An Analysis Of The Strong Memes In Cosmetics Advertising Slogan From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Advertising is a tool for disseminating economic information to the public and a bridge between production and consumption.Nowadays,it has become an indispensable part of people’s daily life.Advertising language is a language art,which attracts the public’s attention with its unique language characteristics.In recent years,the cosmetics industry has become a new consumption hotspot and the consumer market is increasingly mature.In the marketing of cosmetics,simple and novel advertising slogans have a beautifying effect,attracting many female consumers,therefore has been called “the business in a bottle”.It can be seen that cosmetics advertising plays a pivotal role in society and people’s lives,and has the value of in-depth research.Therefore,many domestic and foreign scholars have discussed cosmetics advertising from different perspectives,and although the scope of the discussion includes psychology,marketing,and lexicography,few scholars have studied it from the perspective of memetics.Memetics is a new theory with strong interpretative power,and it is closely related to the theory of adaptation,and the cross-study of both can produce meaningful results.The previous related studies are drawn upon in this thesis,which attempts to explore the formation of strong memes in cosmetics advertising slogans using a combination of memetics and adaptation theory.It aims to solve the following three questions.What are the linguistic characteristics of the strong memes in cosmetics advertising slogans? What are the causes of the strong memes in cosmetics advertising slogans? What are the strategies for creating strong memes in cosmetics advertising?According to the three characteristics of strong memes proposed by Dawkins,this thesis collects a large number of cosmetics advertising slogans from cosmetics official websites,Weibo,magazines,etc.,and selects some representative strong memes as corpus.The theoretical framework of this thesis is also constructed based on Verschueren’s theory of adaptation,combined with the relevant contents of memetics,and a qualitative research method is adopted to analyze the linguistic characteristics,formation process and creation strategies of strong memes in cosmetics advertising slogans.The results show that the linguistic features of the strong memes of cosmetics advertising slogans are mainly the use of rhetorical devices such as quotes,metaphors,puns and hyperbole in terms of form,while in terms of content it is mainly simplicity,novelty,conformity and coherence.Because of these characteristics,the strong memes of cosmetics advertising slogans can quickly and effectively adapt to the mental,social and physical worlds,indicating that the process of forming strong memes is actually a process of contextual adaptation.The mental world contains cognitive and emotive factors,the social world contains culture,authority and social institution,and adaptation in the physical world includes both time and space.The strong memes in cosmetics advertising slogans all adapt in varying degrees to some aspect of these three worlds.In order to help the designers of cosmetic advertising slogans create slogans that can impress the public and spread widely,several strategies are summarized to make cosmetics advertising slogans from weak to strong memes based on the contextual adaptation analysis of strong memes: attaching to existing strong memes and creating new strong memes.In theory,this thesis broadens the research scope of memetics and enriches the theoretical study of cosmetics advertising language;in practice,it provides reference for the creation of cosmetics advertising from more new perspectives and helps advertising designers to create more effective cosmetics advertising language with strong memes.