A Comparative Study On Persuasive Strategies Between Chinese And American Cosmetic Advertisements In Fashion Magazines

With the development of cosmetic industries, cosmetic advertising is playing a more and more important role in the world economic activities. Because of their fashion nature, fashion magazines are used by many cosmetic companies to promote their products. Cosmetic advertisements not only provide their target audience with the information of products or services, but also stimulate their sentiments, arouse their desires to buy, and convince them to take actions. As a special form of communication, cosmetic advertisements can reflect the socio-economic development, and at the same time influence target audience’s life and cultural value. With the globalization and the increasingly intensive international commercial competition, intercultural effect of cosmetic advertising is attracting more and more attention. It is found that scholars have done profound researches on cosmetic advertisements from the perspectives such as rhetoric, grammar, semantics, pragmatics, discourse, translation, transmission, culture, language feature, and so on. However, these studies are mainly limited to unilanguage advertisements and comparative studies are rare. Therefore the present study is a comparative study on persuasive strategies between Chinese and American cosmetic fashion-magazine advertisements, intending to answer the following questions:1. What persuasive strategies are commonly used to rationally, emotionally or morally persuade target audience in Chinese and American fashion-magazine cosmetic advertisements?2. What are the similarities and differences in using rational, emotional and moral persuasive strategies between Chinese and American fashion-magazine cosmetic advertisements?3. What reasons possibly cause such similarities or differences?Data used in this study were collected from the widespread and well-known fashion magazines, Rayli Beauty and VOGUE of January, April, June, July, August,and December in2009. Totally there are342Chinese advertisements from Rayli and68English advertisemnets from VOGUE. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to analyze the data. First the types of the persuasive strategies were identified from both the Chinese and American advertisements; then the distribution and frequency of the rational, emotional and moral persuasive strategies were counted quantitatively to compare the similarities and differences.The results of the research show that emotional persuasive strategies are the most used ones followed by rational persuasive strategies, and moral persuasive strategies are the least used in both American and Chinese fashion-magazine advertisements. However, American advertisements use both rational and moral persuasive strategies more frequently than the Chinese ones and they prefer to use digital language, contrast texts,(situation)-problem-solution-(evaluation) texts, logical and complicated sentences, cause-consequence texts and directly stating facts to rationally persuade target audience, while Chinese ones employ emotional strategies a little more frequently than the American ones, and they prefer to use scientific and technical terms to rationally convince target audience. Furthermore, American advertisements use rhetorical question, lyric prose language and poetic language to emotionally persuade target audience, while Chinese advertisements prefer strategies such as exaggerating the effect of products and using sense-appealing language. In order to morally persuade target audience effectively, American advertisements prefer employing celebrities to using authorities, while Chinese ones use authorities more frequently than celebrities. It is also found that American advertisements highly emphasize personality and customers, while Chinese ones usually tend to emphasize group behavior, utilizing target audience’s mass-following psychology to persuade the audience; and the last but not the least, American cosmetic advertisements tend to highlight the word "new", while Chinese ones tend to emphasize the glorious history of the products. The author thinks that the differences mentioned above are possibly due to the cultural differences such as high and low power distance, high context and low context, collectivism and individualism, past-orientation and future-orientation.