Evaluation in Advertising Reception: A Socio-Cognitive and Linguistic Perspective PDF
Preview Evaluation in Advertising Reception: A Socio-Cognitive and Linguistic Perspective
Evaluation in Advertising Reception This page intentionally left blank Evaluation in Advertising Reception A Socio-Cognitive and Linguistic Perspective Stella Bullo Manchester Metropolitan University, UK © Stella Bullo 2014 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-35042-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her rights to be identifi ed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-46836-2 ISBN 978-1-137-35043-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137350435 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Contents List of Figures and Tables vi Acknowledgements vii 1 Introduction: Researching Reception and Discourse 1 2 Reception, Language and Sense-Making 6 3 Investigating Evaluation in Advertising Reception 41 4 The Discourse of Advertising Reception 80 5 Implications for a Theory of Evaluation in Advertising Reception 130 Appendix 1: Appraisal Coding: Focus Groups 1 and 2 162 Appendix 2: Appraisal Tables 185 Notes 189 References 191 Index 202 v List of Figures and Tables Figures 3.1 Advert for the Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions (detail) 52 3.2 Original advert produced by the Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions 53 3.3 Advert for Mercedes-Benz USA 55, 56 3.4 Advert for IKEA 59 Tables 4.1 FG1 turns selected for analysis 81 4.2 FG1 general figures of appraisal 82 4.3 FG1 percentages of appraisal per advert 82 4.4 FG1 percentages of appraisal per category per advert 83 4.5 F G1 percentages of polarity per appraisal category per advert 83 4.6 FG 2 turns selected for analysis 108 4.7 FG2 general figures of appraisal 109 4.8 Percentages of appraisal per advert in FG2 109 4.9 P ercentages of appraisal per category per advert in FG2 109 4.10 Percentages of polarity per appraisal category per advert in FG2 110 5.1 Appraisal in FG1 and FG2 131 5.2 FG1 and FG2 targets of appraisal 131 5.3 FG1 and FG2 percentages of appraisal per category per advert 132 5.4 FG1 and FG2 comparison of affect 133 5.5 FG1 and FG2 comparison of appreciation 134 5.6 FG1 and FG2 comparison of judgement 135 vi Acknowledgements A special thanks to the focus-group participants for kindly agree- ing to collaborate with the data collection required for this book. Thanks are also due to Dr Veronika Koller for her guidance and encouragement. I am also very grateful for the support provided by the Department of Languages, Information and Communications and the Institute of Humanities and Social Science Research at Manchester Metropolitan University. Finally thanks to the edito- rial team at Palgrave Macmillan and to colleagues and friends who helped me with the book proposal, the editing and proof reading of this work. This book is dedicated to my family and to those special people who accompanied, supported and encouraged me at various stages of its development. Permissions The advert for the Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions (NBTC) is reproduced with permission of the NBTC. The advert for Mercedes-Benz USA has been reproduced with per- mission from Merkley & Partners as agents for Mercedes-Benz USA. The image of the painting, ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother’ by James McNeill Whistler is reproduced with permission of © Corbis. Still life objects in the picture frame image have been reproduced with permission from Mark Weiss/Conceptual Notions, Inc. The photograph of the car is reproduced with permis- sion from photographer Tim Damon. The IKEA advert is reproduced with permission from Inter IKEA Systems BV. vii 1 Introduction: Researching Reception and Discourse 1.1 About this book This book is situated within the context of reception studies and discourse analysis. Reception research is concerned with explor- ing the audience’s use and interpretation of media as a reflection of a particular socio-cultural context (McQuail, 1997). It offers an approach to textual analysis that proposes that the meaning of a text is not intrinsic to the text but rather is created in the relationship between the text and the reader (Jauss, 1982). Following from literary theorists and semioticians Barthes (1977) and Eco (1976, 1979), the audience reception tradition (Hall, 1980) emphasises the active role of the reader in decoding and constructing meanings from the media texts; it stresses that these meanings are never fixed or predictable but negotiated in the semiotic process (Hodge and Kress, 1988). From a discourse analytic perspective, Koller (2005b, p. 138) observes that ‘the meaning intended by the sender and the meaning constructed by the receiver … do not have to converge – indeed, they may hardly ever do so.’ This book is hence concerned with understanding what is involved in sense-making practices and how these are actualised in linguistic structures. To that end, I propose a discourse analytic methodology that will allow for a systematic exploration of the social and the cognitive processes underpinning advertising reception discourse in an attempt to unveil the ‘often opaque relationships of causality and determination between (a) discursive practices, events and texts, and (b) wider social and cultural structures’ (Fairclough 2010, p. 93). 1 2 Evaluation in Advertising Reception By taking a reception approach, I centre on the idea of the audience’s active participation in sense-making and suggest that such a process has an inherent socio-cognitive aspect whereby partici- pants make sense of a new stimulus, such as media text, by associat- ing it with information stored in their reservoir of knowledge, that is, elements from the socio-cultural environment such as popular cul- ture, advertisements, brands, etc. By taking such an approach to text analysis, I focus on ‘how’ rather than ‘what’ something means and I conceptualise audiences as active and texts as indeterminate as readers actively create meanings from them (Barbatsis, 2005). One key aim of this work is to explain comprehensively how the informants construct an evaluative stance in the reception of adver- tising stimuli. The book starts from the premise that the appeal that adverts, or elements of them, has on the audience is not easy to predict and may be determined by various elements interacting in the audience’s socio-cognitive environment. With this hypothesis in mind, the approach taken will attempt to demonstrate that a study of evaluation on its own cannot account for the different and varied responses of groups of people within the same target market of the products advertised but rather that the evaluation derived from the attitudinal positioning is socially as well as cognitively shaped. It is the aim of this work to identify which socio-cognitive resources can be inferred to underlie such evaluative positioning. This means that pursuing a definition of sense-making that goes beyond evaluation, entails the development of a framework that is able to account for higher-level units of meaning revealing the processes that explain the multiplicity of readings. One important issue to clarify is that, whenever I refer to cogni- tive models, I will refer to them as being assumed or inferred. This is indicative of my claim that such models of cognition cannot be proven by text analysis without further empirical evidence within the field of cognitive psychology but rather can be assumed to inform the evaluative positioning and supported by textual evidence in the data as suggested by socio-cognitive discourse analysis research (for example, van Dijk, 2008; Koller, 2005a, 2008) , social cognition research (Augoustinos et al., 2006) and by some theories of cognitive semantics, for example, conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980).
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