A Memetic Study Of Advertising Language

With the development of economy as well as the passage of time, advertising, as sales stimulus, plays a crucial role in delivering information. However, as for any type advertising, its transmission depends largely upon language. Therefore, lots of scholars have conducted a study of advertising language. Based on some understanding of the achievements of the current research on advertising language, the author makes a tentative study of advertising language from a memetic angle. Meme's replication and transmission provide a quick and an effective way to enrich advertising language.Memetics is a new theory for interpreting cultural evolution. A meme, invented to suggest a strong analogy with genes, is a unit of cultural imitation, a self-propagating idea much like a biological or computer virus. The meme is of great importance in the development of advertising language. Vast and various memes of advertising language compete for survival in their living environment in order to spread from one host to another, and only those which have higher value in fidelity, fecundity and longevity have the chance to win out. The author suggests that advertising language has its own memetic selection criteria in the course of transmission and spreading, and proposes that criteria of simplicity, novelty, authority and distinctiveness have advantages over others. The author argues that the more advertising language fulfills these criteria, the more effective it will be in its replication and transmission.According to the memetic selection criteria of advertising language, and considering the theory of meme, the author has chosen some successful slogans as examples and discussed in detail meme's replication and transmission in advertising language from three categories: rhetorical devices, cognition and culture. Based on an analysis of the memetic phenomena in the advertising language, the author has tried to provide some useful hints and references for creating powerful memes.The research shows that successful advertising language is a meme of language by imitating, which reflects the law of cultural evolution. We hope that our research can draw proper attention of some advertisers and help them improve the effectiveness of advertising language.