Go Figure! New Directions in Advertising Rhetoric

Edward F. McQuarrie, Barbara J. Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780765618016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317469605
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Rhetorical scholarship has found rich source material in the disciplines of advertising, communications research, and consumer behavior. Advertising, considered as a kind of communication, is distinguished by its focus on causing action. Its goal is not simply to communicate ideas, educate, or persuade, but to move a prospect closer to a purchase. The editors of "Go Figure! New Directions in Advertising Rhetoric" have been involved in developing the scholarship of advertising rhetoric for many years. In this volume they have assembled the most current and authoritative new perspectives on this topic. The chapter authors all present previously unpublished concepts that represent advances beyond what is already known about advertising rhetoric. In the opening and closing chapters editors Ed McQuarrie and Barbara Phillips provide an integrative view of the current state of the art in advertising rhetoric.

1

Advertising Rhetoric

An Introduction

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Edward F. McQuarrie and Barbara J. Phillips

Rhetoric is an ancient discipline that was fundamental to Western thought for over 2,000 years. Rather suddenly, it began to wither as the scientific revolution took root in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By 1900, rhetoric had almost disappeared from the canon (Bender and Welberry 1990). Today in the twenty-first century, for reasons as yet poorly understood, rhetoric is flourishing once more. Practitioners have spread across a variety of humanities and social sciences disciplines, including consumer research (Deighton 1985), so that by the early 1990s, conceptual and empirical pieces applying rhetorical ideas to advertising had begun to appear with some regularity (e.g., McQuarrie and Mick 1992; Scott 1994).

At present we may say that rhetoric has established itself within consumer research and advertising scholarship as one among many valid perspectives on advertising phenomena. However, we believe that rhetorical perspectives can be taken much further and that their application to advertising can be fruitful both for illuminating advertising phenomena and for advancing rhetorical theory itself. Our intent in assembling the present volume was to showcase new thinking in the application of rhetorical perspectives to advertising phenomena. We recruited a range of established and emerging scholars to this enterprise. Chapter authors were encouraged to push their thinking to the edge and given a mandate to innovate. Rigor was maintained by having each chapter reviewed by a fellow author, and again by the editors. We asked for ideas that had never before seen the light of day, and encouraged risk taking beyond what more conventional scholarly outlets would allow. The goal was to push the frontiers of contemporary thinking about how advertising achieves its effects and to provide scholars with actionable ideas for future research.

To lay a foundation for what follows, this chapter provides an introduction to the rhetorical perspective, proceeds to contrast the rhetorical perspective against other, more established social science approaches, and then summarizes the contributions to be expected from applying rhetorical perspectives to the study of advertising. We then briefly introduce the individual chapters in the volume.

What Is Rhetoric?

Style Versus Content

Since classical antiquity, rhetoric has been more concerned with how to say things, than what to say. In its contemporary revival, rhetorical scholars have focused ever more closely on issues of style rather than content. The idea is that the impact of an utterance may depend in whole or part on the style selected for it. In the background is the presumption that in any given case, a palette of potentially applicable styles exists, and that one of these styles can be determined to be the most effective in a given instance. Systematic approaches to rhetorical scholarship seek to discover general rules and organizing principles for identifying the most effective stylistic choice in any specified context.

In an advertising context, what to say consists of a decision about what attribute or position to claim. Once chosen, such content can almost always be delivered via more than one style. One can state the claim point blank or give it an embellishment; command a response or invite it; express a claim pictorially or verbally; and so forth. All of these are stylistic choices. Each instance shares the same underlying content, but each constitutes a different communication attempt that may fare well or poorly in a specific context. It is important to recognize that although style can be distinguished from content, style also communicates. The separation of style from content, together with the valorization of style, are defining characteristics of the rhetorical perspective. In fact, it can be argued that advertising style was almost invisible until the rhetorical perspective began to be applied (see Scott [1994] for this argument).

In locating the contribution of rhetoric within the arena of style, we also put down a marker as to what (contemporary) rhetoric is not, at least as far as its application to advertising is concerned. As practiced in antiquity, rhetorical ideas governed the selection of content as well as the choice of style; rhetoric claimed to offer guidance with respect to both. Although not all contemporary practitioners of rhetoric would agree, we think that a rhetorical perspective has little to offer advertisers when it comes to the selection of what brand attribute to claim or what competitive position to own. Instead, perspectives developed in other disciplines govern these content choices.

For instance, the concept of personal relevance (i.e., “select the attribute that is most relevant to the target audience”) is a psychological construct, as is the idea that one attribute is likely to be perceived as more instrumental to a consumer’s valued goals than another. Similarly, the concept of segmentation and the idea that one brand position is more viable than another comes from economic theory concerning competitive advantage. Rhetoric does not question or challenge any of these ideas, nor does it substitute its own approach to content; it simply points out that decisions about content do not exhaust the decisions facing the advertiser.

What we are suggesting, then, is a kind of division of labor. The choice of what to say has migrated away from rhetoric and belongs now to disciplines such as psychology and economics, or more properly, their integration into marketing thought. The contribution of rhetoric is to point out first that there is another set of choices to be made, concerning stylistic elements; and second, to contribute to the understanding of how these stylistic elements in advertising operate.

To sum up, contemporary rhetoric probably has more to offer the advertising strategist than the product manager. The product manager, as a marketing decision maker, is tasked with decisions about attributes, benefits, positioning, and target consumer selection. To make these decisions she or he will continue to draw on the best psychological and economic thinking, as distilled in the literature on marketing strategy. However, the advertising strategist knows all too well that his or her job has barely begun after decisions about content are set, because any given content can always be expressed in a variety of different styles. The advertising manager will find little of assistance in psychological research when it comes to stylistic decisions; consequently, she or he is naturally open to the potential contribution of rhetorical perspectives.

Differentiation

The goal of rhetoric, as Aristotle put it, is to identify in any given case the available means of persuasion. The plural form of this statement is crucial to understanding what Aristotle was trying to say. That is, the rhetorician always assumes the existence of sets of discrete stylistic options—of palettes, if you will. The practice of rhetoric, when applied to a specific phenomenon such as advertising, consists of identifying and differentiating the various stylistic options available. The number of options cannot always be known in advance, but the rhetorician tends to assume that there are more rather than fewer. For example, in the print advertising case, we can differentiate ad layouts, identify various headline styles, distinguish multiple pictorial styles, assign body text styles to genres, and so on. In each case, we are setting out the palette of options from which the advertiser may (must) choose.

Making advertising style visible means identifying and differentiating discrete stylistic options, and all rhetoricians engage in this activity. Some rhetoricians, ourselves included, strive in addition to embed these differentiations within an integrative structure. The notion is that a system of differentiations will be more theoretically powerful than an unstructured list of alternatives. For instance, from antiquity onward rhetoricians were wont to compile lists of rhetorical figures (e.g., rhyme, anaphora, antithesis, syllepsis, and many, many more). These typically took the form of simple catalogs with examples of each entry. Once the scientific revolution took hold in Western thought, these catalogs lost their claim to represent real knowledge. A list does not stack up very well against an equation like E = mc². The practice of compiling unstructured lists, and leaving matters at that, led eventually to Samuel Butler’s famous gibe: “For all a rhetorician’s rules/Teach nothing but to name his tools.”

An integrative structure goes beyond a simple list by providing an underlying conceptual network that links some elements of the list together and simultaneously distinguishes them from other elements. As an example, McQuarrie and Mick (1996) suggested that verbal rhetorical figures in advertising could be organized according to a three-level hierarchy. They first distinguished all figurative expressions from nonfigurative expressions, in terms of the property of artful deviation from expectation. Next, they distinguished schemes from tropes as discrete types of artful deviation, constituted by excess regularity of expression in the former case, and irregularity of expression in the latter. Last, within both the scheme and trope categories, they distinguished simple versus complex rhetorical operations, whereby these regularities or irregularities could be constructed.

Without dwelling on the details of the McQuarrie and Mick (1996) taxonomy, we can develop the positive implications that follow from constructing such an integrated structure of differentiations. Specifically, such a structure links the rhetorical system to other systems, most notably the system that underlies consumer response to advertising. McQuarrie and Mick do that by linking artful deviation to the psychological construct termed incongruity. They then draw on Berlyne’s (1971) framework to derive testable hypotheses about the impact of artful deviation on consumer response. Results supporting these hypotheses have been recorded in a number of empirical studies (McQuarrie and Mick 1992, 1999, 2003a; McQuarrie and Phillips 2005; Mothersbaugh, Huhmann, and Franke 2002; Phillips 1997, 2000; Tom and Eves 1999).

This rhetorical procedure is general and not specific to the McQuarrie and Mick (1996) effort. Thus, Phillips and McQuarrie (2004) set out to differentiate the set of visual rhetorical figures. Their typology, like the McQuarrie and Mick (1996) effort, leads to a differentiation of the set of visual figures, but uses different concepts judged more appropriate to the visual modality. Phillips and McQuarrie propose a 3 x 3 matrix, created by crossing two dimensions: visual structure and meaning operation. Again, without going into the details of their typology, the thing to note is that visual structures are conceived to vary according to their complexity while meaning operations vary in their degree of polysemy. Phillips and McQuarrie then use the concepts of complexity and polysemy to tie their typology to alternative consumer responses so that they too are able to generate testable hypotheses about the differentiations that make up the typology.

To summarize, integrated sets of conceptually structured differentiations allow the rhetorician to claim the title of “scientist” as well. We think it is important to note how one can simultaneously be a rhetorician and a marketing scientist, in part because Samuel Butler’s gibe remains timely; we have repeatedly encountered more or less respectful versions of it when presenting rhetorical differentiations to scholarly audiences. In any case, although Rhetoric and Science were once contestants in an earlier “culture war” (Bender and Welberry 1990), the point we wish to make is that there is nothing about the drive toward stylistic differentiation of advertising that is intrinsically unscientific. In fact, the practice of rhetoric and the pursuit of scientific understanding share a common interest in causation, as developed next.

Pragmatism

Almost from its beginnings, rhetoric has been criticized for the ruthless and uncompromising pragmatism of its practitioners. Rhetoric has always been concerned with what works, over and above what is true or right. Early Greek rhetoricians were extensively criticized on this count by their fellow philosophers. Rhetoricians learned early on that the unadorned truth might or might not be persuasive in a specific context and then spent most of their effort on discovering what would be most persuasive in that context. This stance was deemed offensive by truth-seeking philosophers. The resulting ill repute has stuck to rhetoric down through the ages.

Now consider contemporary advertising—do its practitioners not labor under exactly the same ill reputation as ancient rhetoricians did and for exactly the same reason? Advertising is also ruthlessly pragmatic. Ads need not be false, but ads deploy only as much unadorned truth as is consistent with their aims. What ads must do is achieve their desired impact on the consumers to whom they are directed. Rhetoric is above all pragmatic communication. Advertising is likewise pragmatic communication. Truth, comeliness, clarity, or any other desideratum is entirely secondary. The primary goal of advertising is always to cause a specified consumer response. Since this has likewise always been the goal of rhetoric, it seems likely that rhetorical perspectives can contribute substantially to the understanding of advertising.

We do not mean to imply here that rhetorical practice is inherently unethical, nor do we intend to justify false advertising as okay. We are simply asserting a fact: truth seeking is not part of the mandate of rhetoric or advertising. Knowledge of rhetoric and of advertising is instrumental knowledge: it is knowledge-how. A virtuous person will tell the truth, whether rhetorically enhanced or not; an unethical person will not, whether rhetorically skilled or not. An analogy may help to clarify the point: achieving rhetorical knowledge is like sharpening a knife blade. If the person using the knife is a chef in a kitchen, the sharper blade is almost certainly a good thing. If the user is a criminal in an alley, it is probably a bad thing. Rhetorical knowledge can make truth more effective, and it can likewise make falsehoods more believable. Rhetorical knowledge is simply unrelated to truth seeking.

“Pragmatic” has another, less pejorative meaning, as when it refers to the branch of linguistics concerned not with syntax or semantics, but with the action implications of speech—what the listener does with what he hears (Sperber and Wilson 1986). Advertising is a kind of pragmatic communication because it is primarily concerned with causing a specified action to occur (as opposed to, say, educating understanding, or entertaining the recipient). Rhetoric claims to know something about how speakers can elicit whichever response is desired from their audiences, and this is what makes rhetorical perspectives so interesting and relevant to the student of advertising phenomena. In fact, the action focus of rhetoric makes it arguably the most relevant of the many text-analytic disciplines, so far as providing a deep understanding of advertising is concerned.

By “text-analytic discipline,” we mean the scholarly disciplines whose subject matter is texts of various kinds (including pictorial texts). All text-analytic disciplines are primarily concerned with understanding specific types of human cultural artifacts and tend to be more concerned with explaining aspects of the artifacts themselves than with giving an account of their producers or the culture or society in which they arose. Prominent examples would include poetics, art criticism, literary criticism, and semiotics, among others. Now contrasts among text-analytic disciplines are necessarily fuzzy, since their boundaries are not tightly drawn or widely agreed upon, and many concepts and tools are s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Advertising Rhetoric
• Part I. The Starting Box: Using the Past to Hypothesize the Future
• Part II. The Black Box:Understanding the Cognitive Processing of Rhetoric
• Part III. The Gift Box: Examining the Structure of Style
• Part IV. The Toolbox: Unpacking the Inquiry Process
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index