Advertising Contents based on Semiotic Methodology

Abstract

Advertisements in modern era are not intended to be consumed only as commercial purposes, but consumed also as cultural and artistic purposes. Advertising contents' success depends on Semiotic codes revealed in advertising texts. Advertising scholar Ozoh (1998) argued that perspectives for advertising are divided into two perspective, one as marketing tool perspective and the other as communication processes perspective. Advertising planning, advertising management, advertising, and advertising evaluation of marketing perspective are significantly different from those of communication perspective. Two perspectives of advertising present various debates on what contents of advertising messages are and how advertising messages are made up. In this research manuscripts, we discuss story telling as communication tool of advertising text in terms of cultural semiotics. That is, meaning value of goods is so well revealed in use value of goods that they satisfy consumers' needs, we analyze how they satisfy consumers' needs in semiotic(symbolic) process. We apply Gremas's semantic model to coffee advertisements in France and Korea, and analyze various differences between differentiation strategies of French coffee advertisements and those of Korean coffee advertisements in terms of semiotic perspective.