A Study of Multimodal Banner Discourse on Chinese E-Commerce Websites From the Perspective of Discourse Information

Xin GUAN

Abstract


The banner ads on the e-commerce websites offer the information of new goods, best sellers, and promotions etc., which aim to attract the consumers, arouse their desire for shopping, and then guide them to the pages of advertised products. In linguistic sense, a banner is multimodal ads discourse being composed of text and images. So far, most of the multimodal studies of ad discourse take traditional printed ads other than banners as research object, and analysis is conducted, with metafunctions of language from the systemic functional linguistics as the basis, and visual grammar by Kress & van Leeuwen as the theoretical framework, to describe their representational meaning, interactive meaning or compositional meaning as well as meaning-construction patterns in ad discourse. Supported by the ideas of defining ads as one way to transmit information and consuming behavior as the course of processing information, the banner ads sampled from three most popular Chinese e-commerce websites of amazon.cn, TMALL.COM, and JD.COM are analyzed in this paper to demonstrate the characteristics of information structure of both language and non-language discourse in banner ad discourse, and further the way in which images are interrelated with text through information to fulfil the banner’s shopping guidance performance. The analysis also provides proof that the effectiveness of banners can be improved through perfecting the way in which text and images are
interrelated.


Keywords


Banner; Text; Images; Multimodal discourse; Information

Full Text:

PDF

References


Arens, W. F., Weigold M., & Arens, C. (2012). Contemporary Advertising and Integrated Marketing Communication (14th ed.). Mcgraw-Hill Higher Education.

Briggs, R., & Hollis, N. (1997). Advertising on the web: Is there response before click-through? Journal of Advertising Research, 37(2), 33-45.

Busen, S., Mustaffa, C., & Bahtiar, M. (2016). Impacts of attitude towards online banner advertisement on brand awareness: Insight from persuasive hierarchy model. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 7, 81-87.

Du, J. B. (2007). A study of the tree information structure of legal discourse. Modern Foreign Language, 30(1), 30-50.

Du, J. B. (2014). On legal discourse information. Beijing: People’s Publishing House.

Du, J. B. (2015). Discourse information analysis: A solution to the problem of multimodal discourse study. Journal of Zhongyuan University of Technology, 26(2), 17-23.

Fortanet, I., Palmer, J. C., & Posteguillo, S. (1999). The emergence of a new genre: Advertising on Internet. Journal of Linguistics, 23, 93-113.

Grimm, P. E., Agrawal, J., & Richardson, P. S. (1999). Product conspicuousness and buying motives as determinants of reference group influences. In E-European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 4. Association for Consumer Research, 97-103.

Iyama, G. A., & Akpan, I. (2013). Consumers attention and interactivity towards online visual advertisements: The graphic designers’ peremptory challenges. Arts and Design Studies, 7, 49-54.

Johar, J. S., & Sirgy, M. J. (1991). Value-expressive versus utilitarian advertising appeals: When and why to use which appeal . Journal of Advertising, 20(3), 23-33.

Kardes, F. R., Cronley, M. L., & Cline, T. W. (2011). Consumer Behavior. South-Western Cengage Learning.

Katz, D. (1960). The functional approach to the study of attitudes. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 24(2), 163-
204.

Kumar, D. G. (2015). A study on customers attitude towards online marketing strategies in Tirupur. International Journal of Management and Social Science Research Review, 1(10), 285-297.

Lavidge, R., & Steiner, G. (1961). A model for predictive measurements of advertising effectiveness. Journal of Marketing, 52, 59-62.

Lewis, E. (1899). Side talks about advertising. The Western Druggist, 21(2), 65-66.

Madrid, M. N. (2006). Banner ads in EFL web pages: A genre-based analysis. In Actas de V Congreso Internacional AELFE [Archivo de ordenador] = Proceedings of the 5th International AELFE Conference (pp.230-237). Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza.

McGuire, W. J. (1974). Psychological motives and communication gratification. In J. G. Blumler and E. Katz (Eds.). The uses of mass communications: Current perspectives on gratification research (pp.167-196). Beverley Hills: Sage Publication.

Park, C. W., & Mittal, B. (1985). A theory of involvement in consumer behavior: Problems and issues. Research in Consumer Behavior, 1(3), 201-32.

Prasad, V. (2009). Consumer behaviour. New Delhi: Gennext Publication.

Rodgers, S., & Thorson, E. (2000). The interactive advertising model: How users perceive and process online Ads. Journal of Interactive Advertising, 1(1), 42-61.

Snyder, M., & DeBono, K. G. (1985). Appeals to image and claims about quality: Understanding the psychology of advertising. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(3), 586.

Solomon, M., Bamossy, G., Askegaard, S., & Hogg, M. (2006). Consumer behavior: A European perspective (3rd ed.). Pearson Education Limited.

Vaughn, R. (1980). How advertising works: A planning model. Journal of Advertising Research, 20 (1), 27-43.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/9801

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2017 Xin Guan

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Share us to:   

Reminder

  • How to do online submission to another Journal?
  • If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:

1. Register yourself in Journal B as an Author

  • Find the journal you want to submit to in CATEGORIES, click on “VIEW JOURNAL”, “Online Submissions”, “GO TO LOGIN” and “Edit My Profile”. Check “Author” on the “Edit Profile” page, then “Save”.

2. Submission

Online Submission: http://cscanada.org/index.php/ccc/submission/wizard

  • Go to “User Home”, and click on “Author” under the name of Journal B. You may start a New Submission by clicking on “CLICK HERE”.
  • We only use four mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

 Articles published in Cross-Cultural Communication are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).

 CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION Editorial Office

Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138 
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org 
E-mail:[email protected]; [email protected]

Copyright © Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture