Definition: To persuade an audience by purposely evoking certain emotions to make them feel the way the author wants them to feel

To me pathos means marketing emotions to seem more appealing 

Significance: It helps make messages more relatable, memorable, and convincing by appealing to feelings like happiness, sadness, or empathy to get your point across and make people care about what you’re saying or selling.

Learning about pathos is extremely essential for effective communication, marketing, storytelling, and etc. It improves public speaking, leadership, and advocacy skills. Learning about pathos can also come in handy during personal relationships. During relationships, pathos can aid empathy and conflict resolution. Pathos is also valuable in teaching, making lessons more engaging, and in media literacy to spot emotional manipulation (which is why authors use it so often in stories). To apply the concept of pathos elsewhere, you can observe how emotions are used in various contexts and practice incorporating emotional elements into your communication. You can also use ethos and logos with pathos to be more well rounded during persuasion. 

Examples:

Context: In this advertisement , the brand Coke is promoting their drink as sunshines and rainbows. It includes the saying “Open a Coke, open happiness” and disregards all the health problems it can cause.

Context: Pathos is used here to persuade the audience into not just supporting their healthy children, but provide support to those who are not. 

Context: Pathos is used in this picture to show that unlike humans, dogs can’t use their words to show that they are suffering. Therefore you should make a difference because humans do have voices to use.