Analysis Of Nike's Advertising

After characterizing the basic linguistic principles used in advertising in the theoretical part, their practical use in Nike’s advertisements is analyzed.
Fifteen Nike’s advertisements were selected for the purpose of this research; it includes advertising campaigns from different time periods, from 1980 to 2015. All selected advertisements are dedicated to sport products and services. In order to analyze the language structures and means used in Nike’s advertisements four tables were created (see Table 1.1, Table 1.2, Table 1.3 and Table 1.4). Each table contains examples of one of parts of speech – nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns which were written out from Nike’s advertisements. Linguistic analysis of each word was done using the linguistic theory. The basic tendencies of Nike’s advertising language were discussed. The most common words were written out. The number of each part of speech reflected on a graph (see Fig. 1.6). The number of nouns found in Nike’s advertisements is 54 (see Table 1.1). Linguistic analysis (see Table 1.5) shows that there are three gerunds that function as nouns: laughing, winning, running. These words emphasize action and process as it is important for a company such as Nike. It promotes movement and healthy lifestyle.
It also was found that Nike usually uses singular (76%) rather than plural (24%) nouns in order to focus on specific cases and not to generalize. However, there are more abstract (56%) than concrete (44%) nouns in Nike’s