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Will You Buy It?

Any company that anyone could think of uses advertisements to try to sell a product. To
do this effectively, the marketing team has to come up with an ad that will peak interest in a
target audience. Advertisements use visual rhetoric such as the elements of logos, ethos and
pathos. The Sig Sauer gun manufacturing company is no different in there ad for the P228 M11A1. The soul purpose of the ad, is to convince the viewer to purchase the Sig Sauer P228 M11A1. This advertisement does a great job of it's purpose by implementing an appropriate amount
of ethos, logos, and pathos.
The ad that was chosen displays a handgun in the foreground. In the background, it shows
a person who is clearly a fighter jet pilot for some sort of military branch, flying a fighter jet. You
can tell that the pilot is currently flying the military fighter jet at the time the picture is taken
because you can see a body of water underneath the jet. This ad is promoting the Sig Sauer P228
M11-A1. This is established by the fact that on the handle of the handgun it says P228, on the
side of the slide, or what most people would probably mistake as the barrel, reads Sig Sauer
M11-A1.
The most clear of the the three rhetorical appeals is ethos. The reason that ethos is the
most clear of any of the three rhetorical appeals, is because you can physically see it in the actual
picture. No reading needed. In the picture, the pilot of the military fighter jet is the source of
ethos. However, if you do end up reading the text, the ethos in the advertisement becomes more
clear as the first few lines are M11-A1 Trusted by elite military personal. Upgraded for you.
Pistol, compact, 9mm, M11 issued to Naval Aviation and key units in every branches of the
Armed Services, the M11 is proud to serve. Showing that units in every branch of the military

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use this specific model of handgun is very impressive, but to state the pilot portrayed in the ad
who's only ... other weapon is an F/A-18 makes it sound even better especially since that is the
fighter jet that he is flying rather than an actual other gun which makes it seem like it is way
better than it actually might be. This is a form of intensified down play since according to Hugh
Rank, All people intensify... as they communicate... (609). Intensified down play is when a
person is talking about something and makes it seem better than it really is often talking bad
about competitors is included.
Logos in this ad for the Sig Sauer P228 M11-A1 comes in the text. In the text it talks
about different aspects and features that this specific model of handgun has that would lead to it
being superior to it's competitors at say Beretta, Colt, or Heckler and Koch that manufacture
similar products. It talks about how this handgun is compact, shoots nine millimeter
ammunition, has a stainless steel slide and it comes with three flush-fit magazines. For those who
aren't drooling over this because they don't know what all this means, it is small, lightweight,
made of a good material, and the magazines fit perfectly into the handle to avoid unnecessary
jiggling which would in turn possibly create an uneven distribution of weight causing your
shooting to be off. And let's be honest, if you're buying any gun whether it be another type of
handgun, rifle, or shotgun, you're going to want any shooting you do to be as accurate as you can
make it just in case the time comes for you to need it. Like bragging to your buddies down at the
local hunting lodge.
Though the ethos and logos of this ad are pretty easy to spot out, the pathos isn't, or rather
you probably just don't realize that it's working on you. This is because it goes hand in hand with
the logos and ethos. When the ad uses ethos to talk about how the people who serve in the

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military use this handgun, pathos comes in and makes you think to yourself, wow, this must be
a really good, reliable handgun and will let me shoot as good as a trained person in the military.
Also when the logos comes in and talks about all these cool upgrades that the gun has, your
pathos says to you, stainless steel? Your refrigerator is made out of that, and you love your
refrigerator. Therefor you subtly start to think about how great this Sig Sauer P228 M11-A1
must be just because of what you know and how you feel about those things that they use in their
advertisement, which even though it is the most hidden of the three types of rhetorical appeals, it
is subconsciously the most affective and will be the one that sways you top if you are going to
purchase this product or not.
Now that you have explored the use of visual rhetoric in this Sig Sauer advertisement,
you may be wondering why the marketing department for Sig Sauer would put so much effort
into advertising this specific handgun. The answer is answer is simple really. As stated before,
Sig Sauer has a lot of competition, and especially when there are other handguns on the market
that are priced lower than this P228 M11-A1, they need to make sure that you and any other
consumer will buy their products. How would they try to get you to think their product is good
enough for you? By putting it everywhere. According to the Internet Movie Firearm Database,
the Sig Sauer P228 is everywhere from the popular shows on television such as The Walking
Dead, The X-Files, and Charles's Angles, and movies like The Jackal, 21 Jump Street, The Wolf
Of Wall Street, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (IMFDB). This technique is used by any
company that can get there hands on that opportunity, because which would you rather drink,
Coke-a-Cola or the preferred beverage of your favorite superhero that you have seen drinking it
in your favorite movie? Exactly, you would want to drink what your favorite superhero in your

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favorite movie drinks.
As an experiment, I set off on a quest to see how other people would react to the
advertisement. I confronted, individually, a group of five freshmen college students that live in
the California State University Northridge housing units. The initial response that was received
from a majority of the individuals, was shock. They seemed to be amazed and somewhat
uncomfortable by seeing the ad. However, there were a few exceptions to this reaction. Two of
the test subjects were indifferent to the ad that was displayed on the screen in front of them.
When asked what they thought of this advertisement, most of the responses were similar in the
fact that the interviewees believed that guns are a horrible creation and no matter how big, what
kind, or what it's used for, all types of fire arms should be banned from public. In hopes of
getting a positive response about this advertisement, I called my twenty-three year old friend
who lives in Ohio and is a gun enthusiast. He agreed to take a look at the Sig Sauer
advertisement. Upon reading the ad, he said that he thought it was a great advertisement and that
he really likes Sig Sauer. The only problem that he had with it, was a feature of the handgun
itself; the fact that it is only a nine millimeter was his one and only problem.
As one could see, Sig Sauer hired a good marketing team for this that used a great deal of
visual rhetoric to create a the feeling that the P228 M11-A1 is a high quality firearm that
deserves to be purchased over Sig Sauer's counterpart's products. However, it isn't only Sig Sauer
that uses logos, ethos, and pathos in there advertisements. Every company you can think of
between the McDonald's fast food chain to the World Industries Skateboard Company uses these
aspects visual rhetoric to appeal to their possible consumers viewing the advertisements.

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Works Cited
Rank, Hugh. Intensify/Downplay. Models for Writers: Short Essays for Composition, Edited
by Alfred F. Rosa and Paul A. Eschholz, 11th ed., Bedford/St. Martin's. 2012. pp. 608-615.
"SIG-Sauer P220 Pistol Series." Internet Movie Firearm Database. N.p., 23 Oct. 2016. Web. 23
Oct. 2016.
Slowik, Max. SIG Bringing Back the M11 for Limited Run. Guns, 7 Oct. 2012,
www.guns.com/2012/08/07/new-sig-m11-a1-p228-p229-hybrid/.