Rhetorical Analysis

Rebecca Kaplan

Professor Yu

English 1105

5 October 2021

Walmart: Live Better?

Superstore Walmart is a multibillion dollar company with millions of employees and thousands of stores nationally and internationally – it has become a household name in the United States in the last few decades. A big part of this success can be attributed to campaigns such as the commercial that we’re looking at today. Through the use of rhetorical and visual strategies such as ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos, major corporation Walmart is able to connect to a wide audience and make itself seem like a mom-and-pop shop in your community. 

The backdrop to this commercial, the setting, is what makes the story even more significant and the ad hit even harder. The rhetorical strategy of kairos – basically the time, setting, and place of the visual – allows Walmart, and therefore their commercial, to truly resonate with the viewer. The commercial uses general shots of different neighborhoods – and not just the individual Walmart in each town. These shots are simply of residents of all ages, and it’s assumed, backgrounds, going about their average and everyday lives. The beginning of the commercial pans over different towns – we can tell that they’re different because of the variation of lawns, backyards, trees, house sizes, and road maintenance. The corporation takes everything into account, no detail is accidental. The bird’s eye view, though it’s not showing people or close up shots, it relates the viewer to the commercial. The neighborhood that the ad is panning through could be your neighborhood, with your family, your friends, your community. Though this element is relevant throughout the entirety of the commercial – the setting switches between the general neighborhood, individual Walmart stores, family homes, community service initiatives, and just around town – kairos is helpful to set the scene of the commercial and allow for a greater connection through continued visual steps as well as ethos, logos, and pathos.

A major element of this commercial is the voiceover – it lays claim to a greater rhetorical situation. The purpose of the ad is portrayed through videos and photographs, but without the voiceover it wouldn’t have the rhetorical impact that it does. Overlaid on top of videos of small-town front lawns, quiet main streets, rustic backroads, the woman speaking ties the scene together. Her voice carries a soft tone, almost as if her smile is radiating through your computer or television screen. She’s rhyming, as well – this creates a catchy and memorable tone for the advertisement, but it also invokes something else. It’s the same feeling you may have felt when you were reading a Dr. Suess book to your toddler, or teaching your child how to tie their shoes with a rhyming anecdote, or hearing them sing a song with their friends. The rhyming overlay of speech evokes a homey feel within the ad, a connection to the words that the narrator is saying despite the deep general nature of the script. It’s purposeful, to allow the audience to relate to the commercial just that much more. Every ounce of connection that is sparked from any element of the commercial strengthens Walmart’s hold on small-town America. She speaks of hope, passion, and community – in the background, a Walmart employee checks a customer out, a crossing guard assisting a young child across the street, a group of police officers smiling and laughing. The prose of the script, along with the concrete shows of community and camaraderie solidifies the idea that this is what Walmart brings to the table. 

The visual ‘effects’ of this advertisement all play an individual and important role in the greater rhetorical strategy that is at play. The commercial uses camera angles, ‘special effects’, and the color/lighting of the video and pictures to generate a very specific feeling within the viewer. The camera angle and position of a specific shot plays an important role in all advertisements that use film as their medium – using just a few different positions to shoot from, the cameraman is able to create a very distinct situation, and therefore a distinct feeling, from their work. In this ad, the camera angles start broad – the bird’s eye view shots that we spoke about earlier. These make sense at the beginning of the ad, as they are providing a sort of overview for the viewer before the ad delves any further into the topic. The broad shot of the community then becomes a smaller shot – a strip of town, with visible stores and individual cars, a railroad track running through. As the viewer, you can almost picture yourself walking down the sidewalk of no-name-town in this small town, window shopping as you wait for the train to pass. The camera is inside of an average yellow school bus, one that you rode to-and-from school for years. There’s a young girl, resting her head on the windowsill of her seat, watching the trees pass – just as you might have, when you waited for what felt like hours for your stop to come. The children biking down the empty street fill their time just as you did when you were their age, and the firefighters are ready to protect you in a moment’s notice, but for now, they’re talking just as friends do. The camera isn’t always stable – especially when it’s capturing intimate moments between families, as well as employees and customers, and community members and their neighbors. The shots are all illuminated with a warm, orange/yellow light. Even the still pictures, which are all but washed out to black and white (with some even lacking all color), still have warm undertones. Though this is not a rhetorical strategy, it is a visual effect that resonates within the viewer in order to relay that warm tone from the ad into a warm feeling. The cuts between video and still picture give the commercial a scrapbook feel – the entirety of the advertisement is simply a collage of moments in a small town, somewhere in America. 

The ethos of this advertisement lies within the people that the commercial highlights. Unlike commercials for brands such as Nike, or Pantene, or Beats, this commercial doesn’t use star power in order to gain the viewer’s trust. Walmart is an everything store – you can buy groceries, outfit your dorm room, get new swimsuits for the summertime, shop for back to school supplies, purchase a gun, prepare for a life changing event – because of the amount of products and services that they offer, chances are the audience has already used a Walmart store. If they haven’t, a family member has, or a neighbor, or a teacher, or a first responder, and the list goes on. That is exactly what the commercial is highlighting – the ethos of the video stands with the normal, average, everyday person that is being shown. Walmart doesn’t need to bring celebrities in, because celebrities aren’t the ones utilizing their superstores. The people who actually use them are those of us who need the convenience of a one stop shop. They’re the people who live in a rural area or a forgotten part of the country, and Walmart is the closest resource for them. Those are the people that need to feel seen, and the commercial does just that. The reliability of the store is shown through community involvement and initiatives highlighted in the video – Walmart vests picking up trash in a town park, friendly neighbors patching up businesses, a young kid bringing a tray of food to a community kitchen. Those are the real faces that are shopping at Walmart, and by showing this, the corporation utilizes ethos.

Ethos, pathos, kairos, along with visual and other rhetorical devices all allow for an effective, connective, and memorable advertisement. This specific Walmart commercial utilizes all of those tools to create a visually and rhetorically effective tool to get people through the doors of their superstores. The advertisement evokes an emotional feeling within the audience, and it does seem hard to question the company when they are providing more attainable options to underserved communities in America. One main problem with this advertisement is the fact that Walmart, a multibillion dollar company, is playing itself up to be a small-town business, that is here to work for you, the American people. The commercial therefore must be viewed with a grain of salt – it is understood that Walmart isn’t what it is pretending to be in the context of this commercial, while still appreciating the fact that they do serve our neighbors and our communities.

Works Cited

“Live Better” YouTube, uploaded by TheRealSpringer 2014, 8 April 2020,