Selling Points and Promotional Strategies in Advertising: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of a Burger King’s Print Advertisement

Abstract

Gone were the days when communication among people can only be achieved by language, the popularization of computers and the soaring development of multimedia technology have brought tremendous changes to the way people communicate with each other. There is little doubt that language is the most important, but never the only, means by which we communicate and create meaning (Han, 2015, p. 415), resources for representing meaning like sound, image, color, motion and other non-verbal communication approaches are significant as well. While most of the studies prefer a content analysis way to find out the semiotic meaning in a certain advertisement, this article, however, would apply a multimodal discourse analysis approach to demonstrate how business enterprises externalize their selling points and promotional strategies in advertisements.