How do adverts address people with their lexical choices?

We all have that one television advertisement that we hate with a sincere passion. Most recently for me it has been the rebooted supposedly less annoying 'Go Compare' adverts where the fat Welshman has toned down the outrageous singing and admitted that they were rather annoying only to be replaced by an even more tedious sketch. It always gives me a reason to change the channel. However, the language used in adverts such as the above are actually extremely clever.

 

Lingurama International says "The choice of language to convey specific messages with the intention of influencing people is vitally important." This means that advertisers and market researchers already know that different language choices have different affects on different people. So there has to be many different types of advertisements aimed for the wide variety of people it needs to target. One way advertisements will target their audience is through interrogative statements within the advert, this means that a question is asked like in the Kellogg's Special K advert where women step onto a set of weighing scales and have adjectives to describe themselves. At the end of the advert the interrogative question is proposed 'What will you gain when you lose?' Firstly, this is an advert aimed at women as we see that every person in it is a woman including the voice over at the end proposing the question. So, do interrogative advertisements affect women more than men? From my research so far I can safely say, yes.

 

Advertisements aimed at men go for a different approach which is the use of imperative statements. For example in most advertisements about alcoholic drinks there is an imperative disclaimer along the lines of 'Please drink responsibly'. This is aimed at a second person subject who is you, the viewer and consumer. Another example of imperative lexical statements in adverts is 'Save Earl!' Here we are being told to save Earl whereas an interrogative way of putting it would be something along the lines of 'Won't you Save Earl?' this allows for the viewer to have a choice. From my previous research this would be more at home in the second paragraph where women are the main observation in focus.

 

There are several other ways advertisements target their audience but here I have decided to do an overview of just one way advertisements use different lexical choices for different genders. To conclude, it would be unfair to say that these are strict ways in which they are used because there are some crossovers between genders but this I feel gives a nice introduction into the immensely huge world of advertising and what lexical choices they use and how they have different affects on gender. Can you think of any adverts that have similar lexical choices?

 

John Cummins