A Critical Multimodal Genre Analysis Of Xiaomi’s Product Launch Events

Since Apple Inc.took the lead in holding the first product launch event in 2007,this new form of marketing products has become a tradition for high-tech companies such as Xiaomi,Huawei,Oppo and Vivo,etc.The product launch event is a method in promoting products and interacting with the audience.It is a campaign to introduce the new release as well as to attract potential consumers.Analyzing this type of marketing discourse might shed some light on the marketing strategies employed by the corporations.Among all the Chinese technology companies,Xiaomi has taken 10 years to become one of the top Chinese companies with its smartphone shipments market share ranking as No.1 in the global market.As a successful and fast-growing emerging company,Xiaomi can be a model to learn from in terms of its discursive strategies adopted in its product launch events.This research conducts a diachronic critical multimodal genre analysis of 10 videos about Xiaomi’s product launch events from 2011 to 2021,altogether 16-hour long videos with almost 200,000 words transcription.The theoretical framework is drawn from the Critical Genre Analysis(CGA)proposed by Bhatia(2017).Meanwhile,Matthiessen’s registerial cartography(2015)is adopted as the analytical framework for this research.The research has investigated Xiaomi’s product launch events from four levels of discourse realization of CGA—text,genre,professional practice and professional culture.Seven socio-semiotic processes based on registerial cartography are categorized on the text-level analysis,including ‘expounding’,‘reporting’,‘recreating’,‘sharing’,‘enabling’,‘recommending’,and ‘exploring’.On genre level,Xiaomi’s product launch events fall into four moves in general,which are ‘introduction’,‘product’,‘promotion’,and ‘ending’.By counting the ratio of each process in the textual mode,it shows that ‘expounding’ ‘sharing’ ‘recommending’ and ‘recreating’ are the major account of the seven socio-semiotic processes in product launch events in textual mode,while ‘expounding’,‘reporting’,‘recreating’ and ‘recommending’ are most frequent in image mode.This research presents the shifts of seven socio-semiotic processes in Xiaomi’s product launch events from 2011 to 2021.The shifts in textual mode suggest that‘expounding’ process and ‘sharing’ process shape a reversely proportional relation.‘Reporting’ process presents a decreasing tendency.The shifts in image mode present the overall increase of socio-semiotic processes.It indicates the multimodalization in discourse.To be more specific,the image mode also presents changes in the presentation of products,which shifts from ‘expounding’ process to ‘recreating’ process;the characters and landscapes presented are becoming more and more international,including more foreigners’ and overseas tourist spots;Xiaomi also shifts its promotion strategy from the comparison of prices,configuration and function,to cooperation with other brands,and then to the enlistment of brand ambassadors including stars and famous people.On professional practice,the seven socio-semiotic processes in Xiaomi’s product launch events construct Xiaomi’s three identities.Xiaomi shifts back and forth from an expert to a friend during all the ten launch events,while the identity of lover has been built since the launch of MI 8 in 2019.Xiaomi has also expanded its community boundaries by socio-semiotic processes in product launch events from fans community to female community,and eventually,to include international community.On professional culture,marketing strategies are employed in the events to achieve pragmatic success.Xiaomi combines contextualized marketing strategies with fans economy strategies,with the former integrating daily life contextualization and ideal life contextualization,while the latter ranging from community marketing to IP(Intellectual Property)marketing and then to star economy marketing.