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Rhetoric As Found In a 80s Jolt Cola Advertisement | Saturday, September 20th 2025

Jolt Cola essay I wrote as an assigment for school (not great but eh).

Essay Rhetoric As Found In a 80s Jolt Cola Advertisement:

Ever since the first product was sold, humans have been thinking of ways to persuade people into purchasing more products. While the actual word ‘rhetoric’ hasn't always been around, we've always used it. Rhetoric is simply just “using language effectively and persuasively” (The American Heritage, rhetoric). From Greek public debate to Sydney Sweeney’s American eagle ad, we have always used ethos, logos, and pathos as ways to persuade. A perfect example of the use of rhetoric is in the 1985 Jolt Cola ‘Join The Revolt” advertisement for the now defunct ‘Jolt Cola’. In 1985 a man by the name of C.J. Rapp invented Jolt Cola, a soft drink with the slogan of “all the sugar and twice the caffeine” (Wierk, Adam, 1). Jolt Cola was released in a new product category, an energy drink. Like with all new products,, they needed a good advertisement to persuade people into trying it. And that is where their ‘Join The Revolt’ ad comes into play.

Jolt Cola used two form of rhetoric, logos and pathos. The advertisement’s use of pathos is most apparent with its use of flashy colours, jolts, and even it’s name ‘Jolt Cola’ invokes an emotional response of energy and edginess, it screams punk. But even putting the design aside, its subtag line also uses pathos, it states “inspired by the need for a better tasting drink”, one can definitely can argue that saying something is inspired by the need for something is an appeal to emotion. But it also uses logos to a degree in its tagline, “all the sugar, twice the caffeine”. It used having twice the caffeine as all other sodas of its time as a selling point. Sodas at the time had only 30-ish milligrams of caffeine, while it had 72.

In conclusion, all three types of rhetoric were used inside the 1985 ‘Join the Revolt’ as they needed to persuade consumers into trying their new product in a crowed soda market. They employed pathos with its flashy energetic design, and logos by its slogan of “all the sugar, twice the caffeine”. Jolt Cola was able to use rhetoric to launch a new kind of soft drink, an energy drink, and were able to persuade people into purchasing their new product, at least for some time, until its ultimate demise.