Week 8- In class bog - Rhetoric (5 cannons)

A cultural topic i am choosing to criticise is the athletic culture and the way advertisements are directed towards their niche. Take nike, adidas, and rebok for example: their main goals are to find new and improved products to make an athletes performance better. The focus of this blog will be around the fittness/running shoe. It seems like every day or week their is a new style of shoe on the shelf. This is because companies are constantly inventing and creating a shoe that will improve certain areas that the previous shoe did not have; that is why in commercials, the companies even compare their own shoes to one another (older to newer).
Brind part of the athletic culture, when i come across these messages through the media, these ads catch my attention. Also being fact that i like the nike brand, i would more likely pay closer attention to the newer product and probably want to try it out, depending on what it is offering me. Basically, the way that we structure the message being delivered to us is putting it as a positive for what we are interested in and need it for.
Since nike produces and manufactures shoes for all ages, their styles vary in order to reach out to each section of their audience. Although they do not have an age range, the simple fact that most hard training athletes would probably be in their prime years, their ads usually revolve around star athletes and modern happenings. The style of the shoe is also made very catchy/attractive to the eye, and they make the sam shoe with different colours, patterns, and designs in order to try and please everyones taste. When they advertise their products, by showing other athletes wearing and using the brand, it makes us feel that if its good enough for them then it may just work for me, especially if they are a successful pro athlete.
I feel that nike commercials and advertisements are very clear and to the point. They indicate what the product does and usually shows a person in action with the product on. This makes the consumer more certain that the product will benifit them in some way. Though Nike's main audience is athletes, the everyday person also wears their product so their ads can be found everywhere and aired at anytime. In the athletic culture, nike is one of the most popular brands and it is expanding outwards due to their successful products and advertiseing methods.
The way that nike's messages, or any athletic brand for that matter, are remember are by association with certain people or spectific sports. For hockey, rebok sponsors the best player in the nhl Sidney Crosby; Nike sponsors/ed the best ever player in golf Tiger Woods; Easton has a ton of mlb players on their list; and for basketball, adidas sponsors Tracey Mcgrady. Depending on what sport interests you, or what brand you prefer, each ad will have a different effect on the consumer and provide them with a different memory for that product.
For the athletic culture, the simplest way for attracting their consumers is by continue to have advertisement and the media providing them with products or ideas that they can relate to.