Advertising Emotional Closeness in Cooking Light

In “Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals,” Jib Fowles a professor of communication at the University of Houston Clear Lake, states that the goal of advertising is “to tug at our psychological shirt sleeves and slow us down long enough for a word or two about whatever is being sold” (114), which implies that advertisements helps take the audience’s attention in order for the audience to notice the product being sold. The attention is taken psychologically through emotions which is called emotional appeals. It slows down the audience through emotional manipulations. Fowles states that there are fifteen basic emotional appeals that distinguish every ad. I will be analyzing a Cooking Light magazine, which provides healthy food recipes. I believe advertisement companies hired by Cooking Light targets women between the ages of 30 and 50 who have families they want to feed healthy. In Cooking Light, the emotional appeal used most often suggest that the audience has children and care a lot of small animals, and suggest that the magazine’s typical readers are seen as wanting to create bonding families.

In Cooking Light, one of the two emotional appeals most shown is the need to nurture. Fowles states that the need to nurture is “the need to take care of small, defenseless creatures – children and pets” (118), that suggests the reader has love towards small animals and babies. By analyzing the magazine I found a large amount of advertisements, advertising pet food with images of puppies and kittens. An advertisement for Pedigree dog-food takes the whole side of a page showing a picture of a puppy. The puppy’s owner seems to be taking her puppy out for a joyful run, but she is not the center of attention. In other words, the advertisement a...

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...caring single parent. She became a single mother after my dad left our family, and after that, she started caring more about us. My mother cares for me, my sister, and my pets. My pets consist of three dogs, a variety of parakeets, two parrots, and a snake. Even when I ignore my pets my mom always feeds them, which are her instincts to nurture. My mom also cares for our health. For instance, she started changing her grocery shopping habits because we were diagnosed of over-weight. We are a typical Mexican family who used to eat “chorizo”, a pork sausage which is extremely unhealthy. My mother not only stopped serving us unhealthy dishes, but she also adapted to a healthier lifestyle with the help of Cooking Light magazines. All of which, supports that mothers care for their children, small animals, and want to create bonding families due to their maternal instincts.