Evaluation in Advertising Reception

A Socio-Cognitive and Linguistic Perspective

S. Bullo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137350435
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Placed within the context of reception studies, this book investigates how advertisements that rely on re-contextualising shared cultural knowledge are understood by their viewers, and examines their persuasive potential.

1

Introduction: Researching Reception and Discourse

1.1   About this book

This book is situated within the context of reception studies and discourse analysis. Reception research is concerned with exploring the audience’s use and interpretation of media as a reflection of a particular socio-cultural context (McQuail, 1997). It offers an approach to textual analysis that proposes that the meaning of a text is not intrinsic to the text but rather is created in the relationship between the text and the reader (Jauss, 1982). Following from literary theorists and semioticians Barthes (1977) and Eco (1976, 1979), the audience reception tradition (Hall, 1980) emphasises the active role of the reader in decoding and constructing meanings from the media texts; it stresses that these meanings are never fixed or predictable but negotiated in the semiotic process (Hodge and Kress, 1988). From a discourse analytic perspective, Koller (2005b, p. 138) observes that ‘the meaning intended by the sender and the meaning constructed by the receiver … do not have to converge – indeed, they may hardly ever do so.’

This book is hence concerned with understanding what is involved in sense-making practices and how these are actualised in linguistic structures. To that end, I propose a discourse analytic methodology that will allow for a systematic exploration of the social and the cognitive processes underpinning advertising reception discourse in an attempt to unveil the ‘often opaque relationships of causality and determination between (a) discursive practices, events and texts, and (b) wider social and cultural structures’ (Fairclough 2010, p. 93).

By taking a reception approach, I centre on the idea of the audience’s active participation in sense-making and suggest that such a process has an inherent socio-cognitive aspect whereby participants make sense of a new stimulus, such as media text, by associating it with information stored in their reservoir of knowledge, that is, elements from the socio-cultural environment such as popular culture, advertisements, brands, etc. By taking such an approach to text analysis, I focus on ‘how’ rather than ‘what’ something means and I conceptualise audiences as active and texts as indeterminate as readers actively create meanings from them (Barbatsis, 2005).

One key aim of this work is to explain comprehensively how the informants construct an evaluative stance in the reception of advertising stimuli. The book starts from the premise that the appeal that adverts, or elements of them, has on the audience is not easy to predict and may be determined by various elements interacting in the audience’s socio-cognitive environment. With this hypothesis in mind, the approach taken will attempt to demonstrate that a study of evaluation on its own cannot account for the different and varied responses of groups of people within the same target market of the products advertised but rather that the evaluation derived from the attitudinal positioning is socially as well as cognitively shaped. It is the aim of this work to identify which socio-cognitive resources can be inferred to underlie such evaluative positioning. This means that pursuing a definition of sense-making that goes beyond evaluation, entails the development of a framework that is able to account for higher-level units of meaning revealing the processes that explain the multiplicity of readings.

One important issue to clarify is that, whenever I refer to cognitive models, I will refer to them as being assumed or inferred. This is indicative of my claim that such models of cognition cannot be proven by text analysis without further empirical evidence within the field of cognitive psychology but rather can be assumed to inform the evaluative positioning and supported by textual evidence in the data as suggested by socio-cognitive discourse analysis research (for example, van Dijk, 2008; Koller, 2005a, 2008), social cognition research (Augoustinos et al., 2006) and by some theories of cognitive semantics, for example, conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980).

Finally, this book is intended to make contributions to the fields of appraisal theory (Martin and White, 2005) and socio-cognitive discourse analysis and also consider implications for advertising practices.

1.2   The study of reception in this book

The theoretical interest arose from an interest in media reception and the ways in which media texts, and advertisements in particular, seem to conjure up a series of attitudes in the minds of readers, going beyond mere semantic representation and involving references to shared cultural knowledge and experience which exist prior to the text-reader interaction (Williamson, 1978; Messaris, 1997; MacRury, 2009). Of particular interest is the notion that sense-making in the reception context in current media (for example Channel 4’s Gogglebox) seems to contain an inherently attitudinal positioning, a premise this book builds upon and which is appropriately captured at text-level by the appraisal framework. However, a study of appraisal on its own does not take into account other sources of knowledge that are brought to the interpretation of the data in order to obtain a comprehensive account of sense-making discourse. This book argues that these other sources of knowledge and preconceptions brought into the appraisal are socially or culturally motivated and not explicit in discourse but are hinted at through a variety of devices. These clues, however unsystematic, point to some sort of textual indexing which allows making inferences as to what type of higher-level concepts (or models) they make reference to. Combining these perspectives into a holistic theoretical framework will provide a comprehensive approach to the study of sense-making which takes both the socio-cognitive and linguistic functions into account.

The innovation of this book is twofold: methodologically, it addresses an under-researched area of discourse analysis by focusing on reception processes. Secondly, in its theoretical underpinnings, it aims to reconcile appraisal theory, an approach rooted within Systemic Functional Linguistics, with socio-cognitive approaches to discourse, and thus combines two prominent and debated areas into an integrated research agenda. This book examines how the informants construct an evaluative stance in the reception of advertising stimuli and the socio-cognitive resources inferred to be at interplay in the evaluative process. One of the central arguments of the book is that the evaluation derived from attitudinal positioning is socially as well as cognitively shaped.

The data for this project – analysis of which combines appraisal – as a systemic-functional approach (Martin and White, 2005), and socio-cognitive discourse analysis (van Dijk, 1997, 1998, 2001, 2006; Koller, 2004, 2005a, 2008), consists of spoken focus-group data collected from informants from the intended target market group of the advertisements. The stimulus data used consisted of three printed advertisements for high involvement products, namely IKEA, Mercedes Benz and the Netherlands Tourist board, which recontextualise well-known paintings. A full description and review of the adverts used as stimulus material will be outlined in Chapter 3.

The book presents a two-stage analytical approach for the systematic study of the discourse patterns produced in the spoken data by the focus groups participants. The first level of analysis consists of a bottom-up textual examination of evaluative language applying the appraisal typology (Martin and White, 2005). This looks at how evaluation happens in text by identifying lexical items across a range of discourse-semantic categories and allocating them to a specific appraisal category (that is, affect, appreciation or judgement). This is followed by a top-down examination of the socio-cognitive resources and processes inferred to underlie those evaluative choices made by the speaker. This is carried out by identifying socio-cognitive representations (SCRs; Koller, 2008) present in the data and indexed in discourse by various linguistic features. Both frameworks will be outlined in Chapter 3.

1.3   Outline of the book

This book is structured as follows: Chapter 2 draws on the notion of social cognition to develop a theoretical framework which combines theories of socio-cognitive discourse analysis with the study of language from a functional perspective with a focus on evaluation. Chapter 3 sets the background of this study by introducing the notion of ‘recontextualisation’ and hybridity of media texts, and advertising in particular, so as to provide a context to the use of art in advertising. It then introduces the adverts used as stimulus material and describes the methods of data analysis. This is outlined in two stages: first a description of the appraisal categories is provided along with an explanation of how appraisal is identified, coded and analysed in the spoken data. In the second stage, the chapter moves on to a discussion of the socio-cognitive resources inferred from the data and discusses how they can be identified. Chapter 4 presents a description of findings of the data coding and analysis of both focus groups. Each focus group will be presented in two sections. The first part will discuss the appraisal findings from the data, following each appraisal subcategory (that is, affect, appreciation and judgement). This will be followed by a discussion of the conceptual models assumed to underlie the evaluations of each advert. Chapter 5 discusses how the main data findings can have implications for both discourse analysis and advertising practices. It also addresses methodological implications for reception studies.

Having outlined the subsequent chapters, I will now begin by developing a theoretical framework for this book.

2

Reception, Language and Sense-Making

Traditionally, reception theory has been associated with the German school of literary reception, an approach to textual analysis that proposes that the meaning of a text is not intrinsic to the text but rather is created in the relationship between the text and the reader (for example, Jauss, 1982). The humanities ownership of this approach, however, has long been contested by the social sciences. This can be traced as far back as World War I, when the wide-scale use of propaganda led to an interest in understanding how the public might be urged to respond or react to it, as it was feared that propaganda might be used to control the minds and behaviours of the public (Brooker and Jermyn, 2003, p. 5). Social science studies of audience reception, however, were not published until the 1940s. The classic work of Lazarsfeld et al. (1944), for example, examines the effects of the 1940 US presidential campaign on an Ohio community; equally, the work of Hovland et al. (1949) was an early wartime research programme which investigated the effects of film as a motivational and training tool for recruits. Subsequent studies of the public reaction to mass communication were influenced by the Frankfurt School leaders Adorno and Horkheimer (for example, 1976), whose work on the ‘culture industry’ argued that culture was forced in a top-down fashion onto a passive audience. Early audience research sought thus to determine the effects that media had on its audiences, a phase which came to be known as the ‘effects model’, a stimulus-response approach which conceptualised the audience as helplessly being instilled with a message and exposed to its influence (McQuail, 1997). This tradition focused on text analysis rather than on its cultural uses, that is, it involved a semiotic rather than social semiotic framework. It followed a primarily experimental approach where the media content, channel and context of reception were manipulated so as to derive quantifiable results. Scholarly work in this tradition was concerned with potentially harmful media effects, primarily on children and young people, such as the work by Klapper (1960). A later tradition in audience research rejected the effects model of early scholarship on the basis that the quantitative evidence suggested limited insights into the effects of media (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955; Klapper, 1960), and turned to a ‘uses-and-gratifications’ approach which sought to unveil what individual users did with the media rather than the other way round (Blumler and Katz, 1974; Rosengren et al., 1985). The audience came to be seen as having a more active role in their media experience and research focused on the motivation behind the media content (Blumler and Katz, 1974). This approach signals a breaking away from the behaviourist tradition (such as the ‘effects’ approach) since its main emphasis was on the wider social functions of media (McQuail, 1997).

Audience research as it is known today emerged in the 1980s within the cultural studies field. Reception theory is, in effect, the audience research enterprise of cultural studies rather than an independent notion and is concerned with exploring the audience’s use and interpretation of media as a reflection of a particular socio-cultural context and as a process of giving meaning to cultural practices (McQuail, 1997). This tradition is characterised by a critical edge urging the audience to resist and subvert the hegemonic meanings offered by the mass media (McQuail, 1997). Empirical work is characterised by the use of qualitative and ethnographic methods (Seiter et al., 1989; Morley, 1992) taking into consideration content as well as context and the act of reception (Lindlof, 1991). This school has produced much theoretical and empirical work with reference to the processes of ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ media content (for example, Hall, 1980; explained below). Following from literary theorists and semioticians Barthes (1977) and Eco (1976, 1979), this tradition emphasises the active role of the reader in decoding and constructing meanings from the media texts; further, it stresses that media texts meanings are never fixed or predictable.

The idea of the variety of interpretations brought into text comprehension touches on the notion of reception as ‘unlimited semiosis’ (Eco, 1976; Merrell, 2001). This notion means that a text can potentially lead to a series of successive interpretations that extends meaning beyond what the author initially intended. This is also linked to the concept of polysemy, that is texts having multiple meanings and being open to several interpretations (Liebes and Katz, 1986, 1989, 1990). Eco advises, however, that the notion of unlimited semiosis does not lead to the conclusion that there are no guiding criteria for interpretation. The text has been created with a ‘foreseen model reader’ in mind, one who is ‘able to deal interpretively with the text in the same way as the author deals in producing the text’ (Eco, 1979, p. 7). The model reader, in essence, embodies ‘a textually established set of felicity conditions (…) to be met in order to have a (text) fully actualised’ (Eco, 1979, p. 11). However, there is no single correct interpretation for the model reader as meaning is always negotiated in the semiotic process and it cannot be assumed that texts produce exactly the meanings and effects that their authors hoped for (Hodge and Kress, 1988). The text undergoes the reception of innumerable readers, in which process meanings can be negotiated and assimilated or contested. The idea that the text might encounter an audience that may bring other interpretations into sense-making is supported by Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) who discuss hybridity as a characteristic of contemporary texts and add that earlier views of meaning being fixed in texts are now obsolete due to the social fragmentation of modern society; rather, diverse interpretations of texts lead to a variety of meanings. Furthermore, they assert that this variety of interpretations allows for a variety of discourses to be brought into the process, thus creating a new hybrid text as a result of the interpreted texts along with the discourses that are brought to it in the sense-making process. But, agreeing with Eco’s idea, they consider that the variety of interpretations brought to a text is not endless. For this reason, they warn that ‘overstating heterogenisation is as misleading as overstating homogenisation’ (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999, p. 15).

Similarly, Hall’s (1980) renowned encoding/decoding model categorises readings as ‘dominant’ or ‘preferred’, ‘negotiated’ and ‘oppositional’, presupposing that the media text itself is a vehicle of dominant ideology (Schrøder, 2000). In brief, Hall’s ‘dominant hegemonic’ position occurs when the viewer accepts the inscribed meaning and is therefore ideologically dominated by it (linking to Eco’s notion of the ‘model’ reader above). The ‘negotiated position’ implies an ambivalent reading with a mixture of preferred and oppositional elements. The ‘oppositional position’ occurs when, on the basis of a full understanding of the hegemonic message, readers make sense of the message ‘within some alternative framework of reference’ (Hall, 1980, p. 138) based on their individual cultural background and life experiences. Further, interpretations may vary depending ‘on the context and conditions of text reception’ (Koller, 2010a, p. 19). As ground-breaking as the Hall model was in audience research field three decades ago, it has been subject to several criticisms, mainly based on its simplistic nature (for example, Schrøder, 2000; Jensen, 2002) and the assumption that the ‘preferred’ meaning is intrinsic to the text (Wren-Lewis, 1983). Early studies in this field focused on news genres (Morley, 1980) where a variety of alternative or oppositional decodings (of what appeared to be the ideologically ‘preferred’ reading) was identified. These varieties were found to be subject to variables such as the audience’s class and other socio-economic factors (Jensen, 1991).

Other cultural studies approaches see the use of media in itself as a significant aspect of ‘everyday life’ (McQuail, 1997) and concentrate on studying and understanding the use of media in relation to the particular social context and experience of a particular cultural group (Bausinger, 1984). This has given rise to the notion of ‘interpretative communities’ (Lindlof, 1988) to refer to shared outlook and modes of understanding such as forms of discourse and frameworks for media sense-making which arise from shared social experiences. Reception analysts following this tradition argue that any study of media reception must be based on a theory of discourse and representation looking at both the social and discursive perspectives in order to uncover the social production of meaning (Jensen, 1991). On this note, Deacon (2003) suggests that the emphasis of audience research should be on the larger socio-cultural structures that delineate the communicative process as a whole, as much as on the media text, its producers (operating at institutional levels of the media) and recipients (in contexts of everyday life).

Research within the cultural studies field has focused on critical issues such as gender, for example, lo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Researching Reception and Discourse
• 2 Reception, Language and Sense-Making
• 3 Investigating Evaluation in Advertising Reception
• 4 The Discourse of Advertising Reception
• 5 Implications for a Theory of Evaluation in Advertising Reception
• Appendix 1: Appraisal Coding: Focus Groups 1 and 2
• Appendix 2: Appraisal Tables
• Notes
• References
• Index