Weasel Words Essay

Marketing has reached an all-time high in importance for businesses. As the world of media and technology keeps changing, business must learn to adapt to these new forms of communication to keep a competitive edge over their competitors. This competition has led to companies developing new tricks to draw the attention of consumers and hopefully increase sales, these tricks include propaganda and “weasel words” as William Lutz refers to them. According to Lutz, “Weasel words” are used by advertisers “to appear to be making a claim for a product when in fact they are making no claim at all.” William Lutz’s “With These Words I can Sell You Anything” and Donna Woolfolk’s “Propaganda: How Not to Be Bamboozled” both discuss and go in detail how advertisers

It shows the truth behind being a mother, the long hours and countless hardships that show what a mother is truly like, and this is something mothers can appreciate. This approach by P&G is an example of what Woolfolk describes as “Plain Folk Appeal”, the ads glorify the acts of a mother raising a child in order to appeal to their main consumers, moms. Why watch an ad telling you what’s best for your family when you can see the truth with no sugar coating of what life truly is. This different approach touches mothers differently and gets consumers to think that P&G products are different then the others and are meant for the true hard-working mother. This is a sort of propaganda that Woolfolk talks about in her article, “Propaganda: How Not to Be Bamboozled”, this sort of propaganda is described as a “Faulty Cause and Effect”. The campaign delivers seems to project that using P&G products is what mothers do, and that any good mother clearly uses P&G products also will receive the joy of seeing their sacrifices “re-payed” through their children’s success; while that message is obviously not clearly depicted in the advertisement it’s the subtle and almost hidden message behind the commercial that companies hope will affect consumer