The Analysis Of Memetic Phenomena In Chinese Advertising Language

In the current information era, advertisements have been deep into variousaspects of our social life. Advertising is deemed a crucial marketing strategy forpromoting products and winning the trust of customers, and regarded as one kind ofsocial culture, for it not only employs concise and vivid language to display theunique properties and features of commodities intensively and visually so as toexpress the desires and demands of consumers, but also applies emotive words toattract the public and influence them. Consequently, advertising language whichserves as the core content and soul of advertising has become appealing to more andmore scholars.Memetics is a brand-new theory to explain the laws of cultural evolution, whosecore concept is meme. Oxford English Dictionary defines meme as “an element ofculture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic memes, esp., imitation”.Memes are inherited like genes and spread as viruses, from which it can be concludedthat the replication and transmission of memes naturally has certain internal relationwith advertising language. This is the exact reason why the author intends to analyzethe memetic phenomena in advertising language from the perspective of memetics.Therefore, the memes to be studied in the present thesis refer to “strong memes”which are divided into four types: poem meme, idiom meme, proverb meme as wellas music meme.All the data involved in this paper are collected from classic advertisementswhich are extracted in daily life, excerpted from the books and magazines that focuson the research of advertising language, abstracted from the billboards, TV and theInternet. Based on the three characteristics of strong memes, namely, fidelity, fecundity and longevity together with the ways that replicate and transmit memes,case studies of poem meme, proverb meme, idiom meme and music meme areconducted.This research proves that the poem meme, idiom meme, proverb meme andmusic meme all conform to the features of strong memes and abide by the means ofmemes’ replication and transmission, namely, the genotype and phenotype.Furthermore, three favorable impacts, economic benefit, cultural transmission andhumorous effect produced by the above strong memes have been proposed throughthe analysis of memetic phenomena in Chinese advertising language. The authorexpects that this study can shed new light on the study of advertising language andprovide a reference for advertising design.