A Study Of Multimodal Metaphor In Chinese And American Brand Advertisements

With popularity of Internet and of media,advertisements with many modes have become a vital channel for companies to broadcast products and build sound images.Advertisement is generally divided into product advertisement and brand advertisement.Brand advertisement seeks to establish a pleasant brand image in the minds of consumers by spreading brand philosophy and values.At present,multimodal metaphor analysis is often applied to product advertisements.Given the significance of brand advertisements in building brand images,it is necessary to study their multimodal metaphor.Based on the conceptual metaphor theory put forward by Lakoff & Johnson and multimodal metaphor theory by Forceville,the research takes four technological brands,Huawei,Lenovo,Apple,and Intel as objects to collect their brand advertisements.In total,eleven pictures and five videos are collected.The research adopts qualitative method to categorize multimodal metaphor in brand advertisements,explore construction process of multimodal metaphor and its cognitive effects,and reveal different choices of source domain between Chinese and American technological brands.The conclusions are drawn as follows: 1)the typical multimodal brand metaphors of Chinese and American brand advertisements are BRAND IS AN INDIVIDUAL,BRAND IS LIVING ORGANISM,BRAND IS ENTITY.These metaphors belong to ontological metaphor which projects intangible concepts such as abstract concepts and ambiguous states,etc onto concrete substance,entity and container.The source domain is mainly encoded visually and the target domain is encoded verbally.2)multimodal brand metaphor achieves preferable cognitive effects.Brands viewed as individual,living organism or entity can help audience grasp brand messages more easily,achieving better cognitive experience.Multimodal brand metaphor builds brand images in minds of audience who then identifies with brands.3)different choices of source domains endow Huawei,Lenovo,Apple and Intel with different images or personalities.Chinese technological brands like Huawei and Lenovo are hardworking and resilient in pursuing dreams while Apple and Intel are creative and pioneering.The difference of source domain can be explained by economic and cultural elements.Specifically,Chinese advocate hardworking spirits and the growth of Chinese technological brands faces more uncertainty.However,westerners are typically oriented towards individualism and innovating spirits.And economic dominance has given American technological brands less uncertainty.By analyzing multimodal brand metaphor in the Chinese and American brand advertisements,application research on multimodal metaphor is widened to some extent.It provides help for audience in understanding brand messages and also contributes to brand campaigns in the future.