Marketing Identities Through Language

Elizabeth Martin explores the impact of globalization on the language of French advertising, showing that English and global imagery play an important role in tailoring global campaigns to the French market, with media companies undeterred by the attempts through legislation to curb language mixing in the media.

This book presents a comprehensive account of the use and effects of foreign languages in advertising. Based on consumer culture positioning strategies in marketing, three language strategies are presented: foreign language display to express foreignness, English to highlight globalness, and local language to appeal to ethnicity (for instance, Spanish for Hispanics in the USA). The book takes a multidisciplinary approach, integrating insights from both marketing and linguistics, presenting both theoretical perspectives (e.g., Communication Accommodation Theory, Conceptual Feature Model, Country-of-origin effect, Markedness Model, Revised Hierarchical Model) and empirical evidence from content analyses and experimental studies. The authors demonstrate that three concepts are key to understanding foreign languages in advertising: language attitudes, language-product congruence, and comprehension. The book will appeal to students and researchers in the fields of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, marketing and advertising.

Advertising has traditionally communicated messages to consumers with strong local and national identities. However, increasingly, products, producers, advertising agencies and media are becoming internationalized. In the development of strategies that appeal to a large multinational consumer base, advertising language takes on new 'multilingual' features. The author explores the role of advertising language in this new globalized environment, from a communicative theory point of view, as well as from a close linguistic analysis of some major advertising campaigns within a multicultural and multilingual marketplace.

Language, this book argues, is political from top to bottom, whether considered at the level of an individual speaker's choice of language or style of discourse with others (where interpersonal politics are performed), or at the level of political rhetoric, or indeed all the way up to the formation of national languages. By bringing together this set of topics and highlighting how they are interrelated, the book will function well as a textbook on any applied or sociolinguistic course in which some or all of these various aspects of the politics of language are covered.

Language not only expresses identities but also constructs them. Starting from that point, Language and Identity examines the interrelationships between language and identities. It finds that they are so closely interwoven, that words themselves are inscribed with ideological meanings. Words and language constitute meanings within discourses and discourses vary in power. The powerful ones reproduce more powerful meanings, colonize other discourses and marginalize or silence the least powerful languages and cultures. Language and culture death occur in extreme cases of marginalization. This book also demonstrates the socio-economic opportunities offered by language choice and the cultural allegiances of language, where groups have been able to create new lives for themselves by embracing new languages in new countries. Language can be a 'double-edged sword' of opportunity and marginalization. Language and Identity argues that bilingualism and in some cases multilingualism can both promote socio-economic opportunity and combat culture death and marginalization. With sound theoretical perspectives drawing upon the work of Bakhtin, Vygotsky, Gumperz, Foucault and others, this book provides readers with a rationale to redress social injustice in the world by supporting minority linguistic and cultural identities and an acknowledgement that access to language can provide opportunity.

This edited collection examines how people use a range of different modalities to negotiate, influence, and/or project their own or other people's identities. It brings together linguistic scholars concerned with issues of identity through a study of language use in various types of written texts, conversation, performance, and interviews.

This book explores the use of English within otherwise local-language conversations by two continental European social media communities. The analysis of these communities serves not only as a comparison of online language practices, but also as a close look at how globalization phenomena and ‘international English’ play out in the practices of everyday life in different non-English-speaking countries. The author concludes that the root of the distinctive practices in the two communities studied is the disparity between their language ideologies. She argues that community participants draw on their respective national language ideologies, which have developed over centuries, but also reach beyond any static forms of those ideologies to negotiate, contest, and re-evaluate them. This book will be of interest to linguists and other social scientists interested in social media, youth language and the real-world linguistic consequences of globalization.

The Handbook of Research on Identity Theory in Marketing features cutting-edge research that delves into the origins and consequences of identity loyalty and organizes these insights around five basic identity principles that span nearly every consumer marketing subdomain. This Handbook is a comprehensive and state of the art treatment of identity and marketing: An authoritative and practical guide for academics, brand managers, marketers, public policy advocates and even intellectually curious consumers.

This volume highlights the role of language ideologies in the process of negotiation of identities and shows that in different historical and social contexts different identities may be negotiable or non-negotiable.