Nowadays, advertising has an important role in business. Many companies promote their products through advertising. Many advertising appear on TV, radio, magazine, newspaper, banner, etc. Advertising has some message on daily basis and therefore are unable to remember all the advertisements. In most cases people just tend to ignore the messages they are exposed to. As people become more sophisticated, and not easy to convince, marketers have to make advertisements even more capturing the attention and memorable.
One of the ways of doing so is a good advertising slogan. Advertising slogans are an important part of any advertising campaign. Being short and memorable, advertising slogans have been used by large corporations and small business companies for more than a century. The purpose of these catchy phrases is to draw the attention of a potential customer and help to distinguish a product or service from the majority of others in the market. According to Leech (1972), slogans are more powerful than companies’ logos and can be easily remembered and recited by people. Rein defines an advertising slogan as a “unique phrase identified with a company or brand” (Rein, 1982). The scholar asserts that the slogan, which is kind of a presentation of the main idea of the advertising campaign, has to “command attention, be memorable and be brief” (Rein, 1982). Godin (2005) refers to the advertising slogan as a “scenario”, which attracts a potential customer.
The idea that the slogan is a tool that helps a customer to identify the brand is also maintained by Dowling and Kabanoff who state that advertising slogans are a few words that “appear beneath or beside the corporate name at the bottom of a print advertisement and are separated from the body copy for easy recognition” (Dowling and Kabanoff 1996:64). At the lexical level scholars point out the use of pronouns, unqualified comparison, coined words, numerals, adjectives and verbs. Puns, metonymy, metaphor, and simile can often be identified at the semantic level. At the phonological level the extensive use of rhyme and rhythm can be observed. This paper is focus in figurative language used and sound technique used in international’s slogan advertisement.
The analysis of sampled slogans has shown that the most often used examples of figurative language in English advertising slogans are: simile, metonymy, metaphor, pun (word play), personification, apostrophe, symbol, and paradox.
Simile is “a figure of speech in which one thing is likened to another, in such a way as to clarify and enhance an image. It is an explicit comparison (as opposed to the metaphor, q.v., where the comparison is implicit) recognizable by the use of the words ‘like’ or ‘as’” (Cuddon, 1999, 830). According to Ding (2003), simile usually helps to promote some positive characteristics of the advertised product (or service) and/or highlight and strengthen emotional representation of its features:
Cuddon defines metonymy as “a figure of speech in which the name of an attribute or a thing is substituted for the thing itself” (Cuddon, 1999, 510).
Myers states that metonymy is commonly found in advertisements “where the product is associated with some person or surroundings” (Myers, 1997)
In a number of advertising slogans metaphor was identified. Metaphor contributes to the aesthetics of the message and emphasizes the main idea, describing one object in terms of another, usually by means of implicit comparison.
When using a metaphor, two seemingly unrelated things are compared by stating that one is the same as the other; this helps to see the similarities or connections which would remain unrevealed if not by the metaphor:
Leech maintains that metaphors are valuable in the advertising language as they “suggest the right kind of emotive associations for the product” (Leech, 1972, 182).
Many of the analyzed slogans are based on pun that involves a play on words. According to Cuddon (1999, 711), puns are often used for humorous effect. Consider the following examples:
Pun or word play is often used by advertisers because they rely on lexical items with more than one meaning; sometimes a word play occurs when the different words are homophones or homonyms. The pun/word play is based on ambiguity, although, according to Leech, in advertising language ambiguity “hinges on the orthography rather than on pronunciation” (Leech, 1972, 184).
Among the sound techniques most often used in English advertising slogans the following can be observed: rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, rhythm, and onomatopoeia. One of the dominant sound techniques in English advertising slogans is rhyme, which, according to Cuddon, is “the formalized consonance of syllables” (1999, 750). It should be noted that rhyme refers to the way the word is pronounced, not spelled. Here is the example:
According to Ding (2003), rhyme is most probably the best sound technique used for the introduction of the brand name.
Rhythm is “the movement or sense of movement communicated by the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables and by the duration of the syllables” (Cuddon, 1999, 753). Rhythm is usually perceived on a subconscious level and makes the slogan a memorable, repeatable sentence. Neat rhythmical passages are referred to as meter, and the metrical scheme, as Leech puts it, “may easily pass unnoticed” (Leech, 1972, 186).
In conclusion, the slogan in advertisement is a tool that helps a customer to identify the brand. The used of figurative language and sound technique in advertisement have important role to make people or the costumers easy remember the products. All the definitions share a common idea that the advertising slogan is a short catchy phrase related to a specific brand and defines, presents and helps customers remember the key concepts of a brand or advertising campaign. The used of figurative language is a creative way to make the advertisement interesting. The sound technique used in advertisement influenced the costumers’ thought to easily identify the product.
Cuddon, J. A. (1999). The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London:Penguin Books Ltd.
Ding, X. (2003). Stylistic Features of the Advertising Slogan.
Leech, G. (1972). English in Advertising: A Linguistic Study of Advertising in Great Britain (English Language Series). London: Longman.
Myers, G. (1997). Words in Ads. London: Hodder Arnold.
Rein, D. P. (1982). The Language of Advertising and Merchandising in English. New York: Regent.