Branding By Multimodality

In today's world business scenario,explosive growth of commodities has made homogenization a severe yet ubiquitous problem that all market players were facing.Competition is no longer defined by mere sales or turnovers.Several decades ago,the world market has entered into a stage where the competition system was redefined by the notion of brand equity.This is the solution to homogenization.Thanks to the efforts of marketers and theorists,Keller in the early 21 st century has proposed the notion of customer-based brand equity,and generated a systematic account of brand metrics,which opened a new page of brand studies.Our research is conducted in two separate spheres: brand management,and social semiotics.At the beginning,we try to narrow the research topic down,from value generation to brand-customer relation and to brand positioning in Keller's approach,and from the extra-semiotic level to discourse semantics in Martin and Martin's paradigm.This is critical because in doing so,we succeed to explore brand-customer relationship in SFL model,with depth.That's to say,the interpersonal meaning making at the discourse semantic level can be of strategic implication concerning brand-customer relations.The major analytical framework is the Appraisal System developed by Martin and White in 2005,which is later proved as applicable to both verbal and visual resources.The data we're to operate are taken from the webages introducing i Phone7,and HUAWEI Mate 9.We want to see how these two senior plays,Apple and HUAWEI,organize the multimodal representation of their products and include specific brand elements in,how they enact themselves while assign roles to potential customers.According to our research findings,the verbal patterning of both brands is characterized by high forced,positive [appreciation] values via[counter-expectation],or monoglossic expressions to deliver the trustworthiness ofproduct quality.Monoglossia that denotes ‘factuality',and “objectivity” is employed in an exceptionally high frequency to demonstrate brand confidence.The slight difference lies in that,the construction of user experience by Apple is basically through attitudinal values of [composition] that contains many technical lexis,rendered by [justification];while the user experience construed by HUAWEI is generally through attitudinal values of [reaction] or [valuation] that relate to human feeling and cognition,mediated by [endorsement].This divergence indicates difference in customer profile that the two brands construe.As for visual patterning,Apple has demonstrated a multiplicity of [appreciation]resources and flexible planning of voices with marked textural expressions.The meaning potential of represented human participants can be tremendous and complex,especially when Apple manages to instantiate external cultural and social context in its visual representation to augment its brand inclusion on the one hand,and to resonate with customers at a higher axiological level beyond business practice.This is where HUAWEI should catch up,since the overall visual arrangements of Mate 9 representation is not of much meaning potential to relate itself to relevant brand elements.This thesis conducted case analysis on the online discourse of smartphone brands from the perspective of brand equity.Following the social semiotic paradigm,with multimodal appraisal providing analytical framework,this thesis aims to enrich empirical material of interdisciplinary study on brand science.