2. Explain and exemplify how an insurance sales person would sell insurance rhetorically and how he/she would hard sell the product.
“Rhetoric is an instrumental use of language…. One person engages another person in an exchange of symbols to accomplish some goal. It is not communication for communication's sake. Rhetoric is communication that attempts to coordinate social action. For this reason, rhetorical communication is explicitly pragmatic. Its goal is to influence human choices on specific matters that require immediate attention.”
- Gerard A. Hauser: Introduction to Rhetorical Theory (1986)
Rhetoric is the study of effective speaking and writing. As Covino and Joliffe (1995) stated, “Rhetoric is primarily a verbal, situationally contingent, epistemic art that is both philosophical and practical and gives rise to potentially active texts.” In other word, rhetoric is the art of persuasion. Bitzer (1968) supported “In short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action.” Rhetoric is very useful tool to influence people to trust and buy our words, thus it is very important to use for insurance sales person, for instance, in order to get customers to buy their insurances.
There is variety of insurance that people sells. Some insurance sales people sell property insurance, policies that cover losses caused by any damaging events that can affect a home or business. Some sell life insurance especially for people who care for their loved ones after their death; they pay money to named beneficiaries when the policy holder dies. Car insurance is another product an insurance sales person may sell to help people to stay covered in the event of a vehicle accident. An insurance sales person may also sell health insurance to help pay for medical care when necessary.
In order to sell their product, an insurance salesperson would need to give explain the benefit of having an insurance to the future policy holder. This requires an effective skill to persuade the customers. Rhetorically, the sales person would have to give a brief explanation to the customers of what will happen in the future when they are gone, having a car accident, or when they are ill. Let’s take insurance sales person who sell life insurance for example. They have to persuade customers by asking questions to uncover problems which product they can address, like how many dependents the person has. They could ask what will happen to them if the person dies. By asking questions which draw out the implications of the problem, the customers get to feel the pain that will drive them towards the product. Then the insurance sales person would try to persuade the customers to buy their insurance in order to solve the problem.
In addition, the insurance sales person can use advertising to solidify information. Advertising is very effective and persuasive tool to be presented in order to attract the audience. It is important to present the style of a life insurance advert, for instance, whereas it determines the amount of impact it shall affect the audience. They mainly use the suitable medium and genre to make a persuasive advert, and also with the help of creativity being shown by using images and the production team must come up with a strategy so that the message can reach the audience easily.
References:
Bitzer, Llyod. (1968). "The Rhetorical Situation".
Covino and Joliffe. (1995). Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries.
Gerard A. Hauser. (1986). Introduction to Rhetorical Theory.
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