Well-known Italian brands of products (food and drink on the one hand and ceramic tiles on the other) distributed on a worldwide scale, are often recognised for the country-of-origin effect they create in global advertising. The essential domestic message is likely to undergo some modification and / or adaptation when re-written or dubbed for the global market. The reason for this is not simply to satisfy the marketing style of the country but to project a clearly identifiable and relevant cultural self to the foreign market. In the latter case, redundancy in meaning (identifiable in a multimodal analysis) may be a useful factor in reinforcing the identity of the manufacturers and country of origin. Maintaining national identity in a global market has indeed special implications for the linguistic fetishes (Kelly-Holmes 2005) created around a product that the national manufacturer not only desires to project by maintaining essential lexis in the original language, but also in expressions of self-glorification (e.g. Italy’s No. 1 Pasta, Britain’s best … ) and personal commitment to the achievement of perfection in the final product. In doing so the company manages to project its image into a wider market (The world’s best, the world’s number one …), thus extending the relevance of space further afield. With reference to a corpus of Italian company websites and a corpus of multimodal ads, the aim of this paper is to discover how the Italian-ness of both the company and its product(s) is conveyed verbally and non-verbally to a global audience through the medium of English. By means of a series of qualitative analyses, the present contribution purports to reveal how companies in totally different sectors deploy strategies aimed at selling themselves and their product(s). Attention will focus not only on seeking out keywords and their connotative features but also on product denomination, by integrating a corpus perspective with interpretative insights from discourse analysis in relation to the construction of identity and to the role of the perception of space in this process. Results will show that products from two extreme ends of the market sector nevertheless have a common denominator in that they both contribute to establishing and reinforcing identity in relation to a sense of place and of belonging to a particular national and / or social group. Furthermore, such an analysis will also highlight the underlying values conveyed implicitly in the promotional message.

Selling who we are and /or what our product is. Self-presentational strategies in company websites and product promotion / Mansfield, Gillian; Franca, Poppi. - 166:(2013), pp. 267-291.

Selling who we are and /or what our product is. Self-presentational strategies in company websites and product promotion.

MANSFIELD, Gillian;
2013-01-01

Abstract

Well-known Italian brands of products (food and drink on the one hand and ceramic tiles on the other) distributed on a worldwide scale, are often recognised for the country-of-origin effect they create in global advertising. The essential domestic message is likely to undergo some modification and / or adaptation when re-written or dubbed for the global market. The reason for this is not simply to satisfy the marketing style of the country but to project a clearly identifiable and relevant cultural self to the foreign market. In the latter case, redundancy in meaning (identifiable in a multimodal analysis) may be a useful factor in reinforcing the identity of the manufacturers and country of origin. Maintaining national identity in a global market has indeed special implications for the linguistic fetishes (Kelly-Holmes 2005) created around a product that the national manufacturer not only desires to project by maintaining essential lexis in the original language, but also in expressions of self-glorification (e.g. Italy’s No. 1 Pasta, Britain’s best … ) and personal commitment to the achievement of perfection in the final product. In doing so the company manages to project its image into a wider market (The world’s best, the world’s number one …), thus extending the relevance of space further afield. With reference to a corpus of Italian company websites and a corpus of multimodal ads, the aim of this paper is to discover how the Italian-ness of both the company and its product(s) is conveyed verbally and non-verbally to a global audience through the medium of English. By means of a series of qualitative analyses, the present contribution purports to reveal how companies in totally different sectors deploy strategies aimed at selling themselves and their product(s). Attention will focus not only on seeking out keywords and their connotative features but also on product denomination, by integrating a corpus perspective with interpretative insights from discourse analysis in relation to the construction of identity and to the role of the perception of space in this process. Results will show that products from two extreme ends of the market sector nevertheless have a common denominator in that they both contribute to establishing and reinforcing identity in relation to a sense of place and of belonging to a particular national and / or social group. Furthermore, such an analysis will also highlight the underlying values conveyed implicitly in the promotional message.
2013
9783034312547
Selling who we are and /or what our product is. Self-presentational strategies in company websites and product promotion / Mansfield, Gillian; Franca, Poppi. - 166:(2013), pp. 267-291.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11381/2762780
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