EXPLORING THE USE OF RHETORIC IN PRESTIGE COSMETICS ADVERTISEMENTS
Abstract
Every advertising campaign is fundamentally persuasive and geared towards influencing the purchase decisions of individuals. Certain elements are employed to make advertisements apt, catchy and attention-attracting. One of such elements is rhetoric, the art of creating resources that are appellative, attention-attracting and persuasive. This paper, thus, aims at unpacking the intricacies of language use evident in the rhetorical techniques employed in cosmetics advertisements as apparatus for influencing and persuading individuals to making informed choices as they are being confronted daily by alternatives. The study is corpus based as it adopts a descriptive qualitative method to analyse data from 5 cosmetics advertisements sourced purposively from the wide corpora on the internet site of Prestige Cosmetics (www.prestigecosmetics.com.ng), a Nigerian cosmetic brand. Again, Knowles and Linn’s (2004) Alpha Strategies of Persuasion is adopted as a working framework to analyse the strategies that add to the persuasive imports of the advertisements. The study reveals that aside the appeals advertisements exude, strategies of making advertisements more persuasive, adding incentives, increasing source credibility, providing concensus information, emphasizing consistency and commitment and engaging a norm of reciprocity are mechanics pulled by Prestige Cosmetics to heighten the persuasive undertones of advertisements. The paper then concludes that in cosmetics advertisements, rhetoric and all its composits are arts of creativity and persuasion tailored to sway the target into making purchase decisions.
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