Satire Analysis

4/26/10
Satire

     You can’t go a single day without noticing at least a few of the many products out there are their schemes to get you to buy their product. Companies will try anything to get you to accept their product as better than the rest. An article from “The Onion” made fun of the marketing techniques that companies use to market their products and how people buy into such advertisements. The article showed through their example of “Magna Soles” that there are several techniques in which companies tend to use to achieve a higher buyer rate.
 The use of hyperboles and over exaggerations throughout the piece is highly evident in making fun of advertisements and the people who buy into their ridiculous ploys. Just the idea that a shoe sole is “a total foot-rejuvenation system” or that it enables “your soles to heal your entire body” is ludicrous. The article shows how ridiculous that the advertisements sound and how stupid that a consumer must be to buy into such an advertisement. MagnaSoles even hold claim to align a foot’s frequency with that of the Earth and that “if the frequency of one’s foot is out of alignment with the Earth, the entire body may suffer”. Such overstatements are evident to be ridiculous and therefore absurd for any well educated and respectable person to actually buy into such an allure. How can a piece of rubber that you put into your show align your body’s natural frequency with that of the Earth? In showing these advertisement ploys that are totally overstated, The Onion makes fun of anyone who would be convinced by the ridiculous advertisements of ridiculous companies.
     Throughout the article, so-called experts are called upon to further satirize how most all marketing campaigns use doctors or professors opinions even when that expert has no experience in the specific field. The article uses an expert’s opinion from “scientific-sounding literature” to try and strengthen a customer’s resolve that a product is worthy of their money. It’s ironically satirical that the expert utilized by the onion was simply named “scientific-sounding literature”, because that’s all that an expert opinion ever really is. A company to better market their product simply gains access to a doctor or someone with a fancy title to get more credibility for their product. As long as they say something intelligent and “scientific-sounding”, the company can use the expert’s quote to market their product, even though that so-called expert most likely has absolutely no experience in the field that the product is associated. The Onion’s use of ridiculous sounding experts helps to ridicule company’s marketing techniques and anyone who would ever buy into their schemes.
 Although the authorities and expert opinions can obtain many buyers for a product, companies often go further and have average customers relay their experience to gain an even larger range of potential customers; the use of such people is mocked by the Onion’s article about MagnaSoles. An average woman named Helene Kuhn praised MagnaSoles for miraculously healing her twisted ankle. “I could barely walk a single step. But after wearing MagnaSoles for seven weeks, I’ve noticed a significant decrease in pain”. The Onion mocks how ridiculous that these people sound in their commandment of a product. If someone twists their ankle, the ankle will begin to heal after seven weeks regardless of the fact that she was wearing MagnaSoles. A twisted ankle should heal faster by not wearing MagnaSoles than by doing so because when a muscle or joint is strained, it needs to be given time to rest not be put under constant pressure inside of a shoe. Then the article talks about a man named George DeAngelis who supports MagnaSoles on the sole reason that it is “clearly endorsed by an intelligent-looking man in a white lab coat”. The Onion’s use of this customer’s attitude and his reason for endorsing the product is clearly mocking how just because someone looks like “an intelligent-looking man” that they will support a product with no further knowledge of the person or even the product itself. The shear will of a consumer to follow others lead is brainless and expresses that customers are unable to think for themselves. This nature of a client to simply follow another’s lead blindly is being criticized in the article. The Onion’s wide use of supposedly average people who may or may not have been paid to support a company’s merchandise mocks how companies advertise and how many unsuspecting customers buy into their deceits.
     A company’s advertisements and marketing campaigns as well as a customer’s willingness to buy into them is expressly made fun of throughout the article with their use of exaggerations, expert opinions, and comical accounts of ordinary people. With these strategies and many more, the majority of advertisements are made to look so cookie-cutter-like like it is crazy that anyone would buy into them and actually buy their products. Nowadays, the only way that companies are able to sell product is through tricks and borderline lies.