Emotional Appeals, JIB Fowles Outlines

¶ … Emotional Appeals," JIB Fowles outlines that advertisers place emphasis on fifteen core emotional appeals. Advertisements can be analyzed on the basis of these appeals to understand how the advertiser is trying to reach consumers. Over the years, the use of these appeals has become more sophisticated as advertisers become more knowledgeable about consumers' motivations and emotional needs. This paper will outline in detail the ways in which Fowler makes his case.

The intended audience of this article is a reader curious about the workings of advertising. This is primarily the student of marketing, but can also be a reader with a natural curiosity for how advertising works. The author presents ample examples and avoids excessive jargon that would turn off the casual reader or novice student, but provides a good overview of the subject matter. Fowler treats the reader as intelligent enough to understand his arguments. The audience is not considered to have in-depth knowledge of psychology or sociology as little jargon from those disciplines is utilized. The audience is, however, expected to have a broad knowledge of the advertisements that are presented as evidence of the appeals, for example citing the Jordache and Brooke Shields' Calvin Klein ads in paragraph 18.

The structure that the author uses makes it easy to follow, as the fifteen appeals are laid out in list format and are then broken down with headings. The other components of the article, in particular the discussion after the appeals about interpreting ads, are less well-structured. Indeed, the author's work within each heading was generally unstructured and this weakness was revealed in the last few pages of the article. There is considerable subject overlap between "Analyzing Advertisements" and "Do They or Don't They?"

The author's choice of writing style is intended to convince the reader of the author's point-of-view. The author directs the writing towards the audience, such as "it is good to keep in mind…" and "we should recall" and this frames the way that the audience reads the piece. The piece is, essentially, an instruction manual for deconstructing the emotional appeals of ads. The author selects different ads to support his arguments about the different appeals. By cherry-picking from the familiar, the author invites the reader to agree, and avoids a situation where he writes over the reader's head, which could cause the reader's support for the arguments to wane.

Overall, Fowler is relatively successful. The article is not as concise as an argumentative essay should be, but in this case it is also meant as instructive. The author's tone detracts from the article, however, as it is too directly instructional. The other major flaw in the writing is that the author expends very little energy -- and only at the beginning -- presenting his case for the theoretical framework. This would have lent more credence to his case than name-dropping dozens of ads. The student reader is relatively sophisticated -- and Fowler knows this -- but the structure of the paper does not adequately address this sophistication due to the emphasis on examples over theoretical foundations.

The theoretical framework is discussed in paragraphs 1-16. At this point in the article, Fowler indulges in a long-winded but threadbare background to the issue. For example, paragraph 4 is thirteen lines long but states the obvious and provides only one study to back up the claim. Worse, the conclusion of paragraph 4 is simply a restating of the conclusion to paragraph 3, calling into question the necessity of those thirteen lines and the coherency of the author's argument. The last 2/3 of paragraph 8 is superfluous.