The Least Effort Principle And Commercial Advertisement Planning

Advertising is an important social phenomenon in the global-economic time and the information age. In fact, advertisements are permeable and they become an inseparable part of modern life.Due to their importance, advertisements have been attracting more and more experts and scholars' attention. Linguists at first mainly showed their concern on the manifested linguistic features. Later on they turned to semiotics, semantics and pragmatics. Admittedly they have made great contributions to the study of advertising discourse, but few studies have been undertaken in terms of the Principle of Least Effort.The Principle of Least Effort (PLE) was put forward by American linguist George Kingsley Zipf. He held that in the realm of language, there are two contradictory forces: one is the force of unification, and the other is the force of diversification. (Jiang ,2005) The Principle wants toconvey two concepts ------ Least Effort and Best Effect, and makes sure that the so-called LeastEffort is just a kind of probability and balance. Here in this thesis, the author wants to test the applicability of the PLE in the commercial advertisement planning. It has been found that the balance point lies in the recipient owing to the special interactive relation between the designer and the audience, i.e. the target consumers are supposed to cost least effort in most of the situations.The whole thesis is made up of five chapters. Chapter 1 first presents a brief introduction to the definitions and functions of commercial advertisement, and then reviews some of the previous researches on commercial advertisement. Chapter 2 discusses PLE and its development. Chapter 3 states the applicability of PLE in the field of advertising. Chapter 4, the key part of the whole thesis, illustrates and analyzes the ways in which PLE is applied in the field of advertising planning at three levels : psychology, culture and communication channel. Chapter 5 is the conclusion, in which the limitations of this study and suggestions for further research are also pointed out.