Persuasion and rhetoric

We all know her – the fabulous lady who happened to be the wife of the last president of the USA. And I think most of the people who has ever listened to one of her speeches – related to her husband presidency or on entirely different topic – would agree that the way she talks leaves impact on her audience, even if one does not like her at all. That is the topic of today’s post: persuasion and rhetoric. Let’s start with a little bit of history, then we will move to the moral aspect of this question, and finally we will finish of with some examples.

 

When it comes to history, Simons (2001) explains that rhetoric has its origins in Ancient Greece, and some of the first people to have addressed it and made it popular were philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.  The first two, Socrates and Plato, do not like persuasion because of its moral implications. What does exactly rhetoric mean? It is the art of persuasion; the art of being able to impress an audience. The definition from Merriam Webster (2017) for the word “the art of speaking or writing effectively”. The key aspect here is the word ‘effectively’. Effectively does not have a good or bad connotation, which is true for how rhetoric is also perceived – everything depends on the intention behind it. What the two philosophers did not agree with was the fact that even though rhetoric can be an effective tool to popularize truth, it could also be used for something destructive, which is the moral aspect of it. The problem with rhetoric for them is the fact that persuasion deals with judgement not only from the one practicing persuasion, but from the one listening also. You, as a person being persuaded, you have to have the mental capacity to actually make sense of what the others are saying, and hopefully, see through the lies and the irrational arguments. Having so much faith in a crowd is by default irrational. On the other hand, Aristotle is in a defense of it, because it can truly be beneficial. However, he acknowledges the fact that “rhetoric can be used to deceive, mislead, exploit, and oppress” (Simons, 2001). Nevertheless, for me, even though persuasion can be detrimental, it has a lot of benefits, which can be exploited in a willy manner.

One way that this is done in practice, is through two Swedish companies: Absolut and IKEA, which are both extensively explained in the paper by Sonesson (2013). Here, I will try to provide a short summary based on his analysis. He pays attention to a particular Absolut campaign, called ‘European series’. The series were based on different European cities and they were represented on the different ads. For instance, the Madrid one was incorporated in a Spanish guitar; for Athens it took the form of an Ancient Greek column; and for Monte Carlo, it was a gambling table (you can see those here). What the company tried to do was to connect the image of the Swedish liquor to the different and interesting, yet similar in the sense of being European, cities in order for the target group – customers on the other side of the ocean – to feel the enigma of the Old continent. The same idea of persuasion is used in the marketing of IKEA. People usually relate IKEA with being Swedish and instead of trying to fight this, the creators used it to their advantage by utilizing the stereotypes other nations have of the Swedish people (that does not mean that they are necessary true). In a way, both of those strategies, even though they are quite different from one another, somehow manage to use the knowledge other people have of a certain notion, and make them believe in the product they are selling based on this.
Even though those two examples were rather amusing and interesting, I am going to show you something on another note, which I find to be more serious. If it can actually be useful and will make people change their mind is a whole different topic. Nevertheless, I still believe it can be considered persuasive. It is an ad from the Municipality of Ekaterinburg, a city in Russia, which aim was to stop children death through car accidents. Even though it was not aimed at selling something, I believe it was quite important for us to see that it is possible to use persuasion for something beneficial for the society as well. Why I believe it is persuasive? Mainly because it touches an emotional chord in every parent – its child. We still have not talked about it, but for me, the best persuasion is always emotional: if you, as the person being persuaded, feel an emotional connection to the product/service/campaign, you are that much more likely to be influenced by its content. I believe that this was the main reason why the two Greek philosophers were against rhetoric. In this case, it is done for a good deed. But with the same success, it can be done for something destructive. What would we do then?

 

Refernces:

Simons, H.W. (2001). The Study of Persuasion. In: H.W. Simons with J. Morreale & B.E. Gronbeck, Persuasion in Society (pp. 3-24), Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Sonesson, G. (2013). Two strands of rhetoric in advertising discourse. International Journal of Marketing Semiotics, 1(1), 6-24.

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