To reason with them or tickle them: Advertising strategies in the discourse of Persian print ads

Abstract

Consumerism and the inevitable tracking of one's desired product among the endless rows and shelves of colorful products, highlights the importance of winning advertising strategies which have the power to persuade their audience to prefer one product over similar products. The present study aims to investigate two advertising strategies, reason versus tickle advertising and how they translate into the actual discourse of Persian print advertisements. To this end, a corpus of 150 ads was collected from two Iranian magazines, namely Honar-e Ashpazi and Zendegi-ye Ideal. Using the framework adopted by Simpson (2001) in telling apart reason vs. tickle ads based on their discourse features, Persian print ads were analyzed to identify which strategy is more prevalent. Furthermore, the nature of the advertised commodity (consumer's low-involvement or high-involvement) was observed to identify whether it is of any significance in the choice of the advertising strategy by the copywriter. The results demonstrated that the nature of the advertised product does not play a significant role in the strategy adopted by the copywriter and that Persian copywriters tend to employ a direct, factual approach in including the logical reasons why customers might prefer a certain commodity over similar ones in their advertising copy.