A majority of people today would agree that advertisements appear almost everywhere you go and can often affect decisions made about what we want to buy or do with our time. Marketing is the strategic business of selling goods or services to people through advertisements.
I chose marketing as my major because I am interested in business and would like to learn how to use the techniques used to sell a product. I am also artistic and would like to create creative advertisements that I feel would relate to newer generations. In this paper, I will be analyzing articles from different professional marketing journals that share aspects of successful rhetorical marketing tactics. All three journals are written by professionals in my genre of interest and are peer edited. The methods of analysis I will be using to analyze these three articles include audience, exigence, and constraints. The audience is who the author or authors are writing for, or who they are trying to share their ideas with. Exigence is the purpose of the writing or the issue that caused someone to want to write about it. Lastly, constraints are the certain way that an article must be written in order to reach its intended audience. Using these three methods of analysis I will determine how marketing professionals successfully use rhetoric to explain their genre and communicate their ideas to their peers.
The first journal I read shared ideas of how sex appeal affected the number of sales and interest consumers had in a product. The Effects of Sexual Social Marketing.. was written directly for people involved in the field of marketing. The audience is clear through the author(s) use of mentioning “marketers” and using words that only people who were experienced in this field would understand. The author(s) also share details about how marketers can better sell products based on evidence and findings from other research on the topic. “Several studies have shown a purchase intention advantage for sexual appeals despite a decrease in brand information” (The Effects..13). The overall use of audience in the paper seems to appeal to a certain type of advertising where the marketers may need to be more risky or intense, those are the type of people their paper is directed towards. When it comes to exigence the overall purpose of their paper is clear as well. In the genre of marketing, it is important to be able to catch someone’s eye in order for them to want to learn more about the product and the company. This paper tries to convince fellow marketing professionals reading it that the proper way to achieve this is through the use of sexualized advertisements. The author(s) state; “Sexual information, whether in the form of pictures, stories, or sounds, has been shown to evoke a predictable range of emotional responses within viewers”(The Effects..15). This use of evidence for the readers is a predictable use of exigence that will allow the author(s) to gain trust and therefore convince their audience of their overall purpose. Because this is an academic journal the obvious constraints within it are a need to seem professional and trustworthy. In order to achieve this, the author(s) used the APA format. An example of this is how they did not use the first-person point of view throughout the whole journal and their use of evidence which was all cited. Using proper evidence and citing it ties back to their professional audience and whether or not they will be able to successfully convince them of the purpose of their chosen topic.
The second journal I selected is a factual take on how social media affects consumers' thoughts on a specific brand and what marketing teams can do to better their chances of their products being sold. The journal Paths To and Off Purchasing directly targets marketing and business professionals as the audience of their writing. While trying to understand how writers understand their audience better I came across a video by Clancy Clawson titled The Rhetorical Situation where he states “your task is to be an audience-friendly writer” (Clawson). This means that when an author is considering who their audience is they should always write as if they are trying to directly influence that person or group of people. In the journal Paths To and Off Purchasing they directly talked about marketers and business workers to make the journal feel tailored to them. “The growing prevalence of different forms of online media offers exciting new opportunities for marketers to interact with consumers along their path to purchase.” (Paths to..441) They also strategically used terms and numbers related to the specific subject. The exigence used in this journal gives the reader clear numbers and evidence of trials done on the subject and what the author(s) believe to be the best option for the presented problem, which is getting the most sales possible. “First, we contribute by proposing and testing a conceptual framework of how online consumer activity reflected in online media interacts with the traditional marketing mix actions (price, distribution and advertising(Paths to..442)“.