Multimodal Communication by May Wong

Author:May Wong
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030154288
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4.4 Hybridity in Branding Strategies and Its Impact on Viewer Engagement

As noted above, the engagement strategies deployed in personal loan TV advertisements are quite straightforward: the advertisers attribute their claims to intertextual characters and discourses and the intertextual voices endorse the advertisers’ claims through the engagement system laid down in Martin and White (2005). Under Feng and Wignell’s system of engagement values, the two personal loan TV adverts under scrutiny in the preceding section should be considered as highly engaging in the sense that the plot involving both the characters and their lifelike situations entailing a direct, personalised and private dialogue among the intertextual voices becomes an inseparable part of the advertisement.

On the other hand, most advertisements in my data, including the two adverts to be considered in this section, are less engaging. The degree of recontextualisation (and thus the engagement value) is median as there is usually a distinct episode of service pledges at the end of the ad. In this sense, the character voices and the appropriated social practices merely provide a ‘context of situation’ for introducing the loan service and appealing to the consumers (rather than the characters in the ads) emotionally, and then the seller voice takes over the job to highlight rational factors of using the service. This is unlike the two highly engaging adverts discussed in Sect. 4.3 where the intertextual voices speak for the service itself. Yet, median engagement value of advertising does not mean that intertextual voices are neutralised; they undoubtedly endorse the advertised service, albeit through other means such as rhetorical structure . Two principal kinds of rhetorical structure will be discussed in this section: the first draws on a warrant offered recurrently by most adverts that the product/service is a solution to a problem (Cook 2001: 49; Dyer 1982: 168–169), while the second comes from the fundamental structure of narratives, which is ‘dream come true’—it functions on the level of a day-dream/fantasy that viewers are able to make those desires that remain unsatisfied in their everyday life come true on the condition that they sign up to the loan service (O’Halloran et al. 2013; Vestergaard and Schroder 1985: 117). In the following, a detailed analysis of these two kinds of rhetorical structure will be provided using two additional examples of personal loan advertising. The aim is to prove that emotional branding with either the ‘problem-solution’ or ‘dream come true’ rhetorical structure can be combined with rational branding in terms of direct propaganda in the advertising of personal loan services, and to demonstrate that such kind of hybridity may have an impact on the strategies of viewer engagement.

The first example (see Table 4.4) recontextualises a familiar social practice (‘shopping in a store’) and uses a problem-solution pattern to endorse the loan service. The narrative structure (orientation^complication^resolution) is beginning to emerge (see Martin and Plum 1997) as the story unfolds. The story is that the young couple browse in a furniture store (orientation) and suddenly realise that they are short of money to purchase all the household items they need (complication).

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