Course name: Honors Business Writing
Course Number: ENGL 3130
Instructor: Lombardo, Thomas G.
Semester: Fall 2022
Introduction to Healthy or Rhetoric? A Critical Analysis of Marketing as It Relates Social Health Consumption
The target audience for my rhetorical analyses of marketing companies’ ads/campaigns is the average American consumer. I wanted to critique how campaigns often use duplicitous strategies to sell consumers “health” conscious products without any proof behind these claims. The concept of the assignment asked students to select an example of business writing and write an analysis of its effectiveness. The topic of marketing companies tapping into the social culture and insecurities of citizens intrigued from a rhetorical perspective but moral. Through choosing two different products from separate eras, it highlighted the continued abuse of power from companies, as well as creating a juxtaposition between the products but similar motives. The ability to allows question and analyze marketing ads helped me explore how these firms are successful and the best way to implement these skills into my own writing. If granted the opportunity to expand on this paper, I think I would focus solely on cigarette ad of the time and the variety of brands subtle differences in marketing,
Healthy or Rhetoric? A Critical Analysis of Marketing as It Relates Social Health Consumption
Smoke Luckies, “It’s Toasted”, buy Garden of Eatin’ “It’s Gluten Free”. The power of concise, ambiguous words continues to divide consumerism leaving several costumers with skewed view of surrounding their everyday purchases. The “Golden Age of Advertisement” is widely considered between the 1960s to the late 1980s. During this era ads were no longer a form of media with the sole purpose of selling you a product, but a lifestyle to attach to the very items you buy. What was once a simple cigarette granted others a dissociative perspective into your principles. The days of randomly picking products off the shelf were long gone. The average consumer now must consider, “what does this item express about me?”, “does this product uphold my personal branding?”
The question remains have marketing trends in the last decade resulted in skewed expectations and opinions on certain products, equating to a false sense of personal branding through purchases. Lucky strikes coined the iconic phrase “Its Toasted” in 1917, based on their personal curing of tobacco. Unlike other competitors, Lucky’s process including applying heat to the raw tobacco leaf, opposed to other brands that opted for sun drying. The idea of “Its toasted resulted in the future campaigns that toasting the tobacco result in less irritation/coughing when smoking. However, the phrases became equated with the idea that Lucky Strikes “toasted” cigarettes were far more healthy than other competitors. What should have been a phrase that allowed customers a view into the intricate process of their cigarette brand was now a duplicitous ad campaign to disengage consumers from the danger of nicotine.
Lucky Strike’s ad campaign may be one of a past few have experienced; yet it remains an iconic symbol of business and marketing trends. Within the last decade of society, the shift from “It toasted” to “Its gluten free” or “Its organic” has become a gilded attempt to repackage the same motive to consumers. Instead of ignorance is bliss the business world has entered an era of blurred transparency under the veil of our health obsessed society. The Garden of Eatin’ ad expresses this sentiment through the “Gluten free” label proudly boosted for consumers. While some could attribute this label to furthering customers knowledge on the product. This small, yet concise ad within an ad expresses the same sentiment as Lucky Strike. The plase concern with seeming healthy without any real facts or research behind it, though for Garden of Eatin’s case the chips are gluten free. However, the label becomes exceedingly unnecessary once you consider the product is corn chips and were always at their bare minimum gluten free. The undenied marketing ploy and financial benefits stemming from having products that are “free of” create this glamoured need for “health”.
The power of carefully crafted phrases through bold presentation creates a striking contrast for the methods rhetoric can be wielded; the power of written words become the embodiment for positive and negative reinforcement. Blurred marketing has slowly morphed into the metaphorical “all seeing eye”, a fictional but heavy social norm within the novel “The Great Gatsby”. Similarly, the weight of the eye the undeniable need for health in a society post Covid has driven marketing/business strategies to spoon feed the public the skewed idea of buying health through label without understanding the product itself. The social standard has become “buy gluten free”, “buy organic”, and “buy GMO free”; however, the ingenuous system has inadvertently developed sensory overload for consumers who are slowly decoding the marketing strategy.
As society continues to socially progress in consumers unique participation in product development becomes the center of marketing plows as businesses try to sell us the “idea” of what we want. The Lucky Strikes ad refers to past advertising that hoped to maintain a chokehold on society and the ability to create an intricate lifestyle through the act of buying their cigarettes. Within recent years the product has changed but not the message; in deceiving concept of who you can become and what the product truly is lies at the underbelly of most marketing strategies.