This study investigates the role of advertising and visual rhetoric in political persuasion. Analysis of Finnish dairy product video advertisements from 2010–2016 focuses on those that exploit time as the main reference framework. A better understanding of how advertising is used as a tool of political persuasion is sought by exploring the following questions: How are advertisements used in political communication? How is time used as a means of persuasion in advertising? What role do visual rhetoric and social representations have in the process of persuasion? The analysis shows how advertisements objectify work as a tradition and anchor it as a Finnish value. The results show how advertisements employ enthymeme as a major rhetorical tool to assert that the tradition of Finnish employment is under threat but the consumption of Finnish dairy products and favouring a pro-agrarian policy would ensure that the tradition is transmitted to new generations. The contributions of the study are twofold: First, the combination of social representations theory and classic rhetoric provides a theoretical and analytical perspective for the analysis of visual rhetoric in political persuasion. Secondly, by exploring the advertisements as political communication, the study shows how commercials are used to advocate ideological and political projects, such as certain kind of agricultural policy – an angle largely overlooked in the previous research of social and political psychology.
Persuasion and argumentation have been the focus of social psychology since the early days of the discipline (
Food production and agriculture are highly debated topics in Finland and in many other European countries. These debates often stem from the influence of the European Union, which has given impetus to the concern that national food cultures and production are doomed (
The present study contributes to the field of the political psychology by exploring the ideological dimension of everyday consumer goods commercials. By combining the concepts of consumption, national identity and nationalism, the present study provides a social scientific perspective to consumer nationalism (
Social representations theory, first introduced by Serge
Social representations are formed, transformed and maintained through three processes: anchoring, objectification and naturalisation. The anchoring process draws strange and unfamiliar ideas into ordinary categories and images, setting them in a familiar context. To anchor means classifying and naming something (
The focus in social representations allows for analysing the construction of shared meanings. However, in the present study, in order to analyse how these shared meanings are employed to specific purposes of persuasion, we rely on ideas of classical rhetoric (
In this paper, we argue that social representations and classic rhetoric are compatible approaches that can strengthen each other. Social representations are formed to enable common communication and orientation towards the world, while rhetoric seeks to influence these shared representations in a manner consistent with the purpose of the speaker. Social representation theory enables scholars of rhetoric to understand how the shared conceptions of reality have emerged through communication and the research on rhetoric helps social representations scholars to take into account motivational aspects of communication, to understand the strategic construction and use of particular representations, for example, for political needs. Albeit it may be too straightforward to claim that social representations deal merely with the content and Aristotle’s concepts with the form of rhetoric, they provide two different, but interconnected perspectives to persuasion. While the former approach clarifies
Argumentation, as the action of reasoning in support of an idea, can be conveyed through several kinds of modes of expressions. For example, verbal argumentation entails mainly the use of words (either written or spoken) in communication, while visual argumentation is expressed or communicated pictorially, by images, symbols or other nonverbal signs. Most visual arguments are of multimodal nature: although they include verbal elements, the message can be understood only by taking the visual into account (
Politicians and advertisers have long known how to take advantage of the illusory and emotive power of visual communication. In many respects, visual images are useful tools in the process of forming everyday knowledge: they can initiate a process of constructing social representation, they are easy to communicate to a wide audience, and they can make abstract phenomena concrete by giving them visible form. In other words, visual images are seen as working as a source, a medium and the product of social knowledge (
Secondly, words are seen as involving rational processing, while images work through emotive pathways. Even if visual images can be used to appeal to rational thinking (e.g. graphs or figures), they tend to be processed in a more indirect way (
However, visual persuasion can fail if the images chosen do not resonate with an audience’s conceptions (
The present paper endeavours to integrate social representations theory, classical rhetoric and visual rhetoric in an empirical analysis of advertisements as a form of consumer nationalism, an angle largely overlooked in the previous research in political psychology. However, before going into the empirical analysis, we describe the historical context of the present study.
Recently there has been a growing interest to explore intertwining of nationalism, promotion and consumption of food. Everyday products and companies, which have acquired a deep-rooted position in the culture, are effective material for political persuasion as they combine elements such as tradition and cultural and national identity. (e.g.,
In Europe, the continuous debate concerning dairy production and agriculture is often closely connected with the issue of balancing nationalism and internationality.
The present study focuses on the dairy advertisements launched by Valio, the biggest Finnish dairy company. The company’s history is closely related to national history and identity in Finland: co-operative dairy production in Finland dates back to an agrarian political movement in the early twentieth century when Finland was under Russian regime. Farmers saw co-operatives as a means of increasing their economic autonomy, which in turn helped to strengthen the economic base for an independent Finnish economy. The company’s patriotic ideology was set forth in its fiftieth anniversary history as follows:
“The danger threatening our fatherland and the need to improve the economy and cultural life in the countryside led to an unprecedented national enthusiasm and a feeling of togetherness in our country half a century ago. This strong national awakening gave birth to the co-operative . . . . The creation of economic well-being strengthened the inhabitants’ love of home and country. . . . Let’s continue this work as a blessing for our country and our people” (
The quotation emphasises that the company strives to work for Finland and for Finns and to raise patriotism among them. As a result of this history, the company has acquired a special position in Finnish society as a kind of national symbol (
Even though, the association between domestic dairy production and Finnish nation originates from the early 20th century, Finland’s EU membership in 1995 made domestic dairy production a highly topical question. Before that, Valio had practically no competitors in Finnish dairy market but new situation brought Swedish-Danish Arla and French Danone to Finland. According to
Even though Valio’s main task is to process and distribute dairy products, it also has a special reason to promote the preservation of a
The topicality of the agricultural policy as well as the historical position of dairy producer Valio in Finland provides a reasonable starting point for analysing the visual rhetoric of the company’s advertisements. The present study seeks a better understanding of how visual rhetoric is used in political persuasion to construct and maintain social representations.
To promote its goals, Valio uses all advertising formats, from printed newspaper advertisements to videos on television and the internet. The last two forums have increasingly begun to overlap; advertisement videos shown on television are also made public in different video-sharing websites on the internet. Valio has its own channel on YouTube, the biggest video-sharing browser. Since 2010, the company has published over 600 videos, which by the end of the year 2016 had been viewed more than 11.5 million times.
The material for the present study were collected from Valio’s YouTube channel. The first step was to watch 608 videos (from the years 2010–2016), which were subjected to a rough content analysis on the basis of whether or not time appeared as the main frame of reference. In the advertisements time, or “narrative and history” (
Since the focus of the present study was on the use of visual rhetoric in the advertisements, the next step was to restrict the material further.
The videos were analysed by combining the social representations approach with semiotic analysis (see e.g.,
From the perspective of the social representation approach, denotative description shows how the communicated topic (e.g., milk) is objectified. In the analysis below, excerpts and brief descriptions of the plot demonstrate this denotative level. By objectifications we refer to objects (e.g., a field), symbols (e.g., Finnish flag), persons/groups (e.g., a farmer), metaphors (e.g., family) and tropes (e.g., “as pure as milk”) that are used to concretise the communicated topic (
The identification of objectifications and anchorings in the advertisements was followed by a rhetorical analysis.
The process of gathering and transcribing the material was an important part of the analytical procedure. The visual material analysed in the present study, namely advertisement videos, is multimedia by nature, which makes it necessary to investigate the relationship of each individual element within a structure of all the elements (
The analysis follows three stages. Firstly, the objectifications and anchors of the advertisements are identified. Secondly, their rhetorical functions are analysed. Finally, all advertisements are discussed together as one entity in order to elaborate on their underlying myth, i.e. the grand narrative, and the main argument that they present. To avoid unnecessary wordiness in the analysis, only the terms of social representations and classical rhetoric have been used, but semiotics functions as a broad background from which to critically read the visual material.
The analysis shows that time was used as a frame of reference in two ways in the advertisements. Firstly, it was utilised in campaigns showing farmers and ordinary people describing the continuity of production and consumer traditions. Secondly, it was used in the series of advertisements featuring a Finnish celebrity, the former NHL player Teemu Selänne, describing success and expertise in the past and in the future. All of the advertisements selected claim that consuming dairy products is something that belongs to Finnish tradition and is required for good life and success. In the analysis below, we will first identify the objectifications and anchorings after which we demonstrate how, together with rhetorical devices, these shared meanings are used to persuade audience.
Tradition and unbroken continuity between generations of farmers was central to the series of Valio advertisements launched in 2014. The advertisement “Young farmers” (2014; Excerpt 1) begins with an explicit reference to Finnish history. During the first thirty seconds, the narrator connected the distant past to the present (“a new generation”) and also drew a line to the future:
Time | Moving image | Narration | Text | Music/ sound |
---|---|---|---|---|
00:03 | Valio’s logo |
Narrator: For over one hundred years Valio’s milk has come from the Finnish countryside. We are fully owned by Finnish farmers. Behind our milk stand Finnish | “Valio is a Finnish company.” | Guitar sounds in the background |
00:22 | putting on her shoes. | expertise and around 7,400 Finnish farms. On these farms a new generation is stepping into the shoes of the old. They have a positive attitude to the future. | ||
--- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
00:36 | Close-up of a man | Interviewed: For two years we have been co-owners of the farm. My parents are still co-owners. | Name of interviewed and the title “Farmer” | |
--- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
01:29 | A man and two children in a cowshed | Physical strain has decreased as a result of technology, but the amount of work and its binding nature have remained. | ||
--- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
02:01 | Cows milking in the cowshed |
Valio is definitely a source of pride. That we can produce high-quality Valio milk for Finns is a value in itself. |
The guitar music grows louder. | |
02:06 | steadily into a house | production and the viability of its countryside. We employ more than 30,000 Finns in the country and in cities. | Valio. Love of Finnish milk. |
In Excerpt 1 the main objectifications are the company and generations of producers (farmers) (00:22; 00:36; 01:29) which are presented visually as well as by a metaphor of “stepping into the shoes” (00:22). Milk production is objectified in images depicting countryside (00:03) and in images of cowshed (01:29) and cow milking (02:01). These objectifications acquire their meaning through anchoring them to values of pride (02:01), tradition (00:03; 01:29), continuity (00:22; 00:36), work (01:29) and Finnishness (00:33; 00:22; 02:01; 02:06). Below we discuss how tradition, continuity and Finnishness are constructed and used in the persuasion, while we elaborate more the role of pride and work in the subsequent Excerpt.
Finnish tradition is the most pervasive anchoring in the advertisement. In the opening line the narrator says that the product has come “from the Finnish countryside” (00:03) for more than a century. Rhetorically, this represents
The full story is framed with “Finnishness” in the first twenty seconds. The scene exploits repetition by mentioning the “Finnish countryside” where “Finnish farmers” do “Finnish work” for a “Finnish company” (00:03–00:22). In the closing lines, the same message is repeated by adding exact numbers “30,000 Finns” (02:06), a way of appealing to
A similar narrative form, namely interviews with farmers, was used in several advertisements. In the campaign released in 2016, farm owners tell their story. Excerpt 2 demonstrates a narration in which the temporal dimension reaches into an even more distant past than in Excerpt 1:
Time | Moving image | Narration | Text | Music/ |
---|---|---|---|---|
00:00 | River, a summer landscape | I have always said that this farm will sell milk as long as water flows in the River Tornio. | The farm’s name. Tornio, Finland. Established 1765. The company’s logo | |
--- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
01:16 | A view of a modern cowshed. Two men working | This farm is two and half centuries old. The first owner began selling milk here in 1765. My brother and I are now the ninth owners. And the tenth has already been | ||
01:20 | born. | |||
--- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
03:06 | Farmers stand in the doorway of a cowshed and look towards the | We have done this kind of work since we were children. And it’s a point of honour. It is a point of honour to continue the work of past generations. | “We owners” | Speaker’s voice trembles |
03:18 | camera |
Most of the objectifications and anchors used in Excerpt 2 are similar than in Excerpt 1. In this Excerpt, anchoring to the tradition of work is strongly emphasised by the visual rhetoric. As in Excerpt 1, the first scene in the video is an iconic view of the Finnish countryside. However, here the place is located both verbally and by the text conveying the truthfulness and appealing to
Excerpts 1 and 2 demonstrate the Finnish tradition connected with farm work. In 2011 the company launched a campaign promoting a butter-vegetable oil called “Oivariini”. The series presented the consumers’ side of the tradition. In the four advertisement videos an unnamed family is spending a summer day in a red cottage and its green garden. Excerpt 3 describes the advertisement “Grandmother’s pancakes” (2011):
Time | Moving image | Narration | Text | Music/Sound |
---|---|---|---|---|
An older man is sitting | Man: It sounds like Grandmother’s recipes | Flies buzzing, | ||
00:10 | on the stairs of a red cottage. The sun is shining. | are in use. Grandmother was strict about what she ate. She accepted only pure Finnish ingredients. She always said that others can eat what they eat, but our people eat from their own soil. | The product name | sounds of cooking |
00:20 | Pancakes are in the pan. A younger couple are preparing food. | |||
00:22 | Older man on the stairs. New-born baby in a child’s seat beside the man. | Don’t laugh. Grandmother was always right. |
||
00:28 | The sun is shining. |
A baby’s voice | ||
00:30 | scattered around the garden. | |||
00:33 | Narrator: Only Valio Oivariini is made of Finnish butter and rapeseed oil without additives. | The product’s name. Text: “Naturally, without | ||
00:40 | additives” |
In the Excerpt 3 the most obvious message is that the product is healthy and of high quality: “Naturally, without additives” (00:40). However, at the same time the advertisement introduces consumption as a tradition. The main objectifications are images of three generations (00:10–00:20), red cottage, sun and pancakes (00:10–00:20, 00:33). “A red cottage and a garden plot” anchors to the happiness of living amid nature, to countryside, summer and to tradition. A country summer cottage scene is an important element in Finnish oral tradition and symbolises Finnishness in the context of food: according to
The grandfather uses the noun “our people” (
Excerpts 1–3 demonstrate campaigns which present ordinary people (consumers) and farmers (producers) as the carriers of Finnish food traditions. A distinctively different use of time as a frame of reference appears in the campaign ads that feature a former Finnish ice hockey player, Teemu Selänne. Selänne, who is one of the best-known NHL players in Finland, was recruited for the company’s advertisements already in 1992 (
In the video “Teemu and a glass of expertise” (2014) (Excerpt 4) Selänne talks about the preconditions for success. The temporal dimension is construed visually. At the end of the film these elements are connected with Finnishness.
Time | Moving image | Narration | Text | Music/Sound |
---|---|---|---|---|
00:03 | Selänne sits in a darkened ice rink, holding a milk carton and looking | The voice of Selänne: There is no shortcut to | Sound of ice-skating | |
00:14 | into the distance. |
happiness. It’s the result of hard work. | growing louder. | |
01:24 | ice-skate around the rink. | And the fact that you want to learn. | ||
--- | --- | --- | ---- | --- |
01:42 | Selänne and junior players raise their glasses of milk at the bar | Finnish grit [ |
Voice of a sports commentator [in | |
01:44 | where other customers are watching the ice hockey game. | with skill is quite a good combination. There are two elements like... it is | English]. | |
01:50 | The last scene: A milk carton on the | unbeatable. |
Blue and white profiency/ | |
01:53 | ice. A milk glass slides next to the carton. Blue and white colours. The | And Finnish milk produces more Finnish | pureness/ milk/ | Solemn music surges. |
02:00 | company’s logo. | work. |
In Excerpt 4 ice hockey (00:03–01:42) generations of players (01:24), raising a glass (01:42), skill and grit (01:44) and the colours blue and white (01:53) are used as objectifications, which anchor to competition, continuity, togetherness, a work ethic and Finnishness, in respective order. The opening scene implies that a former ice hockey star is remembering the past as he sits in an empty ice rink (00:03). The voice verbalises his thoughts when suddenly the film shows that the story is not over; rather there are new players training on the ice, just as the former star trained in the past (01:24). The colouring of the scene – white ice and the players’ blue shirts – explicitly evokes the colours of the Finnish flag. At the end of the film, Selänne and young players meet at the bar (01:42). This scene is a direct reference to Valio’s advertising video of 1992 (
The main rhetorical device used in the advertisement is
In the last example (Excerpt 5) “Teemu and Virtanen’s heritage” (2014), sports are juxtaposed with other kinds of work and with success in science, another source of national pride.
Time | Moving image | Narration | Text | Music/ Sound |
---|---|---|---|---|
Selänne is sitting at a bar. | Selänne: Hi | Teemu, a legend | ||
00:04 | Three people dressed in white laboratory jackets come into the bar. | Women: Hi | Tiina, a professor |
|
----- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
00:16 | Woman points to Teemu’s NHL ring and places a golden Nobel Prize medal on the counter. | Women: You have a nice ring. Selänne: Thanks. You have a nice medal. | ||
00:24 | Selänne and the scientists raise | Women: We have that. It’s Virtanen’s heritage. |
Solemn | |
00:30 | their glasses of milk. | rewarded a Nobel prize. A. I. Virtanen worked in Valio and | music surges. | |
00:35 | his heritage is honoured by the quality of the company’s work | Company’s logo. | ||
00:40 | today. | Blue and white milk. |
In Excerpt 5 the ice hockey player and the scientists (identified in the captions [00:04]) meet in the bar as old friends. Laboratory jackets (00:04), NHL ring and Nobel Prize medal (00:16) are objectifications which anchor to professionalism and heroism. The ring refers to international success in sports, while the Nobel Prize medal introduced in the next scene is shown as a parallel to that (00:16). Raising a glass (00:30) is an objectification which anchor to sense of togetherness. Showing off the medal, the professor says, “We have that” (00:24), referring to the company where the former scientist Virtanen worked and left a heritage common to all Finns (just as the achievements of Finnish athletes, symbolised by the ring, are common to all Finns). Finnishness is emphasised with blue and white colour and in the closing lines, where the narrator intones, “blue and white expertise was rewarded . . .” (00:30). The
In this section, we investigate the political purposes that are served by the uses of visual rhetoric and social representations that we demonstrated in the analysis above. At the level of product promotion and social representations of food, the advertisements respond to the anxiety and worries about modern food production by showing visual evidence (demonstrative mode;
The advertisements also had a more pervasive purpose than to wait for an immediate consumer response. Objectification of the continuity of generations of farmers, consumers and ice hockey players was anchored in Finnishness, tradition, work and pride. The overall objective of Valio’s use of time as a main frame of reference in these advertisements seems to have been to build schematised associations among these four anchors with visual and verbal cues (rhetorical mode;
Rhetorically, the argument conveyed overall in the campaigns utilises an
The overall argument construed by the series of advertisements, namely ensuring the continuity of Finnish work, has clear political implications. The advertisements contribute to the public discussion on the problematic situation of imported food (
This interpretation is supported by earlier studies, which have shown that the value attributed to local food is concerned not only with health and environmental issues, but also addresses a rural policy sector that supports local livelihoods and maintains a heritage (
The present study has focused on visual political rhetoric in the context of Finnish dairy advertising. The exploration has examined advertisements that use time as their main frame of reference and has identified rhetorical devices utilised to create arguments. The advertisements were found to have used
In the present paper, we attempted to combine social representations and classical rhetoric to provide a way to analyse visual rhetoric in political persuasion. Our analyses showed that visual rhetoric employs shared cultural knowledge (
In line with
It should be remembered that advertisements may serve multiple ideological purposes simultaneously. In the present study, the material was restricted to selected videos using time as the main framework of reference. Besides convincing an audience of the patriotic value of domestic food production, the advertisements also advocate on behalf of the whole dairy industry in the context of consumers’ growing interest in vegan products and broad concern about animal-based products. By examining how advertisements use not only time, but also other factors such as health, safety, taste or cooking as referential frameworks would reveal other ideological purposes that might be served. The other limitation of the present study is its focus on the analysis of the advertisement material only. The reception studies (e.g.
The social representations of agriculture and the countryside are continuously debated in Finland. The changing social context and consumer preferences also require changes in rhetorical devices. A longitudinal analysis of the company’s advertisements would show how the form of visual rhetoric has adapted and the content preserved in changing situations. Previous research has suggested that Valio’s advertisements have had a significant effect on the formation of Finnish symbols and social identity (
This research was funded by the Academy of Finland (grant 295923) and University of Helsinki Research Foundation.
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
The authors have no support to report.