Strategies In Advertising: A Relevance Approach

Based on Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory, the present study analyses how the audience of advertisements acquires optimal relevance through the strategies employed by the advertiser in the process of the unique communication. Ostensive-inferential communication happens in advertising social context shows that trust and co-operation between the interlocutors are limited or lacking. In order to achieve the purpose of informing, persuading and influencing, the advertiser employs various strategies. These strategies function as the ostensive stimuli to attract the audience's attention on the one hand and to direct the audience to proceed towards the optimal relevance on the other hand. This study presents how the attention-attracting strategies help the audience with acquiring optimal relevance and recovering the informative intentions of the advertiser. This study presents strategies used by the advertiser from three aspects: rhetoric devices - ellipsis, pun, the image of kids, the overtness in advertising for expensive commodities.The results of the study indicate that the attention-attracting strategies in advertising are vital for the audience to understand the advertising. It is these attention-attracting strategies that give impetus to the audience's inferential process and help the audience acquire the optimal relevance.