Special session summary Judith Butler, gender theorist: Philosophical and phenomenological insights into marketing and consumer behavior (original) (raw)

Balirano, G. 2015. Framing Identities in Advertising: Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Balirano, G. 2015. “Framing Identities in Advertising: Multimodal Discourse Analysis”. In Balirano, G. / Nisco, M.C. (eds), Language, Theory & Society: Essays on English Linguistics and Culture, pp. 2-40. Napoli: Liguori Editore. , 2015

This chapter explores the theoretical framework used in social semiotic studies through some analytical instantiations based on the Multi-Modal Discourse Analysis (MMDA) of issues connected to gender and race in advertising. By means of a discursive/social semiotic perspective, print adverts are here investigated as a global discourse worthy of critical investigation. In particular, the exploitation of the human body, in promotional discourses, is seen as having an important role in the construction of gendered and racial identity representation. Drawing on Kress and van Leeuwen’s ground-breaking volume, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (1996), the chapter does not aim, however, to present a complete and exhaustive account or theory of visual grammar. Rather, it simply attempts to introduce some rudimentary visual elements that can be used to classify iconic images and, especially, verifiably detect the visual means adopted in the mediated construction of stereotyped gendered and racial identities. My main aim is to observe and analyse the different types of identities construed in promotional discourse from a diachronic perspective, paying particular attention to the way the representation of the human body is used as a semiotic resource as well as a promotional strategy. After a preliminary methodological overview of the underpinning theories informing this chapter, which briefly range from Halliday’s SFL to recent developments in the field of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, a practical recapitulating grid for establishing some important criteria in the analysis of ‘semiotic metafunctions’ is provided in paragraph 2. The VINCorpus, a diachronic multimodal corpus of magazine and newspaper ads comprising print ads produced from the 40s to the 60s in the Anglophone contexts of Britain, the US and Canada, is introduced and analysed in the third paragraph. The MMDA of three ‘vintage’ print adverts highlights the strict connection between advertising and the way promotional discourses are culturally dependent and able to influence important aspects of social practice. In particular, a diachronic approach to the biased construction of identities in ads proves to be very informative to contemporary society’s understanding of the resilience, whether intentional or not, of gender and racial prejudice still perpetrated in our cultures and societies today. Indeed, if such strict categories of gender and race are still upheld, despite “a kind of stubborn ‘weight’ of history” (Pitcher, 2014: 145), within complex and complicated discourses of injustices and inequalities, power and hegemony, it then becomes compulsory to persistently reiterate how gendered and racial stereotypes keep on construing negative meanings in social representations.

The woman in pieces: advertising and the construction of feminine identity

This article aims to analyze the representation of the feminine identity in advertising. It explores the notion of social identity as a category that is experienced in the tension between classification and value. It also discusses the logic by which ads elaborate an image and, while in this process, transform the woman into a silent and fragmented body. In this article, I follow the anthropological tradition of symbolic systems analysis, and with it contribute to the debate concerning social representations throughout mass communication in general and, particularly, in advertising.

Identity And Iteration: Marketing Images And The Constitution Of Consuming

management.ac.nz

Marketing communications depict consumer society as a fountain of personal freedom, choice and satisfaction, where citizen and consumer are almost interchangeable expressions of identity. The apparent insight that consumers construct identities with brands, images, and market choices has exerted a profound, foundational influence for marketing and consumer research in recent years. However, a paradox of identity construction, or subject constitution, emerges when the consuming subject, in choosing among and ...

Utility and Identity: An Analysis of Two Rhetorical Strategies in TV Advertising

Our starting point is the observation that television advertising sometimes attempts to persuade the viewer of the value of a product by showing how useful it will be to him in resolving a problem while, on other occasions, it does this by illustrating how it will help him to construct an identity which will be appreciated by himself and others (in this article, the convention of assuming that the communicator is female and the audience, male, will be followed). In accordance with the reason/tickle theory, the more the advertiser bases her strategy on the utility of the product, the closer her message will be to a prototypical reason ad. In contrast, the more she bases it on the capacity of the product to help the consumer to acquire a glamorous identity, the closer it will be to a prototypical tickle ad. In the first case, the advertisement is intended to address the viewer's uncertainties directly, informing him efficiently about what is being sold to him and what use or savings it offers him. In the second case, meanwhile, the aim of the advertisement is to transmit the communicative intention of the advertiser and thus capture his attention. It will not, however, resolve the viewer's uncertainties directly, but will rather base its relevance on its capacity to make him infer an array of weak implicatures which associate the product with a glamorous identity. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of nine advertisements, allowing us to describe in detail some specific cases which respond both to these two prototypes and to various points along the scale between them. The objectives are twofold: First, to offer the researcher a theory which allows him to make a thorough and rigorous analysis of the discursive nature of the television advertisement; and secondly, to use this theory to offer an explanation which responds to these characteristics of the above-mentioned strategies.

The panoptic role of advertising agencies in the production of consumer culture

Consumption Markets & Culture, 2002

Advertising’s role in promoting an ideology of marketed consumption has been widely commented upon by critical theorists yet the mechanisms through which this influence becomes manifest remain relatively under-examined. In particular there has been no explicit examination of the mediating role of cultural knowledge in the production of ideologically driven advertising. This paper invokes the panoptic metaphor to position the knowledge gathered by and on behalf of advertising agencies as a major dynamic in the production of consumer culture. The consumer of advertising is a known entity for advertising agencies: the subject is watched, filmed, questioned, recorded, and tracked. Indeed, consumer biography and subjectivity itself has become material that is both produced and consumed by advertising agencies in order to produce culturally constitutive advertising. The paper integrates disparate literatures to situate knowledge of consumer culture at the hub of advertising’s constitutive ideological influence.

Advertising and Promotional Culture: Case Histories

Advertising and Promotional Culture: Case Histories, 2018

This key textbook traces the development of advertising from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, providing connections with the past that illuminate present developments and point to future possibilities. Chapters take a variety of theoretical approaches to address four main themes: how advertising imagines the future through the promise of transformation; how tribalism creates a sense of collective identity organised around a product; how advertising builds engagement through participation/presumption; how the blurring of advertising, news, art, education and entertainment characterises the attention economy. P. David Marshall and Joanne Morreale expertly trace these themes back to the origins of consumer culture and demonstrate that, while they have adapted to accord with new technologies, they remain the central foci of advertising today. Ideal for researchers of Media Studies, Communication, Cultural Studies or Advertising at all levels, this is the essential guide to understanding the contemporary milieu and future directions for the advertising industry.