Organizational rhetoric doomed to fail: R. J. Reynolds and the principle of the oxymoron

In the fall of 1995, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company engaged in a public relations advertising campaign that opposed restrictions on tobacco advertising proposed by President Clinton. This essay argues that in spite of the presence of creative and varied Burkean identification appeals in the messages of the RJR campaign, the campaign was fatally flawed by illegitimate presumptions of similarity and an oxymoron that violated Burke's "principle of the oxymoron." The essay argues that this transcendent principle is unidirectional; it must offer a rise in social status for it to provide a motive for identification.