Address Forms in Commercial Advertising

Competition is prevailing in the modern society and nowadays the consumer demands more and more products and services to be promoted and distributed, which is normally the task of the marketing area. One of the most important tools of marketing used to promote products and services for different target groups at any area are advertisements. The texts of such advertisements are to be made very carefully in order to bring the message intended by the authors of the advertisements to the concrete target group. The main function of such advertising “messages” is a persuasion of a concrete target group to act in the necessary way.
According to sociolinguistic assumption, each of such target groups uses a language code which more or less varies from the language codes used by other groups of people. An address form in a way serves as an indicator of the language code which may be purposefully used and refers to the concrete audience. Thus, a properly used address form attracts the attention of a target group and such advertisement works considerably better than an advertisement without such address, since persuasion is more concrete and personal and makes people identify themselves within this group. It leads to the fact of the importance of addressing the particular target group in a way that makes the audience feel to be addresses and speaks the same language the group does.
The main goal of the research paper is to discover the ways in which the address forms are used in advertisements for different target groups as well as in presenting and advertising of different products and to suggest the ways for most efficient use of these address forms.
In order to reach the goal of the research paper, theoretical literature in the area of advertising has been reviewed and, in particular, sociolinguistics in order to state the notion and role of address forms in language and to find out, how they have developed and used in business practice. In order to provide a basis for further analysis of sociolinguistic factors, which are to be taken in mind during construction of the texts for advertising, goals of advertising and the division of target groups in marketing will be defined. Based on the findings mentioned before, a corpus of advertisements will be analyzed in order to state the differences in usage of various address forms for different purposes of advertising.
The first chapter will consider the significance of address forms in language in general, the target of the second chapter will be to provide an insight into the role of advertising and to investigate the role of language in commercial advertising. The second chapter discusses the notion of target groups as it is used in marketing. The third chapter deals with a practical analysis of examples reflecting, how address forms are used to approach different target groups.
The hypothesis of the paper is the following: address forms are used in advertising depending on social parameters of the target group, which is chosen for a particular advertisement. The parameters of the target groups are negotiated in the second chapter.
In order to fulfill the tasks and to prove or reject the hypothesis, theoretical literature available in the area will be analyzed and its relevance to the situation of the English, Russian, Latvian and Italian language advertisements will be discussed. The afore mentioned languages are chosen because inflectional languages possess a greater variety of address forms owing the fact, the inflections display gender, tense and cases of pronouns and nouns used in them. Conclusions on the use of address forms for the purposes of advertising will be drawn basing on the analysis of the corpus of advertisements.
The first point possible to draw from the given definitions is: address is not only a direct call to somebody, but also a speech and speaking to a wider audience, such as may be given in special cases of addresses to meetings and similar. As it seems, this kind of address – in the form of speech (a text of an advertisement) to a particular target group – is very common in advertising, even if it is not provided directly by an address form such as “Dear friends!” or “You, people at the age from 20 to 45, whose income is 4000 LVL a year and whose family consist of four members!” as the case might be. …