Persuasive Strategies in Multimodal Metaphor: A Contrastive Analysis of the Advertisements “Good Girl” & “Bad Boy”

Abstract

According to Lakoff & Johnson (1980), metaphors not only are a formal aspect of language, but they are used to understand one concept in terms of another and they are pervasive in our daily life. Conceptual Metaphors (CM) and Multimodal Metaphors coexist with our daily life because they are pervasive in many different fields in the world. Concretely, this study focuses on the field of advertising, in which the vast majority of current advertisements imply multimodal metaphors. Multimodality occurs when two or more modes of representation are involved in metaphor. Therefore, most part of TV advertisements not only use images but also texts and sounds together, which allow the human mind to better process and understand them. At the present time, persuasion is becoming more significant and it is considered the most influencing aspect in TV commercials. The purpose of this paper is to analyse and compare the perfume TV commercials “Good Girl” and “Bad Boy” dealing with persuasive strategies in Multimodal Metaphor. Following the methodology proposed, both commercials selected deal with music, images and texts as modes of representation. Therefore, the present paper demonstrates that images and music play a persuasive role in TV advertisements, demonstrating that there is no need to use verbal words to persuade the audience.