Semiotic Analysis Of Advertising

Advertising is the practice of drawing attention to a product or service to increase trade or sales. Advertisements are tools of persuasion, used to influence and convince the viewer (which is also the consumer) to buy and use their products. ‘Advertisers rely on a handful of Epicurean themes to peddle their products.’ (Beasley et al. 2002) In this essay I will be discussing how advertisement reinforces hegemonic representations of gender, race and class in a South African context in the BIC advertisement used to mark Women’s Day in 2015. By using Gramsci’s theory on hegemony, I will prove this by conducting a semiotic analysis of the advertisement.

Semiotics can be defined as the ‘study of signs and sign systems.’ (O’ Shaughnessy, M. Stadler,

M, 1987) the basic principle of semiotics is that meaning, interpretation and ways of seeing and understanding signs are made by the development of acts and objects which function as ‘signs’ in relation to other ‘signs’. By understanding language semiology helps to interpret and decode an advertisement in depth to understand the proper meaning it is trying to convey to the audience. ‘The goal of semiotics in the study of advertising is ultimately to unmask the arrays of hidden meanings in the underlying level. (Beasley et al. 2002) Semiotics operates through a basis of signs; these signs stand for or represent something else. These levels of representation consist of two types of meaning, the connotation and the detonation. ‘Denotation is sometimes regarded as a digital code and connotation as an analogue code. (Wilden 1887, 224) Detonation is the literal meaning of the sign (in this case the BIC advertisement.) In the BIC advertisement (BIC being an international and national pen

Semiotics signs consist of a connotation. The connotation is the hidden message behind the advertisement. The connotations of an advertisement can be defined as “to the emotions, values, and associations that a sign gives rise to the reader, viewer, or listener.” (O’ Shaughnessy, M. Stadler, and J. 2012. P. 136) Too understand the connotations one needs to understand what is going on around you, according to Chandler (n.d.), connotations refers to having some sort of cultural knowledge and ‘personal’ associations ( experiences one has, they way one views things and how one was brought up to view aspects in life. ) In this advert they are trying to use Women “Empowerment” although this advert is very sexist. The advert states that women should “look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a boss.” The hidden meaning behind this is that men are more powerful than women are. Those men are more dominant than women are and tend to be more successful. This is hegemony, which can be defined as “power and leadership maintained through processes of struggle and negotiation, especially through winning the consent of the majority of people to accept the ideas of the dominant group.” (O’ Shaughnessy, M. Stadler, and J. 2012. P. 205) this is achieved through dominant discourse influence and persuasion by shared beliefs and ideas. According to (Davies 2015) the message that the advert is actually sending to females is that