Rhetorical Analysis

So, I missed the memo about doing a rhetorical analysis last week for our blog, sorry about that- here it is...

I decided to analyze Marlboro Cigarette advertisements. I figured it would be easier to analyze pictures rather than an essay or a speech, etc…. If you haven’t seen very many Marlboro ads, they’re usually represented by some kind of western front and cowboy snapshot; rough-edged, old and wise looking cowboys riding horses and looking off in to the distance, lassoing horses and bulls, branding cows, filling their canteen from a stream, leaning on a fence post pondering life… you get the point. These ads usually come with a catch phrase: “Come to where the flavor is. Marlboro country,” probably suggesting that America is more than just polluted, drug-fed and crime driven cities and suburbs that have lost or have no ‘flavor,’ but is also a land of unsophisticated, beautiful, rich, plentiful and immense wilderness full of cowboys, farms, and anything else beautiful that goes along with this kind of environment- including cigarettes.




To begin with, the main purpose of these advertisement is to persuade buyers (smoker and non) to buy their product over all other brands of cigarettes. 2: These ads persuade buyers that Marlboro’s are better than other cigarettes by implying they have more flavor; richness of flavor equal to that of the wild western front. 3: It persuades buyers that Marlboro’s are cool to smoke because rough and tough lookin’, hardworking cowboys smoke them on a regular basis while doing rough and tough cowboy like work.




The audience could be anyone who is old enough to buy cigarettes. I think the main audience would have to be men, from age 20 to 60. Men look for ways to look cool but not cocky, rugged but not ragged, tough but not a jerk, down-to-earth but not careless, strong but not sterodic, wise but not critical, and intense but not aggressive every day. What better way to portray these feelings than with a cowboy. If you’re a true man, you’re ultimate goal is to become an astronaut, a pro football player or a cowboy. These are the only three ways to attract attention, a lot of attention, a lot of attention from girls, hot girls. And who doesn’t want to be a cowboy? Who wakes up and says, I’d rather keep my 9-hour-a-day job inside of a cubicle than be a handsome and strapping cowboy who gets to explore the country and live in peace… queers, that’s who say it. The Marlboro company, obviously understanding that pro athletes don’t smoke for health reasons and knowing there is no oxygen in space to light up a cigarette, grab the American cowboy perception and slap a cigarette in his mouth.




Marlboro depicts the cowboy life as a kid would dream about: the cowboy is lean and cut, wears old rugged button down shirts with the cuffs rolled up just a bit. He wears his tan colored cowboy hat and work gloves along with the rawhide leather jacket, with or without sheep skin, and dirt and sweat stained chaps. The cowboy never smiles, he is always hard at work and he shows it with his stern serious and focused look, and if he’s not working then he’s looking off in to the distance taking in the cool mountain air breeze and thinking about how awesome his life is and how much cooler he is than all of them city-slickers with their fancy ties and white-collared shirts.



The background to these advertisements is of course a wild western frontier; pine trees, mountains, horses, snow, rivers and streams. It’s what we, as Americans like to see; it’s what we’re proud of in a sense. It’s peaceful yet energetic, subtle yet forthright and adventurous, dirty yet beautiful. The cowboy is just the icing on the cake; the butter on the bread. It is an incredible scene, something you don’t see every day. The pure manliness and masculinity of the bronco wrangler catches our attention as that of a gorgeous and slim Top Model does to a young woman, and makes us look at him/her over and over again leaving us to question ourselves, “what can we do to look more like them, how can we be that frickin awesome?” for the men, the only way to look like a cowboy is to smoke Marlboros, for the girls to look like Top Models, its abstaining from eating.



It’s movie-like really; practical but at the same time seems unrealistic, it’s like seeing Kobe Bryant break through a line of defenders untouched before his one-handed dunk finale, as if there was nobody in front of him the- beautiful, even if you hate basketball, you know it’s beautiful and it makes you wish you were Kobe, or makes you actually want to watch NBA, maybe, probably not, but still.

SOURCE: http://marlborocigarettesblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/marlboro-cigarettes-ads.html