Creativity In Advertising: The Relevance Theory Approach

Based on Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory, this thesis investigates advertising creativity, focusing on how advertisers employ different language according to the target audience, which thus ensures effective advertising creativity.Whether commercial or non-commercial, advertisements abound in our life. When we are reading advertisements, questions such as why the same ad becomes differently manifest to different people may arise. For example, this ad"天高几许?问真龙。"is understandably manifest to cigarette smokers, while not to others, which may be related to the cognitive environments of different people. Cognitive environment is the central notion of D. Sperber and D. Wilson's Relevance Theory (RT), which views communication as an ostensive-inferential one. Ostension and inference are two sides of the same coin. They refer respectively to the addresser's production and the addressee's interpretation of the same utterance. This process aims at achieving contextual effects which result in the addresser's communicative intention resorting to ostension, combining the contextual assumptions (He Ziran & Ran Yongping 2001). The RT argues that the cognitive environment of the addressee plays a vital role in understanding utterance in communication, and it consists of three kinds of information, namely, logical, encyclopaedic and lexical information. Different cognitive environments may lead to different perceptions. Advertising is a kind of communication (Dyer 1982; T. Vestergaard & K. Schroder 1985, etc), which is audience-targeted. The nature of advertising shows that its purpose is to make the audiences notice its intention or information. That is to say, advertising is apparently an ostensive communication whose interlocutors are respectively the advertisers and the audiences. As is known, the purpose of advertising is to inform and persuade the audiences to buy products or to take certain actions intended by the advertisers. To fulfill their goals, advertisers use the manifest languages, easily understood by the target audience according to their cognitive environment. In this way advertisers can produce better ads that effectively accomplish their purpose. In other words, advertising anchored in the cognitive environments of the target audiences is more attractive and creative.With the help of the RT, this study analyzes more than 20 ads collected from books on advertising, newspapers, magazines and the street corners, consisting of commercial advertisements addressing people of different genders and ages, as well as non-commercial ones which address a far wider audience, and examines how the language in these advertisements is evidently manifest to the target audiences. For example, in cosmetics advertisements addressing women, similar words and phrases to"美白肌肤"have been employed; the ones addressing men use such words or phrases as"成功","豪迈奔放"which acknowledge men's characteristics of masculinity; and the ones addressing children, the young, and the elderly have respectively employed language that is full of imagination, that infers challenging and adventures, and that shows care and consideration. In non-commercial ads, however, the advertisers employ language that is perceptible and manifest to the general public. These ads created according to the cognitive, perceptive and inferential abilities of the target audiences, i.e. their cognitive...