How to Sell a Bridge in Brooklyn: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Persuasive Techniques Used in Advertising

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1991
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Award
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en_US
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
This paper examines the role of language in advertising by presenting two groups of subjects (one of college students, one of eighth grade students) with a collection of phrases used in actual product promotions and recording their reactions to those phrases. Subjects were questioned about both the characteristics of the product being advertised and the target audience of the phrase itself. The second part of the experiment asked subjects to match a set of products with likely slogans. It was discovered that the surface semantic content of the phrases plays a minimal role in establishing the image of the product in the mind of the consumer. Subjects were able to intuit with reasonable accuracy several features of the products without any mention of those features in the actual phrase. It was observed that, in general, college students were slightly more accurate in predicting a product's characteristics. A reasonable variation in terms of which characteristics were best predicted between the two age groups was also established. Part II revealed that certain types of products are more easily matched with the correct phrase depending on the age of the subject group. Part II also demonstrated that certain styles of language may be used to promote more than one product.
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