Masaryk university faculty of education
A Brief History of an American Icon
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- Navigate this page:
- THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
- Advertising and the Communication Situation
- The Elements of the Communication Situation
- Advertising and the Functions of Language
- The Six Elements of the Act of Communication and Language Functions
- The Language Functions Dominant in Advertising
- Presuppositions, Expectations and Entailments
- Greimas Actantial Model-Advertising Participants Roles
A Brief History of an American IconInvented over a hundred and twenty years ago (1886) in Atlanta, Georgia as a cocaine-including substance for medical purposes curing headaches, hangovers and impotence, Coca-Cola succeeded beyond the greatest expectations of its creator, Dr John Pemberton. History of Coca-Cola is the remarkable story of how more than 99% sweetened water, became the symbol of American culture. In the words of Mark Pendergrast, the author of the unauthorized history of Coca-Cola entitled For God, Country and Coca-Cola: “The real key to Coca-Cola’s success, from the outset, was ingenious, ubiquitous advertising”, in which “the master image-makers created and slaked the thirst of a nation, then a world, all the while polishing an image of high morality and patriotism” (Pendergrast. Book cover). The name of the drink was suggested by Dr Pemberton’s accountant, Frank Robinson, who possessing a great handwriting, created the unique flowing Coca-Cola logo we know today. At the beginning Coca-Cola was sold for 5 cents a glass at pharmacies, 9 drinks a day on average. Prior to his death Dr Pemberton sold the majority of his interests to an Atlanta businessman and marketing genius, Asa. G. Candler, who invented countless creative ways of promoting the product and started selling it at soda fountains. Soon after, more and more people started enjoying the ‘delicious and refreshing’ drink and thanks to advertising it quickly spread beyond the boundaries of Atlanta. The growing demand brought the idea of making the drink portable, thus bottles were introduced and people could enjoy ‘the pause that refreshes’ anywhere and anytime of a day. Coca-Cola became so popular that its competitors tried to earn on its success and started producing similarly looking and tasting drinks. To make it easier for people to recognize Coca-Cola from its imposters and enjoy the ‘real thing’, a new bottle copying a shape of a female body was introduced (1916). In 1919, the company was sold to a group of investors and Robert Woodruff, a man whose goal became to turn Coca-Cola to an ice-cold drink ‘available to anyone, anytime, anyplace’, became a new company president. Under his leadership Coca-Cola grew into a first global brand and the most recognized trademark in the world. As stated in Animated History of Coca-Cola at Coca-Cola Company website: Over more than hundred years later the formula is still a closely guarded secret, but the popularity of Coca-Cola is no secret. [...] ‘Wherever you are, wherever your thirst is’, the Coca-Cola Company and the Coca-Cola bottlers answer the need for refreshment in many different ways, but the shining star is and it will always be Coca-Cola, the original soft drink, unique, delicious, authentic and fun. There is only one Coca-Cola, the most refreshing drink in the universe. (The Coca-Cola Company) Unfortunately, everything has its bright and dark sides, thus even this outstanding Coca-Cola image might be viewed as gilded when it is put under thorough examination. Among many others, Mark Thomas created a documentary entitled Mark Thomas on Coca-Cola challenging the Coca-Cola Company. Similarly as Mark Pendergrast in his publication: For God, Country and Coca-Cola, he points out at back-room political deals, black market trades of Coke for money and sex, brutal treatment of competitors, migrant workers, abuse of Third World Coca-Cola labourers, problems with child labour, pollution and depollution of water supplies, etc (YouTube). THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
As stated earlier, powerful force playing a major role in our culture, economy and even political sphere is advertising. It possesses the ability of reflecting these aspects as well as influencing and shaping people’s behaviour and beliefs. At this point, it is necessary to place advertising into the broader notion of the communication process and explore its mechanisms, because advertising is based on nothing else but communication. This chapter discusses the general features of advertising necessary for communicating a message. Firstly, a model of the communication situation is described and transformed into a model of advertising, in the second place, the relationship between the elements of the communication situation and the functions of language is outlined; subsequently, language functions dominant in advertising are highlighted. The second half of the chapter is devoted to explaining the roles of presuppositions and expectations in advertising and lastly the Greimas' actantial model is explained.
In general, most advertisements are meant for the broad public and do not presuppose immediate response, or to be more precise, there is no turn-taking between addresser and addressee in the communication process taking place. Considering a print advertisement, there are two ways it can communicate a message, through the text and through the picture. Most of the time both ways are used to draw a clear idea of what is being communicated. According to whether or not language is present we can draw a line between verbal and non-verbal communication. (Schroder and Vestergaard. 14) For the purposes of this thesis, all advertisements chosen for analyses contain both verbal and non-verbal means of communication. Therefore all the advertisements presented here can be described as both: verbal and non-verbal, public, one-way pieces of communication.
Let me now turn to the communication situation itself. The general communication model, represented in Figure 1, is further worked with to explain the way the advertisements communicate with the public. Each communication involves at least two participants, the speaker (addresser) and the listener (addressee), the former one needs to encode and transmit a message while the latter one is supposed to decode and understand what is being communicated (message). To meet this efficiently the participants have to share a communication system (code), for example the same language, and they need to be in a physical or at least a psychological connection (contact), which could be a face-to-face interaction, written correspondence on paper, mails, radio, television, etc. Moreover, any communication takes place in a certain situation (context) involving the current placement of the participants, immediately preceding events, but also includes “the wider cultural context of the addresser and addressee, and the knowledge which they share about their total situation and their culture” (Vestergaard and Schroder. 15). Fig 1: R. Jakobson’s schema of factors inalienable in the communication situation 
CONTEXT  
CONTACT 
CODE ADDRESSER ADDRESSEE 
MESSAGE Before proceeding with linking the six elements of the communication situation with their determining language functions, let us transform the Fig 1 into an advertising model. In the case of a printed advertisement this can be viewed as follows:
(Vestergaard and Schroder. 15) In other words, in the communication situation of a printed advertisement an advertiser makes an attempt to inform a reader/buyer about the possibility of buying a product which will make the reader’s life better. The advertiser uses such language and visual codes with which the reader is sure to be attracted and understood. The reader is usually exposed to this message in a printed publication and he or she contemplates about the message on the basis of his or her total situation and cultural knowledge with which the advertiser strives to be familiar.
The language of advertising should be investigated in all variety of its features. Before discussing its dominant language functions it is necessary to define their place among others. Each communication takes place to fulfil a certain function, e.g. we use language to express our inner states, to describe the world around, to explain conditions that exists at a particular time, to influence and inform our interlocutors of facts they were not aware of before, to talk about the language to avoid possible ambiguities, etc. (Vestergaard and Schroder. 16)
Fig 1 illustrating the six components of the communication situation, suggested by Roman Jakobson in 1960, serves as a starting point for explaining the functions of language. In his classification of language functions: emotive, conative, poetic, metalingual, phatic and referential, Jakobson proposed their one-to-one correspondence with the six elements of the communication situation. The emotive function of language is focused on the addresser. It communicates his feelings, wishes, attitudes and will. “The emotive function is typically expressed by interjections, exclamations and expressive or emphatic intonation patterns’’ (Dontcheva-Navrátilová. 15). Yuck, what a revolting smell! Gosh! Wow, what a view? The conative function is oriented toward the addressee; it engages him directly influencing his actions, emotions, beliefs and attitudes. It is best illustrated by vocatives and imperatives. Tom, Could you close the door, please? You should go home now. The poetic function puts the focus on the message itself, what particular form is chosen for creating the internal structure of the message. This highlighting is often achieved by the means of rhyme, rhythm, repetition, metaphors, neologisms, puns, etc. Reebok: I am what I am, Jaguar: grace, space, pace. Energizer: Keeps going and going and going. The metalingual function focuses on the code, it seeks to clarify potential misunderstandings, ambiguities and disruptions of conversation that might occur, for example, if two different languages are used or the speakers uses different codes within one language (slang, dialects) . What does ‘onomatopoeia’ mean? What did you mean by saying that my ideas about politics are wet? The phatic function serves for initiating, prolonging and finishing the conversation. Hello! How are you? Could you hold on a second? Have a nice day. See you later. The referential function is oriented toward the context; it describes a situation, object, mental state outside the addresser and the addressee. It is raining cats and dogs. The table is too big for this room. Annie looks very sad today.
Since in the modern western world the barest needs of people are more than satisfied, advertisers, who want to raise the sell of a particular product, must think carefully how to compile a message which will be sent to the readers/buyers. Vestergaard and Schroder argue that through consumption human beings satiate not only their material but also their social needs of belonging, self-identification and positive image. In their words (5) “the objects that we use and consume cease to be mere objects of use; they become carriers of information about what kind of people we are, or would like to be”. A successful brand then does not sell its product only; it sells its symbolic value. This, according to Vestergaard and Schroder, has led to aestheticization of commodities. Firstly, a product itself possesses an intriguing design, smell, material, colouring, etc. and secondly, advertising help raise the product’s attractiveness even further to such an extent that even “the advert becomes an aesthetic object in itself” (9). Mindful of these tendencies, let me turn to the language functions dominant in advertising. In one of his articles The Functions of Language, Professor Louis Hébert points out that in general:
The Coca-Cola Company has created many memorable slogans over the years in their advertising campaigns, the following catchphrase ‘You Can't Beat the Real Thing’ (1990) is given for illustration and indication of the dominant functions of language in advertising. Despite the fact that the verbal part of the advertisement only is not sufficient for understanding the message wholly, for the purpose of exploring the language functions dominant in advertising it should be feasible. The advertising message ‘You Can't Beat the Real Thing’ attracts reader’s attention by establishing communication using an expression close to a proverb/saying (phatic function, poetic function), there is a strong appeal to reader’s emotions centred round the words Real Thing = Life = Coca-Cola reminding the reader the genuine, authentic moments in life and the natural role Coca-Cola plays in them (emotive and referential function). Furthermore the reader is being convinced that there is nothing more important than life and Coke, which ideally arouses a need he or she will want to satisfy (conative function). Following the demonstration, I can summarize the main task of an advertisement in connection with its dominant language functions, which often fuse together, as follows:
Therefore, when compiling an advertisement – following the three main steps above, it is necessary for an adman to make inquiries about people’s current trends, values, desires and behaviour as well as to make the advertisement appealing to basic human instincts. In their, still popular today, 1929’s Introduction to Advertising, Brewster and Palmer explain that people tend to react in a define way, when a proper stimuli is present – such tendencies to react are called instincts. “Most of the instincts are said either to have a race survival value or to be conductive to the welfare, comfort or progress of race” (77). An adman should hence create an advertisement in such a way that it would serve as a stimuli “which will cause a reaction in the mind of a prospective customer and result in purchase either in the present or in the future” (ibid 77). While doing so, an adman often works with people’s presuppositions and expectations based on the common knowledge and experience of the world. Presuppositions, expectations and entailments are thus the next terms to be discussed.
Any communication builds on the principle that nothing would be imparted unless there is a good reason for doing so, “this principle enables us to make a number of legitimate deductions from what we hear (or read)” (Vestergaard and Schroder. 23) While studying a piece of a communication, it is important to discriminate between “what is actually said and what follows from either the content of what is said or from the mere fact that it is said” (ibid. 24). A piece of information which is not stated but still gets communicated plays a high importance in advertising language. An adman needs to praise a product making as many positive claims as possible without actually explicitly making them (ibid. 25). For this purpose the following language tools are used:
Her brother is single. presupposes She has a brother.
Anna ate three apples. entails Anna ate something.
This website is reliable. expects Other websites are not. Reflecting on what has just been outlined, let me examine the following 2008’s Coca-Cola slogan: ‘Live on the Coke side of life’ entails you do not live on the Coke side of life, it also presupposes that the Coke side of life exists and creates an expectation that the Coke side of life is better for living than the side you are currently dwelling. Being an allusion to the saying ‘to look on the bright side’ (of life), which Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines as “to find good things in a bad situation”, the slogan heralds that drinking Coca-Cola makes people happy and serves as an invitation to live on a brighter and more positive side of life. This slogan can be used for explaining another essential device of advertising, i.e. : Advertising “does not try to tell us that we need its products as such, but rather that the product can help us obtain something else which we do feel that we need” (Vestergaard and Schroder. 29). This device is based on A. J. Greimas’s actantial model for the analyses of the content structure of a text.
In his article entitled The Actantial Model, Professor Louis Herbert describes this term, developed by A. J. Greimas during the 1960’s, as “a device that can theoretically be used to analyse any real or thematized action, but particularly those depicted in literary texts or images. In the actantial model, an action may be broken down into six components, called actants” and the relations between them (Signo): Subject (the Hero) strives after a desired Object (a Princess waiting to be rescued) Giver (the King) instigates the action – Receiver (the Hero, the King, and the Princess) benefits from the action Helper (a Fairy) assists the subject in his or her endeavours – Opponent (a Dragon) hinders the quest (Signo) Returning to the advertising slogan ‘Live on the Coke side of life’, the actantial analysis could be performed as follows: Subject = a prospective buyer longs for a happy life = Object, the Helper who assists him on his quest is a bottle of Coke, the Opponent might be represented by other soft-drink brands available on the market and finally, the Giver and Receiver are embodied by the product and the prospective buyer respectively. Hence, focusing on the most important Subject – Object – Helper participants of an advertising process and relations among them, an adman is given a clear and profound structure to follow.
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