| Currently,increasing numbers of companies start to realize the importance of corporate image building.A corporation focuses on the external corporate image building by investing in community image building and environment improvement,and internal corporate image building is also of great importance.Attention has been paid to product or service quality improvement,management optimization,and culture construction and so forth.Corporate image is an important aspect that enterprises should pay much attention to.Previous studies on corporate image mainly focus on the definition and determinants of corporate image while ignoring the perception process of readers,or customers in reading the public communication.Mission statement,as the strategic proposal that guides the way of enterprises and puts forward objectives,is a highly accessible corporate public communication method.In the thesis,the author analyzes several samples of mission statements from the perspective of cognitive poetics and tries to find out how corporate image is constructed by readers during meaning comprehension and discourse analysis.The thesis aims to analyze how readers comprehend and construct corporate image in reading mission statements through literature review and case analysis.The thesis also puts forward three research questions:(1)What corporate identity does the company transmit to readers in building the text world?(2)How is corporate image built by environmental factors in mission statements through the method of prototype?(3)Why can individual factor influence the formation of corporate image through constructing mental space in mission statements? To answer these three questions,thirty mission statements of mobile phone companies are collected as the original data,nine of which are randomly selected as cases for analysis.After analysis,three research questions could be answered as follows:(1)The mission statement plays a role of background information introduction,information accumulation and updating,as well as image transmission in the process of building the text world.(2)Through prototypical structure and sentences,companies use mission statement to activate the relevant information in the minds of customers,help them comprehend implications embodied in the mission statement,and help them establish a holistic view to better understand the companies' strategy,goal under the circumstances of changeable environmental factors such as national policies and industrial trends.(3)Individual factor emphasizes the responsibility of an entity,an organization,or even the role of a single person related with the company such as customers and employees.Mental space construction helps understand complex sets of affairs such as real,historical,imagined or hypothesized events.Therefore it not only helps each stakeholders know their responsibility and duties played in the development of the company,but also evoke a favorable mental image through describing successful historical cases of service and transmitting the company's competitiveness.Three approaches of Cognitive Poetics,namely Text World Theory,Prototype Theory and Mental Space Theory are applied to analyze mission statements to obtain information about how readers process texts and discourses.In specific mission statement interpretation,readers comprehend mission statements and establish their impressions on the companies by constructing various text worlds and mental spaces and by activating prototypical images of the company on the basis of given information,their background knowledge and environmental changes associated with the company.Therefore,to formulate powerful mission statements and convey positive images through mission statements,companies need to have comprehensive understanding of themselves to identify their orientation,prospective insights on the industrial changes and environmental updating to shape or reconstruct their prototypical images,and cares to stakeholders to attract their interests. |
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