Netecha Elizabeth
Kamyanets-Podilskiy Ivan Ohiyenko National University
Scientific Supervisor: Nykytiuk S. I., Senior Lecturer
STRUCTURAL PECULIARITIES OF THE ENGLISH FEMALE FRAGRANCE COMMERCIALS
In the modern world media plays one of the key roles and commercials aren’t an exception. And the language is a crucial tool in achieving the best profitable results of the advertising campaign. That is why we focused on this aspect of constructing best female perfume advertisements.
Keywords: advertisement, female perfume, linguistic structures, semantic-linguistic analysis.
The world of advertising, perfume advertising included, is such a utopia. The advertisement offers a “space”/place in which by purchasing a perfume, the customer achieves the feeling of completeness, if the work of the advert was properly done. And the language serves as the medium for conveying the intended message for people to purchase products or services.
The advertisement of the product, i.e. the perfume “shows” the weaknesses, or whatever is missing in the life or identity of the consumer in comparison to the role-model promoted by mainstream ideologies. The language is the medium, where words serve as foundation and help to build this utopia. This is how the consumer’s identity is controlled by the media with the help of language. Therefore the article unfolds how language is used as a means for reflection of gender (female) and which constructions are used to achieve the most profitable effect of the product’s sales. In this article we have focused on the female perfume printed and TV advertisements.
“Language observes and examines at a discursive level “speaks about the social construction of gender” [1]. Women are usually described in terms of light, care, hedonism, creativity, flora and as reliable ones.
The concept and use of verb constructions, verbal puffery in advertising has been researched in the past few decades. Referring to the results of Haan and Berkey’s research done over the verbal use in advertisement we can claim that verbal superlatives and exaggeration in verbs and nouns are mostly used [2].
This suggests that advertisers of consumer products, who rely heavily on subjective claims, as is the case for fragrances, should be wary of delivering these claims using verbal puffery, but it doesn’t seem to work. Because nowadays the slogan goes as follows: ‘the simpler, the better’.
In this paper we concentrated mainly on two out of the most popular women’s fragrance advertisements and analyzed them from the lingual structure point of view.
For instance in this magnificent Crystal Noir, Versace advertisement we can find prepositional phrases used the most, second place goes to participial phrases: “She has presence. She walks with her head held high, and she has that certain smile. She has an innate ability to always be sexy and confident. She has a sure sense of fashion and elegance, and she loves the lavishness, eccentricity and glamour of haute couture spirit. She’s a Versace woman. She wants a sumptuous fragrance, the olfactory equivalent of a long train on fabulous evening dress. It must be a “red carpet” fragrance, multi-faceted like a diamond. It is a unique fragrance inspired by the virtuosity and creativity of Versace and its modern interpretation of luxury (Crystal Noir, Versace)” [3]. Despite a very gorgeous style of the advertising, the structures of the sentences are in simple Present Indefinite which makes it easier to read and comprehend. Besides that we can easily determine the target audience: women, because of numerous references by adding a pronoun “she” almost in the beginning of every sentence.
The second one is Chanel No. 5 the film starring Nicole Kidman as a role model, however the story is told by a young man (Rodrigo Santoro) [4]. Their story develops as we follow his narrative, which mainly consists of simple sentences: “When did I wake into this dream, I must have been the only person in the world, who didn’t know who she was. But my world would never be the same again…”, “When she came into my life”, “…(it) Didn’t matter. I knew who she was to me”, “It’s the right thing to do.”, “And then she was gone. Has she forgotten? I know, I will not. Her kiss, her smile, her perfume”. As we can assume from his thoughts, everything is very simple about their complicated relationship, because we see major used are past simple and perfect tenses. The repetitive structure of the last sentence, which is actually the last one in the advertisement as well, gives the description of the role model, focuses the recipient on her main features (kiss, smile, perfume). Some modal verbs constructions here and there: “must have been”, “must be”, “would never be”, “No one can steal”. Abruptly ended sentences often without objects create the feeling as if we were inside of the man’s mind. If we turn to the woman, though, we’ll notice that her phrases are often verb less or simple imperatives or declaratives: “Drive!”, “It’s beautiful up here. Everything seems so peaceful.”,“I’m a dancer. I love to dance.”, “I will always be. I love you.”, “I don’t care about tomorrow.”, “No one can steal a dream. No one. Goodbye.”
So to conclude all mentioned, we may claim that the language used in the advertisements is highly descriptive. Parts of speech that dominate the discourse are, as expected, adjectives and nouns. Verbs are not so numerous and they usually take present simple tense form, which only puts more emphasize on the habitual nature of the actions expressed in the advertisements. Sentences are mostly simple, often imperatives or declaratives. Imperatives usually come in the form of “be + participle/adjective”. Declaratives serve more the purpose of giving statement about the personality of the role-model promoted. There are also verbless sentences, being adjective phrases, noun phrases, prepositional phrases or adverbial phrases. They are usually short, function on their own, and are used for giving a statement or attitude. Frequently found in corpus are prepositional phrases with “for” as the headword and they usually state the recipient of the action, who has a choice either to join the exclusive club and become one of those described by noun phrases after “for” or not. And the membership to this exclusive group is granted by purchasing the product.
References
- Weatherall, Gender, language, and discourse. New York: Routledge. 2002. p75.
- Haan, P. and Berkey, C. “A Study of the Believability of the Forms of Puffery,” Journal of Communication Research, 2002. Vol. 8, pp. 243-256.
- Filipović, M. THE LANGUAGE OF FLESH AND ROSES IN FRAGRANCE ADVERTISING ‒ DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF FRAGRANCE WRITTEN ADS. University of Belgrade Faculty of Philology. 2015. p147.
- Ibraheem, H. The 5 best perfume adverts. Get the Gloss. 20.10.14. https://www.getthegloss.com/gallery/the-10-best-perfume-adverts.