A Semiotic Approach To Social Media-Based Advertising

In the digital age,communication between brands and consumers through advertising is evolving in both the media and the agency.The use of social networks as advertising tools determines that consumers and brand personalities are more cognitively overlapping,the latter is acquiring a certain degree of humanity and increasing the need to develop communication skills.Because they are subject to closer and more personal contact with the consumer,on social media the brand becomes a user,the bearer of ideologies and characteristics amplified by the digital world.This humanization contrasts with the role of consumers,who are increasingly aware of promotional methods and achieve selfbranding mechanisms through social media,every day promoting their virtual image to a larger audience than the one found in real life.The shift in the communication paradigm between brands and targets,combined with the costeffectiveness of platform-based messages,has resulted in a larger public for promotional messages,as well as a more sensitive audience influenced by conflicting value systems coexisting on platforms.Indeed,multiple cultural and value systems coexist on social media platforms,transforming this communication medium into a melting pot of interpretative systems.However,the aforementioned variety of factors also corresponds to numerous trends that transversally break the traditional classification of market segments and include people from very distant social and cultural groups;in this case,it is easy that the extension of these segments,more than a system of values,recognizes its own limits in generational differences.In this context,a brand has numerous options for producing an economic advertising message while increasing consumer brand awareness more than ever before.For instance,the endorsement is not limited to celebrities or people with professional recognition,but also from influencers and ordinary people with whom the consumer can easily identify.Indeed,the factors of identification and emotional provocation have frequently proven to be the most fruitful mechanisms at the promotional level.The humanization of the brand serves to maximize the benefits of these communication mechanisms,which often operate on an unconscious level.Semiotics is useful in this context because it is capable of discovering,deconstructing,and recomposing a message into its most fundamental units in order to elicit those mechanisms.Semiotics,through the ability to manage signs,enables better management of the brand image perceived by the consumer,leveraging the knowledge of his/her expectations.In this sense,semiotics can be used to reduce the possibility that the message causes the user/consumer dissatisfaction and spreads uncontrollably,undermining the brand’s credibility,ethics,and image.Addressing a rapidly growing and constantly changing communication context,this thesis makes use of semiotics to propose a brand promotional approach that focuses on cultural differences and,at the same time,understands how to exploit social platforms to reach as many people as possible and maximize commercial efforts.Understanding the cognitive association system between the message’s content and the message’s recipient determines commercial effectiveness.In this sense,evaluating signs as meaning units allows the examination of elements such as language,narrative mechanisms,visual appeals,and cognitive associations as they are influenced by culture.By examining these factors,interpretative trends can be identified that keep up with the evolution of cultural paradigms that are increasingly influenced by social networks.Furthermore,effective management of communication mechanisms across platforms aids in the reduction of threats such as online firestorms and public accusations,which can spread globally and be difficult to manage.Through qualitative analysis and questionnaires,examples of semiotic analysis of advertising will be proposed as an explanation of the importance of cultural consideration in the production of effective advertising communication,especially presenting a parallelism between Italian and Chinese culture.A specific Dolce&Gabbana brand promotion will be used as a semiotics object in order to provide parallelism between the two cultures.The perception of the Italian consumer will be examined,as they share the cultural systems of the two stylists,to understand what the evaluation framework of the content is,if it reflects and justifies the promotional content,or if,like for the Chinese consumers,they consider the promotion dysfunctional and offensive,reflecting an overlapping system of values between East and West.This study should make it clearer how ethical/cultural systems differ from the establishment of universal values,which instead are part of a global system that is constantly interacting and in which interpretive models are moving away from tradition and toward one another.In a digital context,where self-promotion is increasingly feasible,the professionalism of a marketer will be based on contextual preparations regarding target information,knowledge of social network media,adequate brand image management,and knowledge of trends and communication appeals that enable messages to stand out among many others.Semiotics and the latest studies in this area enable marketers to systematically adapt the model of analysis to the context they need to target at a promotional level,anticipate trends and exploit the breakdown of cultural barriers due to social networks and globalization.