Rhetorical Analysis 6 (Sales Encounter)

Goal: It sort of goes without saying that the sales representative at the Verizon wireless booth of University mall was to sell me another phone.
Argument: The associate’s argument was that I should abandon my current cell phone plan in favor of a new Verizon Wireless cell phone plan because the Verizon plan/phone had more features than my current phone. (Somehow, having more features on my phone is going to drastically improve the quality of my life I suppose.
Audience: Duh! The audience was me.
How: Since, I’m a young, dumb college student the associate assumed that he already had some sort of established “ethos” with me because we were peers and somehow he could “automatically relate to me.” (I still made him work though!). He kept calling me “bro” and “dude” which at first glance seems like an appeal to pathos because he’s playing on my emotions and sensibilities as a young-adult college student, but I honestly saw it as an ethos ploy. Why? Well because he was trying to establish his own “cred” by saying “look man, I’m not some stuffy out of touch sales-rep type. I’m a guy you can trust. I go through the same things that you do, I value the same things that you do, I am interested in the same things that you are.” This was an attempt to get me to take him seriously. He didn’t really give a whole lot of “evidence” for why the DROID was a good phone, he mostly tried to “wow” me by flattering me, talking about things completely unrelated to the phone (The Celtics, my excellent taste in shoes, etc) and essentially regurgitated a bunch of things that are already broadcast on the TV Droid commercials. I will confess that I did try to stump him a little bit (like asking if he had to pay George Lucas any royalties for stealing a word that he created) but for the most part, the sales guy expected me to kind of already know what the Droid was capable of and he wanted me to just shoot the breeze with him, and he gave me some BS bit about how he’d cut me a special deal that was strictly for me (even though I know for a fact that the “special rebate” is protocol for ANYONE who buys the phone. Nice try buddy?

Effective?: No where close to effective.