Rhetorical Analysis Oldspirce

Chris Rectenwald

Professor Bain-Conkin

Writing and Rhetoric

16 October 2013

                                “Clean Your Balls”

        Charles Darwin once said that the world is one competition. The earth is the battlefield and the task is to survive. The key to survival is the ability to reproduce. Many species have gone extinct over the years because of this inability. In fact billions of species that walked this earth are now extinct. However companies have realized that they need to stop this doom for the human race and have taken action. One of those companies is Axe. With their strong scents of masculinity, Axe sells male grooming products with a purpose of helping males attract women. In their commercial “Clean Your Balls” Axe takes a stand to help the male population. Although the ad is lacks seriousness, the commercial’s use of ethos, logos, and pathos persuade many people to switch to using AXE products, which creates a closer connection to its audience, thus becoming well integrated into the popular culture.

        To start off, ethos is the credibility and the reputation that the speaker presenting that information has. Basically it is the traits that the speaker which makes them convincing or not. In regards to these AXE commercial, young men featured in the commercial seemed genuinely interested in the product, so therefore their intended audience was young men. However, the ad takes a humorous route for the conventional way of advertising with their use of metaphors. The product they are selling is the Axe Detailer, which helps males cleans area of their bodies that are metaphorically depicted as sports balls. In order to establish ethos, the ad features two spokespersons (Denese Saintclaire and Monica Blake), both gorgeous women. By nature men aspire for the most attractive woman, so if the two women say that they like it when men use the Axe Detailer, the men will listen. So, the men are left thinking  “Because these beautiful women love when my man parts are clean, I want to purchase the detailer; so I can be clean and please women”. In sum, this commercial creates ethos by having two beautiful women host the ad to persuade men to think buying the Axe Detailer will increase their chances to attract women.

Besides the spokespersons establishing their own ethos, they also use logos, the appeal to the audience based on logic and reason, to improve the validity of the product. Before using the Axe Detailer to clean the balls, they had to devalue any ordinary scrubber. They did this by first using the ordinary scrubber to clean the ball. The scrubber failed to clean the ball, so they then used the Axe Detailer to show that the Axe Detailer significantly cleans the ball better than the ordinary scrubber.  Then, the spokespersons called up and cleaned numerous people from the crowd’s balls of all different shapes and sizes. All in all, this commercial effectively portrays the Axe Detailer as the only product that can sufficiently clean a man’s body.

...