Go Figure!: New Directions in Advertising Rhetoric

336 Pages·2007·4.53 MB·English

by  Barbara J. Phillips

New Directions in
Advertising Rhetoric
Edward F. McQuarrie and Barbara J. Phillips, Editors
M
.E.Sharpe
Armonk, New York
London, England
Copyright © 2008 by M.E. Sharpe, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without written permission from the publisher, M.E. Sharpe, Inc.,
80 Business Park Drive, Armonk, New York 10504.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Go figure! New directions in advertising rhetoric / edited by Edward F. McQuarrie
and Barbara J. Phillips.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7656-1801-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7656-2133-7 (electronic)
1. Rhetoric. 2. Visual communication. 3. Advertising—Language. I. McQuarrie, Edward F.
II. Phillips, Barbara J., 1966–
P301.5.A38G6 2007
808’.066659—dc22 2007022322
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z 39.48-1984.
~
BM (c) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
1. Advertising Rhetoric: An Introduction
Edward F. McQuarrie and Barbara J. Phillips 3
Part I. The Starting Box: Using the Past to Hypothesize the Future
2. Rediscovering Theory: Integrating Ancient Hypotheses and
Modern Empirical Evidence of the Audience-Response Effects
of Rhetorical Figures
Eric D. DeRosia 23
3. Rhetrickery and Rhetruth in Soap Operas: Genre Convention,
Hidden Persuasions, and Vulnerable Audiences
Barbara B. Stern 51
4. What the Symbol Can’t, the Icon Can: The Indispensable
Icon/Symbol Distinction
Val Larsen 68
Part II. The Black Box:
Understanding the Cognitive Processing of Rhetoric
5. A Model of the Cognitive and Emotional Processing of Rhetorical
Works in Advertising
Bruce A. Huhmann 85
6. The Dark Side of Openness for Consumer Response
Paul Ketelaar, Marnix S. van Gisbergen, and Johannes W.J. Beentjes 114
7. Inspecting the Unexpected: Schema and the Processing
of Visual Deviations
Mark A. Callister and Lesa A. Stern 137
Part III. The Gift Box: Examining the Structure of Style
8. The Case for a Complexity Continuum
Tina M. Lowrey 159
9. Pictorial and Multimodal Metaphor in Commercials
Charles Forceville 178
10. Reading Pictures: Understanding the Stylistic Properties
of Advertising Images
Kai-Yu Wang and Laura A. Peracchio 205
11. Classifying Visual Rhetoric: Conceptual and Structural Heuristics
Alfons Maes and Joost Schilperoord 227
Part IV. The Toolbox: Unpacking the Inquiry Process
12. A Visit to the Rhetorician’s Workbench: Developing a Toolkit
for Differentiating Advertising Style
Edward F. McQuarrie 257
13. Visual Analysis of Images in Brand Culture
Jonathan E. Schroeder 277
14. Expanding Rhetoric
Linda M. Scott 297
About the Editors and Contributors 315
Index 321

1
Advertising Rhetoric
An Introduction
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 disci-
plines, 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
3
4 INTRODUCTION
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 embellish-
ment; 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 ap-
plication 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