A Study On Persuasive Strategies In Advertising Slogans

Advertisements floods into our life, influencing and guiding our life. To some degree, what kind of product we select among various advertisements reflects people's acceptance to the product. Meanwhile, it shows the effectiveness of advertisements, that is, the power of persuasion. So the core concern for the advertisers is how to improve the power of persuasion of the product. Meanwhile, at the early years of this century, advertisements of several foreign-oriented international companies appeared to be a failure in China, which presents us the caution that the message delivered in advertising slogans of multinational companies should try to avoid conflicts in the perspective of culture and concept that the local potential consumers hold.There were a great number of studies done in China on communication strategies of advertisements, however, these studies were mainly on the basis of cross-cultural communication and mainly about the communication strategies used in advertising text. Few studies were done on the persuasive strategies of advertising slogans from the point of view of communicative strategies and stylistic/linguistic strategies. Meanwhile, most of the studies were based on the advertising communication strategies the foreign-oriented international companies used in China, but few studies were done on their communication strategies applied in other foreign countries. Therefore, the author believes that it will be a more direct, practical and effective guidance for the Chinese-oriented international companies to advertise their slogans overseas if the study on persuasive strategies of advertising slogans is done on the basis of foreign cultures.The thesis is a qualitative study and takes Burke's theory of dramatism, including symbols, framing and naming, as a theoretical foundation. The thesis analyzed the advertising slogans collected from four different multinational companies, namely Coca-Cola Company, Ford Motor Company, Eastman Kodak Company and IBM Company, from the point of communicative and stylistic/linguistic strategies. The features of persuasive strategies discovered in advertising slogans are as following:From the point of communicative strategies:1. Burke's theory of symbols was fully and extensively applied, such as negative, hierarchy and perfection.2. The five-element pentad of Burke's concept of framing (act, scene, agent, agency and purpose) was applied in many advertising slogans. Sometimes more than one element was used in a single slogan.From the perspective of stylistic/linguistic strategies:1.The main strategy discovered in advertising slogans is deixis and personalisation. Deictic words, absolute uniqueness and personal pronouns were applied in a wide range of slogans.2. Deviant styles, such as masculine and feminine, were used in slogans of certain products.3. Idioms and their variants were commonly used and were much easier to be understood and accepted by local consumers.Accordingly, when advertising abroad, the Chinese-oriented international companies should pay attention not only to the preference and the pattern of acceptance that local consumers hold to advertising language, but to the factor of localization and also to different language styles due to different products and consumer groups. It is hoped that the findings of the study are able to provide some guidance for the Chinese international companies to avoid communicative barrier or even communicative disaster when communicating cross-culturally.