A Rhetorical Analysis Of Two Car Adverts

Car advertisements are something we see every day. They are in nearly every magazine and part of many commercial breaks on TV. One brand that you might often see is Land Rover. They’re known for their rugged outdoors theme to advertise their SUVs. The first advertisement I picked shows a Land Rover Discovery near the edge of a cliff with mountains in the background. In the upper-left are the words, “For everyone else there’s the internet” and there are also coordinates below those words. The second advertisement I chose is from a popular Japanese car manufacturer called, Daihatsu. Their advertisement consists of a green car parked on a city street. To left there is a person using a laptop and a newspaper on the desk. Also, in the bottom right, it says, “Daihatsu, it takes a huge place in your life.” Both images are trying to persuade you to buy the respected vehicle, however they use different strategies such as setting, text, colors, and rhetorical strategies to appeal to different target audiences.

Starting with the Land Rover image, at first look, you can already get an outdoors and adventurous feeling. This is because of the vast mountain scenery in the background. The advertiser wants you to think that this vehicle would be perfect for driving through rugged terrains such as the mountains. As for the Daihatsu image, the setting is a typical city. However, the picture is taken from inside a building where someone is using a laptop. Also, the photo is captured at such an angle that makes the vehicle appear the same size as a newspaper. This is meant to make you think about how small the car is, and possibly how easy parking would be. It’s clear that each of these advertisements are targeting different audiences because one uses the rugged mountains as their setting, and the other uses an urban city as the setting for their