»Folge Deinem eigenen Stern!« - Zur Produktwerbung im Spiegel der russischen Gesellschaft
“Follow Your Own Star“ – Product Advertising in the Mirror of the Russian Society

Summary/Abstract: The language of product advertising reflects political, social, and economic contexts. Thus,a broad basis of material enables linguists to observe in what way the change of a society becomesvisible by strategies of marketing a product or a brand name. In the article, by the example of thelegendary and prestigious Mercedes-Benz brand this in shown by way of a semantic-pragmaticanalysis. For this it is briefly outlined the career of Mercedes-Benz and today’s socioeconomicsituation in Russia. By way of examples from a corpus of Russian advertising copies on this brand,which has been on the Russian market for more than a century, it is then demonstrated how thelanguage of economic advertisement works today and which strategies are used to advertise thevarious products of the different price ranges. From a gender-linguistic perspective it is sketchedthe use of rhetorical devices by help of which there is breaking through the conventional expectationsof those being in the focus of advertising. It is shown in which way the language ofadvertisement exploits social cliches to sell a certain image of man, and in which way the uniqueselling proposition is used to make the product-specific, emotional, and the factually not justifiableadditional advantage of the advertised vehicles explicit, which makes them different from theircompetitors. After having determined the linguistic concept of vagueness I explain the highlyunclear nature of the language of advertisement, how this way it fulfills its persuasive function,and how it thus tempts consumers to buy a product which was formerly beyond everybody’smeans.

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