly grammar must remind them of their own kids or family members of the same age. As the little girl goes on in her narration for the rest of her life, she is shown to be walking to school alone on her first day. As she does this different scenes of a woman (who seems to be in a panic because she is late to work) is seen driving a Volvo. These two scenes come together when the woman driving almost hits the little girl walking to school, in which Volvo’s camera and auto breaks saved the little girl’s life. The commercial ends off in saying “sometimes the moments that never happen, matter the most”. Referring to several different things. One of them is that the little girl did not get hit by the car and another being all the experiences the little girl was to have in the future during her narration. Overall this commercial used a great amount of pathos to intrigue its audience.
Whenever I see an ad with a child in it, I know that the ad is going to somehow play with my emotions to get me to try and relate to it more. I completely agree with your argument about your chosen ad.
When driving, one of the main safety concerns is your family and getting your loved ones safely to their destinations. These are one of the driving factors( no pun intended) that customers tend to put priority on when choosing a family car to take their children places. I think marketing around family and safety is the company knowing which group they want to target with the ad.
I like how you made a comparison that a cute child has the same affect a puppy has on a consumer because it further appeals to the audience’s emotion.
I completely agree with you in that they used children to appeal to the audience’s emotions, and it really does work because just like a puppy, people want to love and protect them.