A Critical Discourse Analysis of Rhetorical Devices Used in Advertisements of Beauty Products in Pakistani Print Media

Abstract

The primarily focus of advertising is to persuade the customers. In other words advertising aims to capture the attention of customers and convince them to buy the products by using different persuasive techniques. Beauty products are become the fundamental need of every man and women because everyone wants to be look beautiful also wants to have their spouse to be attractive. Rhetorical devices or rhetoric techniques in advertisements play a vital role to persuade viewers. The current study has also focused on rhetorical devices used in the advertisements of beauty products in Pakistani print media. The researcher’s aim was to examine the rhetorical devices used by advertisers in order to capture the attention of customers and also to investigate the representation of gender in beauty products advertisements that control the mind of mind and persuade them to purchase the products. For this purpose, the study has used Critical Discourse Analysis as a research tool. The research was qualitative in nature. Data was collected from beauty products advertisements and these advertisements were taken from print media. Print advertisements were collected from 3 Dawn English magazines and 3 Mag English magazines over a period of three months (April to June 2018). By using systematic random sampling the researcher selected twenty four (24) advertisements (twelve of each gender) from total population as a sample. The data was analyzed through Rhetorical Structure Theory proposed by Mann and Thompson (1988). The findings reveal that hyperbole is the most used rhetorical device. Moreover, alliteration and analogy also frequently used in beauty products advertisements. The researcher also observed that the representation of gender in beauty products are more persuasive and tactic. The advertisers used the representation of celebrities in order to motivate the viewers and to sell their products. The study also concluded that the frequently used relations from subject matter relations are: Elaboration and Explanation and from presentational relations are: Motivation and Evidence.

Keywords: Rhetorical Devices, Advertisements, Gender analysis, Pakistani print media.

DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/53-03