Discourse Analysis in Advertising and Marketing

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Discourse Analysis in Advertising and Marketing

• I plan today to talk about some examples of how
  Ive tried to apply DA principles in advertising
  and marketing research. I wont be focussing on
  methodological detail but will set out some of
  the assumptions that inform my particular take
  on DA.

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DA some assumptions

• I see DA as part of a group of interpretive
  approaches that focus on the production of social
  life through language and social practice. The
  analytical emphasis falls on structure, function,
  and variation in social texts.
• Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. (1987) Discourse and
  Social Psychology, Routledge.

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Related approaches

• Related approaches (I would argue) include
  narrative analysis, some phenomenological
  studies, and studies of rhetoric in marketing. DA
  is one dimension of a turn to
  theoretically-informed interpretation of
  qualitative data that has developed in marketing
  and management research.

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Published DA studies in marketing.

• Uses of overt sexuality in advertising
• Uses of advertising by adolescents
• Advertising management and creative development
• Young peoples social identity and consumption of
  branded alcohol ESRC study
• Advertising textual analysis Cook, G. (2002) The
  Discourse of Advertising, Routledge, 2nd Edn.

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Critical DA Language and power in management

• ..language and communicative action produce and
  reproduce the world-taken-for-granted thereby
  giving priority to certain (unrecognised)
  interests and presenting social reality as
  natural and given
• Alvesson, M. and Willmott, H., 1992, Critical
  Management Studies, Sage, p. 16

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Three studies

• 1. Advertising agency management
• 2. Implicit models of the consumer
• 2. The discourse of marketing management text
  books

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Data gathering in agencies

• I asked ad professionals to explain what they did
  and give me examples. The transcribed interviews
  were supplemented by ethnographic context to
  ground indexicality.
• Informal observation, field-notes, email and
  telephone conversations, supporting documents
  e.g. agency publications, internal documents

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Study 1 British Journal of Management

• In accomplishing their professional positioning
  and accounting for their own actions and
  reasoning in their work, interviewees seemed to
  draw on several important (and mutually
  supporting) interpretive repertoires. The
  agency is highly successful.

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The corporate way

• This repertoire produced the speaker as a solid
  corporate citizen rather than a maverick (we do
  things this way here.
• The agency doesnt approve of that system
• account managers here contribute a lot to the
  planning process
• ..people here are twenty times cleverer than
  other agencies..

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• the culture here is very different to the BBC,
  less hierarchical, more articulatea place where
  people think through issues in great detail (an
  account manager)
• There isa very intellectual approach to
  creativity, not just creativity for its own sake
  (a creative)

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Intellectual contingency

• This repertoire created space for much variation
  in accounting (justifying, describing) while not
  undermining the notion of a corporate ethos of
  creating advertising. It was evident in a highly
  qualified and imprecise style of accounting,
  punctuated by constant pauses and strategic
  vagueness (BJM p.241).

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Strategic Imperative

• This repertoire justified particular actions in
  terms of an overarching strategy
• all the way through the process when everyone
  was being really wobbly...I was always able to
  bring back the debateto a really commonsense
  view of what we had to communicate (account
  planner)

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Variation in accounting

• indispensible contribution of research.. (from
  an agency booklet)
• ..we have to have a consumer perspective.. from
  an account person
• this agency approach is very thinking and
  analytical
• the proposition has to encapsulate the brief..
  

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Positioning strategies

• ..we hate research.. (from a creative)
• proposition..I mean, for a start, its a silly
  word isnt it? It encourages people to be really
  precious and often just takes people away form
  being really commonsensical.
• well, yeh, were supposed tobut Im not very
  good at thatno reason for it.

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Study 2 International Journal of Advertising

• Interviewing professionals in several agencies I
  began to think that implicit working assumptions
  seemed powerful in framing the way that people
  oriented themselves to the task of advertising.
  In particular, they seemed to have different
  ideas about the consumer.

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Implicit models of the consumer

• In DA terms professionals in different roles
  seemed to account for actions in terms of
  differing implicit models of the consumer. These
  models informed their working practices. I
  characterised these models as android, poet and
  cave-dweller.

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Consumers as androids

• The account manager seemed to see the consumer in
  terms of an information-processing entity driven
  by economic rationality and motivated by
  communications that offered persuasive economic
  reasons to purchase.

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Consumers as poets

• The account planners seemed to feel that
  consumers were like poets, seeking meaning in
  their lives and motivated by communications that
  reflected their own lived experience and desire
  for symbolic transformation.

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Consumers as cave-dwellers

• Creative professionals seemed to see consumers as
  busy, inattentive entities living mundane lives
  who can be motivated to consume by aesthetic and
  emotional themes in advertising inspiration, not
  information, persuasion or even meaning, was the
  key issue.

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Study 3 Journal of Management Studies

• The JMS study focussed on written rather than
  spoken text and explored the deployment of
  ideological rhetoric to produce a sense of unity,
  consensus and authority in marketing management
  text books.

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The marketing text producing consensus, unity

• marketers manage demand and build profitable
  customer relationships
• marketing is the establishment of mutually
  satisfying exchange relationships

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• marketing...is more than a business function- it
  is a philosophy that guides the entire
  organisation (creating) customer satisfaction
  profitably
• We are all customers now

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Ideological-rhetorical strategies

• Binary of theory/practice
• Marketing texts both aggrandise theory and
  despise it to produce a sense of practical
  authority
• JMS passage on p.1332

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References

• We Are All Customers Now Rhetorical Strategy
  and Ideological Control in Marketing Management
  Texts, Journal of Management Studies (Vol.40,
  No.5, pp.1325-1352 June, 2003)
• How divergent beliefs cause account team
  conflict, International Journal of Advertising
  The Quarterly Review of Marketing Communications
  (2003) Vol.22, No.3, pp. 313-332.
• Silent Running tacit, discursive and
  psychological aspects of management in a top UK
  advertising agency, (2000), British Journal of
  Management, Vol. 11, Iss. 3, pp.239-254.
• Doing Research Projects in Marketing, Management
  and Consumer Research, London, Routledge