AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOCULTURAL ASPECTS OF PRODUCT ADVERTISEMENTS
AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOCULTURAL ASPECTS OF PRODUCT ADVERTISEMENTS

Summary/Abstract: In nowadays societies the interdisciplinary approach of concepts is generated by the interference of various fields of activity. Advertising is an activity that overlaps psychology and marketing as well as language and communication in the context of globalization. Advertising as a part of marketing mix relies on the connection between targeted consumers’ needs and designed advertising campaigns becoming ”an integral part of modern culture (Mathur 2007:8). In the same context, Hofstede's research on cross-cultural values in an employment context may be applicable to consumer behaviour and thus to advertising thinking. Advertising as a cultural and linguistic approach envisages the idea that the sociocultural frame of linguistic contact, the contact proper between cultures induces the diffusion of material and spiritual elements of culture and generates lexical and cultural interferences. Advertising involves a form of semiotic communication actively using repeated verbal and visual images creating its own discourse. Bougnoux (2000:49) states that “semiology is therefore a science of culture rather than a science of nature or better said a science of transit from nature to culture”. Advertising as a communicative approach is concerned with ”the ethnography of communication, the questions of what a person knows about appropriate patterns of language use in his or her community and how he or she learns about it.” (Hymes, 1972:54)

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