Implicit promises: brand signatures in advertising discourse

Abstract

Advertising speech is often presented as a discourse of seduction. The advertising textual genres are salient in our daily life, not only because of their constant and unavoidable presence in the mass media (radio, television, newspapers, magazines …), as in all corners of the city (signs, awnings, billboards…), or printed on daily objects (sweaters, caps, pencils and pens, mugs, key rings …). Such profusion of advertising statements has led to a growing “raising the voice” in order to capture the attention of the target audience, which is reflected in increasingly creative texts full of linguistic, visual and sound rhetoric. Starting from a real corpus of 120 brand signatures collected in television advertisements in Portugal, the present research aims to analyse its extension, syntactic configuration, density of rhetorical figures and speech voices. Underlying the language strategies adopted in the construction of the brand slogan is a language of seduction, of insinuation in the receiver’s memory and of his identification with the brand values. Ultimately, these signatures bring us implicit promises of better, ideal and desired worlds, the promised lands of the consumer society.