A multi-level contrastive analysis of promotional strategies in specialised discourse

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2019.12.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The Herbal Tea Promotional Text (HTPT) is analysed as a type of informational-persuasive text.

  • A typical macrostructure of the HTPT common to English and Spanish is unveiled.

  • A primarily persuasive step encapsulates six different promotional strategies.

  • English promotional strategies appeal to emotion and the Spanish ones rely on reason.

  • Based on descriptive results, a writing tool is developed for the practice of ESP.

Abstract

As a consequence of globalisation, small to medium-sized companies are increasingly seeking to promote their products further afield than their home markets. This entails cross-linguistic communication needs, and results in the emergence of text types not thus far addressed in the literature. One such case is that of the herbal tea promotional text (HTPT), in which a herbal tea is described and evaluated with persuasive purposes in mind. This article aims to assist Spanish professionals in writing such texts in English, and to this end will conduct a cross-linguistic multi-level analysis to identify the rhetorical macrostructure and informational-persuasive linguistic features of HTPTs, characterising the promotional strategies that serve to convince a customer to try the product. We carried out two English-Spanish contrastive analyses using ACTEaS_Promo, a purpose-built comparable corpus. Adopting a move-analysis method, the rhetorical analysis reveals a six-move macrostructure, with further steps within. Focusing on the step ‘marketing statement’, we identify pervasive language resources with a primarily persuasive function. Our interpretation of such features reveals six underlying promotional strategies, some of which show statistically different behaviour across the two languages involved, English and Spanish. Whereas English HTPTs seem to favour emotion-laden strategies, Spanish tends to rely on reason-based strategies.

Introduction

Promotion is bound up with a broad concept of advertising, whereby “mere information about a product is not sufficient to trigger a consumer reaction” (Janoschka, 2004: 88). In other words, promotional genres are associated with descriptive text types whose goal is to persuade. As such, promotional genres might be classified as representative of the informational-persuasive register (Biber & Zhang, 2018). Within the promotional realm we find core genres, like advertisements or book/DVD blurbs, which have received considerable scholarly attention (Bednarek, 2014, Cook, 2001, Gea Valor, 2005), but also more recent ones, such as web-based genres, which have seen far less linguistic exploration, promoting a specific call (Anthony, 2016) for academia to meet the industry's needs for specialised communication in English. The present study sets out to meet these needs, and the text type under study, the Herbal Tea Promotional Text (HTPT), can be understood as an instance of “descriptions with an intent to sell” (Biber & Zhang, 2018, p. 102). In that their ultimate purpose is selling, such promotional genres resort mainly to a positive evaluation of a given product, which would thus be described with an intended perlocutionary effect of persuading the customer to purchase such a product.

The role of English for promotional purposes in a globalised world can hardly be overstated (Nickerson, 2005). In fact, the present study is framed within a larger project that aims to meet the communication needs of Spanish professionals who are seeking to promote their products through the English language. As identified by the ACTRES research team,1 more and more local manufacturers in the food and drink industry in the region of Castile and León (Spain) are trying to enter the global market (Labrador and Ramón, 2015, Rabadán et al., 2016). Consequently, there is “a growing need for linguistic services, not only direct translation and/or interpreting services, but also services involving assistance in professional writing for various purposes” (Labrador & Ramón, 2015, p. 226). Echoing Anthony's call for academia to meet the needs of industry (Anthony, 2016), ACTRES researchers have embarked on various analyses of specialised sub-genres to develop corpus-based tools that assist Spanish professionals in the writing of food promotional texts, including HTPTs.

Drawing on Bhatia's Multiperspective Model (Bhatia, 2004), discourse can be approached as ‘text’, ‘genre’, ‘professional discourse’ and ‘social practice’. Far from being mutually exclusive, these four dimensions are complementary and even overlap to a certain extent (Bhatia, 2008).

Accordingly, the text type under scrutiny in the current study, HTPT as ‘text’ represents a promotional register, which is here understood as containing those pervasive linguistic features (Biber & Conrad, 2009) that are frequently used to describe a product in such a way that the customer is persuaded to buy it. Here, this informational-persuasive register will be analysed as it appears in online food descriptions.

As ‘genre’, HTPT displays a (multimodal) macrostructure divided into moves and steps, where persuasive and descriptive functions are served through a variety of resources (cf. 3.1). HTPT would fit within a colony (Bhatia, 2008) of promotional genres where persuasion, together with description, informs the customer about a given product, in this case herbal teas. Within this colony, we find traditional promotional genres such as advertisements, but also modern-day, online, multimodal genres that have arisen in the technological era to satisfy new and emerging professional needs (Bhatia, 2005). In this regard, attempts by small and medium-sized Spanish companies to promote their products internationally, as mentioned above, have stimulated interest in online product descriptions. Thus, if we had to visualize a taxonomy within such a colony of promotional genres, we would find a primary branch of ‘sister’ genres that range from traditional ones, like ‘ads’, to modern-day ones, like ‘online product description’. This latter genre, in turn, may serve as a parent genre, classifiable into different sub-genres that promote various types of products, such as ‘food’. At a lower level of text specificity, the HTPT would be a promotional subgenre where a specific food is promoted through the description of different attributes, such as origin, taste, appearance, and ingredients, amongst others. In sum, as regards its communicative purpose, the HTPT is a modern-day promotional subgenre which is itself a member of the online food description subgenre.

To the best of our knowledge, no study has thus far accounted for the ‘online product description’ as a parent genre, although previous research has examined related sub-genres, such as wine tasting notes (López-Arroyo & Roberts, 2014), online cheese descriptions (Labrador & Ramón, 2015), and biscuit descriptions (Pizarro, 2018). These studies attest to the fact that linguistic commonalities found across all these different text types reflect a food promotional register. In this sense, descriptive and persuasive resources merge to describe the food-product as well as to motivate the consumer to sample it. Notwithstanding similarities in communicative purposes, topic-specific register features may emerge. As acknowledged by Biber and Conrad (2009, p. 46): “topic is the most important situational factor influencing vocabulary choice; the words used in a text are to a large extent determined by the topic of the text […] both at the level of general topic domains […] and very specific topical domains”, just as ‘food’ and ‘herbal tea’ can be seen to exemplify, respectively. On the other hand, differences seem to occur at the rhetorical level, in that the macrostructural realisation of the text types noted above is not exactly the same. Nevertheless, equivalent moves are observed (cf. 3.1), which would strengthen the notion that a parent genre exists, this on the assumption that flexibility in genre structure is itself a defining criterion of what a genre is (Bhatia, 2008).

‘Professional discourse’ and ‘social practice’ are closely intertwined; as an instance of the former, the promotional texts described here are produced by a specific ‘professional community’. Moreover, discourse production takes place in accordance with a set of conventions that have previously been established in, and are thus expected within, the ‘social context’ where communication occurs. Exploring the professional community or addressors of the HTPT further, it is, theoretically, the members of the marketing department of a given brand that are expected to produce it, in that they are familiar with advertising strategies and marketing devices that accurately create the desires and satisfy the needs of their potential customers. In practice, however, the degree of expertise and knowledge of these marketers might not always be sufficient to deal with specific text types such as the HTPT, let alone with its purely linguistic aspects.2 In such a situation, large companies can often afford to hire professional writers or freelance communication advisors. Whereas this may be a simple, albeit costly, solution, these addressors would nevertheless need to be aware of genre-specific structure and register-specific linguistic features to comply with the abovementioned conventions. The likelihood that these professionals would be fully familiar with such specific information is low, given that the HTPT – just like descriptions of cheese, biscuits, or any other specific kind of product – can be seen as a narrow, under-researched domain.

The situation is even more challenging for those small and medium-sized companies that are looking to expand the promotion of their products internationally, in that this requires the use of English as a foreign language (EFL) in an acceptable and comprehensible way. In this regard, machine translation is not a feasible solution due to not only inaccuracy problems but also the cost of post-editing (Skadina, Vasiļjevs, Skadiņš, Gaizauskas, Tufiş & Gornostay, 2010). Furthermore, as personally reported by marketers at Pharmadus Botanicals S.L., local manufacturers may not be able to afford to outsource either the writing or the translation of their promotional and descriptive texts and must attempt to do it themselves.

The challenge that such professionals face is twofold: first, they need to be in control of rhetorical and lexico-grammatical conventions that are typical of the promotional genre; second, they need to have a mastery of the English language in general, particularly in terms of the topic-specific variety which they will be using. Yet as Cook (2001, p. 3) warns, “although advertising seems to be homogenous and increasingly international and cross-cultural, such generalizations immediately run into trouble”. Such a situation demands a contrastive study such as the one reported on in the present article, where we aim to address a specific gap in the field, in that previous studies have focused on English only (Labrador & Ramón, 2015).

Complying with socially driven conventions is paramount for the success of communication, both within and across language boundaries. So, how can professionals meet the requirements noted above? In the present context, a genre analysis approach to raise awareness of text structure and linguistic features would hardly be efficient or effective. Likewise, an English for Specialised Purposes course would also be insufficient, as well as impractical in terms of time. Therefore, in an academia-industry alliance, the role of linguists from ACTRES has been first to examine a specific text type in order to shed light on prototypical features from both the genre and register perspectives. Then, in order to assist professionals in the writing of specific promotional texts, we have capitalised on this (linguistic) descriptive work to design tools that are both useful and usable at the workplace, such as text generators3 (Pérez Blanco & Izquierdo, 2018). Describing the HTPT writing tool is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, we report on the descriptive stages that were necessary prior to transferring the knowledge yielded to the tool. We designed the abovementioned writing tool with the assumption in mind that professionals might be less interested in the text itself than in its perlocutionary effect. To guarantee the acceptability, comprehensibility and expertise of the tool's output, which is key for successful communication, the research was conducted using a corpus-based approach.

Specifically, we used a comparable corpus-based approach (cf. 2), identifying both a recurrent macrostructure of the HTPT and those pervasive linguistic features that effect the text type's main functions, namely, describing and persuading. In particular, we focus on its most persuasion-laden move as a way of identifying the functional forces that make pervasive linguistic features be associated with the text's overall description-to-sell nature. Our research questions, then, are: what strategies underlie the informational-persuasive type of language used as a means of motivating the end customer to try the herbal tea products described? Are the addressees of the HTPT prone to be convinced by the same values conferred on the products in the British and in the Spanish cultures? In an attempt to answer these questions we will take into account whether addressors appeal to reason and/or emotion to the same extent in the two languages. Likewise, we will consider whether they rely on any other sort of effect on the customer. We will focus on the formal realisation of the most persuasive chunk of the HTPT to establish our classification (cf. 3.2).

Section snippets

Material and methods

A contrastive analysis based on a comparable corpus was conducted at two levels: rhetoric and lexico-grammar. This multi-level analysis is necessary because “knowing how to perform a genre […] involves knowing both its schematic structure, or staging, on the one hand, and the specific form-function correlation of each stage, on the other”4

Rhetorical macrostructure

The rhetorical analysis revealed the generic move structure shown in Table 2 and illustrated in Appendix 1.

As shown in the central column of the table, we identified six moves, five of which are further subdivided into steps. Table 2 also shows in how many texts we observed the realisation of each move and step. We also provide percentage occurrence rates as a means of illustrating similarities and differences more clearly. Bearing in mind the ultimate goal of the project, that is, the

Conclusions

In this paper we adopted a contrastive approach to the analysis of herbal tea promotional texts, doing so from two perspectives, genre and register, this as a means of identifying strategies that persuade the customer to try a given product. Taking the ‘move’ as our functional unit, we identified a generic six-move macrostructure that works across languages, albeit with different realisation rates. Focusing on the chunk where persuasion is a primary function, i.e., the step ‘marketing

Acknowledgements

Research for this paper has been partially funded by Project LE227U13 sponsored by the Regional Government of Castilla y León (Junta de Castilla y León, Spain) and through Project FFI2013-42994-R of the Spanish Ministry for Economy, Industry and Competitiveness.

We are greatly indebted to two anonymous reviewers for their thorough and thoughtful comments on a previous draft of this paper. Their generous advice and suggestions have helped us to improve it considerably. Any errors remain our own.

Marlén Izquierdo is an associate professor at UPV/EHU. She received her PhD from University of León in 2008; she is a member of the ACTRES research team. Her research interests include corpus-based contrastive linguistics, ESP and EAP. She has disseminated research in various journals (Languages in Contrast, Meta), collective volumes (John Benjamins Studies in Corpus Linguistics), and at international conferences.

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    Marlén Izquierdo is an associate professor at UPV/EHU. She received her PhD from University of León in 2008; she is a member of the ACTRES research team. Her research interests include corpus-based contrastive linguistics, ESP and EAP. She has disseminated research in various journals (Languages in Contrast, Meta), collective volumes (John Benjamins Studies in Corpus Linguistics), and at international conferences.

    María Pérez Blanco is an assistant professor at University of León, from which she received her Ph.D. in 2013; she is a member of the ACTRES research team. Her research interests include contrastive analysis, corpus linguistics, translation, English-Spanish evaluation and modality. She has published articles in journals such as Languages in Contrast and Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada and in edited volumes, such as Peter Lang Lodz Studies in Language.

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