Stuart Hirschberg The Rhetoric Of Advertising

Submitted By John-Van Hoesen
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Pages: 8
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Targeting Mommy
Children, the perfect way to hit home to mothers. When mothers are reading through a magazine that is targeted for them they tend to see advertisements with children in it. Companies advertising in these kinds of magazines see children as a way to pull at a woman’s heart strings and get the mother to buy their product. I was flipping through a Dr. Oz the Good Life magazine when I came across numerous advertisements targeting women. Dr. Oz the Good Life is a popular magazine whose main audience is mothers and woman who want to get healthy. The magazine has numerous topics in it. It has anything from eat right recipes to inspirational weight lost stories to different make up products. The advertisement that stood out the most was a vitafusion advertisement.
The vitafusion advertisement may appear simple, but if the reader digs deeper they can discover more about it. This Vitafusion advertisement is a perfect example on how large companies will spend big money to unlock the subconscious of the reader to go out buy their product. In this case, the product is vitamin gummies. The advertisement uses vague, or hook wording on the reader, they use very specific colors within the advertisement, Vitafusion also shows several different images including real fruits, a mother and her two children, and also three different bottle options they offer.
When after reading an essay by Stuart Hirschberg you can draw a lot of information from his paper “The Rhetoric of Advertising”. The reader starts really noticing the subtleties of advertisements in magazines such as the Vitafusion ad. Hirschberg goes through and explains the techniques the companies use to draw the viewer in and make the reader want to buy their product when the consumers are at the store. Hirschberg explains and open his reader’s eyes to what is actually deeper in the advertisement. Advertisements are not as they appear on the surface. They actually have deeper meanings.
This vitafusion advertisement more often than not uses vague wording throughout the magazine advertisement. Hirschberg explains that companies will love using this kind of wording to entice the readers to buy their products. The first word that stood out was “well”. Well is on the immune well bottle. What does “well” mean? It could mean anything! “Well” could mean that your body is just trying to do better or it could mean that it actually helps you feel better. Also, this advertisement uses the words immune support more often than any other phrase. Again this vague wording appears. Support, how is it supporting? The company gives no explanation on how it is going to support the reader’s immune system. Human immune systems are more complex than just eating these vitamin gummies and then boom the immune system is ready to go. The company leaves out which part of the immune system it supports or if really does cover all bases of it.
Vitafusion also calls their product an “excellent source”. Again Vitafusion, what do you, as a company, mean by excellent? There is no description! It is all extremely vague and has no substance to the wording of their product. Hirschberg warns about companies using these kinds of words to missleads the reader.
Now, let us move on to the word high. High what? You may be asking. Well, this magazine claims high potency of several different vitamins contained within each individual gummy. The company, vitafusion, gives no insight on the word high. How high is your potency of vitamin C, D, or even your Zinc? Too much of a good thing can turn out to be a dangerous thing. The company leaves no explanation of how much of their ingredients are in their product. They would rather the reader go to the store, if the reader is so incline and pick up a bottle of vitafusion and find out then. By the time the reader is at the store and has that bottle in their hand, the company already has you targeted to buy their product.
When holding the product in your hand you see a
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