On Cultural Elements In Chinese And English Advertising Language From The Perspective Of Memetics

This thesis aims at providing advertisers with references of developing more culture connoted, more attractive and more effective ads via analyzing ad instances entailing cultural memes from the angle of memetics.With the development of society, market economy improves rapidly, market competition becomes more severe than before and media play a more important role in our daily life. For the purpose of explaining the popularity of products or service, merchants are apt to turn to advertising for publicizing. To some extent, we are just as living in a sea of ads. We can see ads in every corner of the world. TV, the Internet, newspaper, magazine and the like are all media of ads. Each country or each region has its own cultural customs. Therefore, it is necessary to take cultural elements influencing customer's consuming behavior into account to make ads that can catch consumers'eyes.In this thesis, the author mainly analyzes the cultural memes from the view of memetics which is a new-born theory based on Darwinism for interpreting principles of culture evolution. Meme is the basic unit of culture evolution and offers mechanism for it. Mankind can explain the rules of culture evolution which refers to the ideas imitated and spread among people are transferred from generation to generation. It introduces the terms relating to meme and memetics and describes the characteristics, choosing criteria, transmission process and the properties and functions of advertising to show the interrelationship among meme, culture and advertising. Any message or behavior that has been imitated and transferred can be called a meme. And the final goal of advertising is also being delivered again and again and advancing the advertised product's popularity, from which we can learn there is close link between meme and advertising. From the analysis of ads carrying cultural information, we can see that advertising language is a mirror reflecting culture. Its publicizing effect is affected by cultural factors while it reflects the cultural background of a country or a region. Ayling once defined meme in advertising as meme in advertising is an idea or view that is extracted and refined and then its meaning will be mastered in an easiest way by people. Advertising language is adopted for publicizing products through combining meme's features with cultural information which is helpful for audience to remember the ad easier and longer.There are two categories of meme: genotype meme and phenotype meme. And each has two and three sub-categories respectively. This thesis focuses on supplying some practical cues for ad practitioners and ad lovers via analyzing ad examples embracing cultural memes of each sub-categories from perspective of memetics.