Rhetoric in Advertising: The Oldest Persuasion System Still Running

Rhetoric in advertising is the deliberate use of language, structure, and argument to move an audience toward a decision. It is not manipulation dressed up in academic language. It is the discipline underneath every headline, every brand narrative, and every campaign that has ever changed what someone believed or did.

Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion, ethos, pathos, and logos, have been in continuous commercial use for over two thousand years. The medium has changed. The mechanism has not.

I want to be honest about where this sits in my own thinking. Earlier in my career, I was deep in lower-funnel performance. Click-through rates, cost per acquisition, conversion optimisation. I believed that was where the real commercial work happened. What I have come to understand, and it took years of managing significant ad budgets across thirty or more industries, is that much of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. The person who already wanted to buy was going to find you. The harder, more important question is what persuaded them to want the thing in the first place. That is a rhetoric question.

What Is Rhetoric and Why Does It Belong in a Strategy Conversation?

Rhetoric gets dismissed in marketing circles. It sounds like something from a humanities degree, not a commercial planning session. That is a mistake. Rhetoric is a system for constructing arguments that persuade, and advertising is, at its core, an argument. Every ad makes a claim. Every claim needs a structure. Rhetoric is the structure.

The three classical modes break down as follows. Ethos is the credibility of the speaker. Pathos is the emotional register of the message. Logos is the logical or rational case being made. Strong advertising almost always uses all three in some proportion. Weak advertising usually over-relies on one and neglects the others.

If you are working on a go-to-market or growth strategy, rhetoric belongs in the conversation from the start, not as a creative flourish applied at the end, but as a planning discipline that shapes how you position, message, and sequence your communications. The argument you are making to the market needs to be constructed before you brief a creative team.

Ethos: Why Credibility Is a Strategic Asset, Not a Brand Value

Ethos is about trust. In advertising, that means the audience needs to believe the brand has the standing to make the claim it is making. This is not the same as listing your awards or years in business. Ethos is earned through consistency, specificity, and the right kind of social proof.

I judged the Effie Awards, which are awarded on proven marketing effectiveness, not creative ambition. What struck me reviewing entries was how often the strongest campaigns had an unusually clear sense of authority. The brand knew exactly what it stood for, and the advertising reflected that without hedging. Brands that tried to claim too much, to be credible across too many dimensions at once, consistently underperformed. Ethos requires discipline. You cannot be credible at everything.

In B2B, this problem is acute. I have worked with financial services businesses where the temptation was to claim expertise across every product line and every client segment simultaneously. The result was messaging that persuaded no one. If you are working on something like B2B financial services marketing, the rhetorical challenge is almost always an ethos problem: how do you establish credibility with a specific buyer in a category where everyone sounds the same?

The answer is usually specificity. A claim like “we have helped mid-market manufacturers reduce working capital requirements” is more persuasive than “we deliver innovative financial solutions for businesses.” The first has standing. The second has none.

Pathos: Emotion Is Not the Opposite of Rigour

There is a persistent idea in B2B marketing that emotion is for consumer brands and that business buyers make rational decisions. This is not supported by how people actually behave. Business buyers are people. They have careers to protect, bosses to satisfy, and anxieties about making the wrong call. Pathos works in B2B because the emotional stakes are often higher, not lower, than in consumer categories.

I remember the first time I was handed a whiteboard pen and asked to run a brainstorm for Guinness, early in my career at a creative agency. The founder had been pulled to a client meeting and I was left in the room. My internal reaction was something close to panic. But what that experience taught me was that Guinness, like most great consumer brands, had a rhetorical identity so clear that the creative brief practically wrote itself. The pathos was built into the brand architecture. You were not selling stout. You were selling patience, character, the willingness to wait for something worth having. Every piece of communication drew on that emotional logic.

Pathos without ethos is manipulation. Pathos without logos is sentimentality. But pathos as part of a complete rhetorical argument is how brands create the kind of preference that survives a price comparison. Understanding how to build that emotional architecture into a campaign is one of the things that separates advertising that moves markets from advertising that fills media space.

It is also worth thinking about where pathos operates in the funnel. Emotional resonance tends to do its work early. By the time someone is filling in a form or clicking a buy button, the emotional work is largely done. This is one reason why pay per appointment lead generation models, which are almost entirely lower-funnel, depend on upstream persuasion having already happened. If the rhetoric has not done its job earlier in the experience, no amount of conversion optimisation at the bottom will compensate.

Logos: The Rational Case That Most Brands Underinvest In

Logos is the logical structure of the argument. In advertising, this means the evidence, the demonstration, the proof. It is not enough to feel trustworthy and emotionally resonant if the rational case is weak or absent. Buyers, especially in considered purchase categories, need a reason that holds up when they explain their decision to someone else.

The mistake most brands make with logos is confusing features with arguments. A feature is a fact about the product. An argument is a structured case for why that fact matters to this buyer in this situation. “Our platform processes data in real time” is a feature. “Your sales team stops chasing leads that went cold three days ago” is an argument. The second has logos. The first is just a specification sheet.

When I am reviewing a brand’s digital presence, I am always looking at how well the rational case is constructed. There is a useful checklist for analysing a company website for sales and marketing strategy that I use as a starting point. One of the consistent patterns I find is that websites lead with ethos (who we are, how long we have been doing this) and pathos (aspirational imagery, brand language), but the logos layer, the actual argument for why this product solves this problem better than the alternatives, is either buried or missing entirely.

Logos also matters for search and content strategy. When someone is actively researching a category, they are in a logos-dominant mindset. They want evidence, comparisons, and structured reasoning. Brands that only communicate in emotional registers lose those buyers to competitors who have done the harder work of building a rational case. Market penetration strategy depends on reaching buyers at multiple stages of their decision process, and logos is what closes the argument at the consideration stage.

How Rhetorical Mode Should Shift by Channel and Context

One of the practical applications of rhetorical thinking in advertising is understanding that different channels call for different modal emphases. This is not about having a different message per channel. It is about understanding what mode of persuasion is most available to you in each context, and structuring your communication accordingly.

Television and video at scale are pathos-dominant environments. The audience is not actively seeking information. Emotional resonance and brand credibility do the work. Paid search is logos-dominant. The user has already formed intent. The argument needs to be rational, specific, and directly connected to what they typed. Social media is ethos-dominant in many categories. People are deciding whether they trust the brand before they engage with the message.

Context-specific advertising, what is sometimes called endemic advertising, operates with a rhetorical advantage because the environment itself does some of the ethos work. An ad for a clinical product appearing in a medical publication carries credibility that the same ad in a general interest context would not. The channel is part of the argument.

When I was growing an agency from a small team to over a hundred people, one of the disciplines I tried to embed was channel-specific brief writing. Not just “what do we want to say” but “what mode of persuasion is this channel best suited to, and how does our message need to be structured to use that mode effectively.” Most agencies do not do this. They adapt the creative execution but leave the rhetorical structure unchanged. The result is advertising that is technically present in the right channels but rhetorically misaligned with what those channels can do.

Rhetorical Fallacies: The Errors That Undermine Campaigns

Rhetoric also gives you a vocabulary for diagnosing what is wrong with advertising that is not working. The classical tradition identified a set of fallacies, structural errors in argument, that are as common in modern advertising as they were in ancient political speech.

The appeal to authority without relevant authority is one of the most common. A celebrity endorsement is an ethos argument. But if the celebrity has no credible connection to the category, the ethos does not transfer. The audience registers the incongruity. This is why some endorsement campaigns produce awareness without persuasion. The rhetorical logic is broken.

False dichotomy is another. Advertising that implies the only choice is between this brand and an inferior alternative misrepresents the market. Sophisticated buyers see through it, and it damages the ethos of the brand that deployed it. Growth-focused marketing sometimes falls into this trap, framing every product as a category-defining breakthrough when the reality is more incremental.

Bandwagon appeals, the suggestion that everyone is using this product and you should too, are pathos arguments that can work at scale but collapse in niche markets where buyers know the actual adoption numbers. I have seen B2B tech brands make bandwagon claims that their own prospects could disprove in thirty seconds. The rhetorical error destroyed credibility at exactly the moment the buyer was doing due diligence.

Understanding fallacies is not just about avoiding them in your own work. It is about recognising them in competitive advertising and understanding why they create openings. If a competitor is over-relying on a bandwagon appeal, a logos-heavy campaign that presents honest, specific evidence will win the rational buyer every time.

Applying Rhetorical Thinking to B2B Tech and Corporate Marketing

B2B technology marketing has a particular rhetoric problem. The category defaults to logos, because the products are complex and the buyers are technical. But logos without ethos and pathos produces white papers that no one reads and product pages that generate traffic but not pipeline.

The most effective B2B tech marketing I have seen works because it builds ethos through specific, verifiable proof (case studies with real numbers, not vague outcome claims), uses pathos to connect the product to the buyer’s actual professional anxieties, and then closes with logos that makes the rational case in terms the buyer can use internally to justify the decision. That is a complete rhetorical argument. It is also, not coincidentally, a complete sales motion.

The corporate and business unit marketing framework for B2B tech companies is a useful lens here. The rhetorical challenge at corporate level is different from the challenge at business unit level. Corporate communications tend to be ethos-heavy, building the overall credibility of the organisation. Business unit communications need to shift toward logos, making the specific product case to specific buyers. Mixing those up, running ethos-dominant campaigns in channels where buyers are in a logos-dominant mindset, is a common and expensive error.

There is also a sequencing question. Research from BCG on go-to-market strategy in financial services points to the importance of understanding where buyers are in their decision process before determining what kind of communication to deploy. The same logic applies in B2B tech. Ethos-building needs to happen before logos-heavy conversion campaigns. If you skip the ethos stage, the rational case lands without the credibility foundation it needs to be believed.

Rhetoric and the Measurement Problem

One of the reasons rhetoric gets undervalued in modern marketing is that its effects are hard to measure in the short term. Ethos-building happens over time. Pathos operates on emotional memory. Logos closes arguments that were opened weeks or months earlier. None of this maps cleanly onto a last-click attribution model.

I spent years managing hundreds of millions in ad spend, and I will tell you honestly that the measurement frameworks most businesses use are better at measuring what happened than explaining why it happened. They capture the conversion. They do not capture the persuasion that made the conversion possible. This creates a systematic bias toward lower-funnel tactics, because they are measurable, and away from the rhetorical work that creates the conditions for conversion in the first place.

Think about it like a clothes shop. Someone who tries something on is significantly more likely to buy it than someone who only looks. The act of trying on is the pathos moment, the emotional connection to the product. The rational justification, the price, the quality, the fit, comes after. Performance marketing tends to measure the purchase. It rarely measures what created the desire to try things on. Rhetoric is what gets people into the fitting room.

When I am doing digital marketing due diligence on a business, one of the first things I look for is whether the measurement framework is creating perverse incentives. If the business is over-indexing on measurable lower-funnel activity and under-investing in the rhetorical work that creates demand, the performance numbers will look stable until they suddenly do not. Demand capture without demand creation is a strategy with a finite runway.

Forrester’s work on agile marketing at scale touches on a related tension: the pressure to optimise for speed and measurability can crowd out the slower, harder work of building strategic capability. Rhetorical rigour in advertising is exactly that kind of strategic capability. It is not glamorous. It does not produce a dashboard. But it is what separates brands that grow from brands that just spend.

More thinking on how rhetoric fits into broader commercial planning is available across the go-to-market and growth strategy section of this site. The articles there approach growth from the same commercially grounded perspective: what actually drives results, not what looks good in a deck.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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