Marketing — The Rhetorical Situation

I was recently discussing the concept of “tone” with some marketing colleagues. We all agreed that tone is important, and that using an ill-advised tone can be disastrous for a marketing campaign. It can become self-indulgent and braggadocious. What is less clear is exactly what creates tone and how we can control it. To answer those questions, I take you back to our college rhetoric class for a little refresher course.

Rhetoric is the art of effective communication. Naturally we all want our communication to be effective, right?

But that requires a thorough understanding of the entire rhetorical situation, which has three key components:

• The first is the “rhetor,” which in this case is the marketer, the person creating the message.
• Of course that implies that there is a message, which is the second part of the rhetorical situation.
• Then of course we need an audience, someone to receive our message.

Finally, we need a medium, a way to convey our message from the rhetor (ahem … that’s us, my friends) to the audience.

To recap: We marketers devise a message, find a way to disseminate the message, and if it’s all done effectively, the audience will be motivated to do what we — the marketer — desire. But that’s a big “if.” The key to being effective is to focus on an infinitive.

You remember infinitives, right? They’re verbs with a “to” in front of them: “To please.” “To inform.” “To humor.” Every rhetorical message has an associated infinitive that describes what the rhetor wishes to do to the audience. This should not be conflated with our “call to action”. Not every message will have a call to action, but every message should have an infinitive.

This is often the best place for a marketer to start when creating a campaign … by considering what we want “to do” to our audience. This is the cure for a self-indulgent program. If we’re not focused on our company or our product, but on using our message “to do” something to our audience, the focus will naturally be on the audience, our customer.

This also will help us to strip out any errant “fluff” that has made its way into our messaging so that we deliver clear, concise information that can be consumed by our customers quickly.

Further, while a well-chosen verb will make our rhetoric less self-indulgent, a well-chosen adverb will set the tone. Perhaps we want “to warmly persuade” our audience or “to enthusiastically cajole” them.  Maybe we want “to politely correct” them.

So now we’ve come full circle: the right verb and adverb will center the goal of a tactic, where it belongs — on our target, and do it in an effective way.

*(NOTE: “Naturally we all want our communication to be effective, right?” is an example of a rhetorical question, one asked solely to produce an effect or to make an assertion and not to elicit a reply. Please take heed though, these questions are asked in order to produce an effect. And we all want our communication to be effective. And the thus circle of life is complete. You’re welcome.)

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