Analysing Product Pitches Multimodally for Chinese International Trade

Abstract

Product pitches, as an innovative promotion genre, could be more persuasive than traditional oral promotion in which there is no combination between non-verbal modes and verbal modes in business environments (Cassily & Ventola, 2002; Valeiras-Jurado & Ruiz-Madrid, 2015). Through the use of Internet media, it is undeniable that product pitches with the multimodal approach could be theoretically applied to online sales. However, the majority of Chinese international trade salespersons are not familiar with this promotion genre. In this research, a questionnaire is designed to analyze the attitudes and views toward product pitches of ten Chinese salespersons. Due to the lack of real and available materials of product pitches in the trade field, the pitch example used in the questionnaire comes from the American TV program Shark Tank, which is performed by an entrepreneur to pursue investment. Despite it has a different purpose from product pitches performed by salespersons, it could be used to initially study the possibility of applying product pitches multimodally to online sales in Chinese international trade.The main objective of this paper is to discuss the possibility of applying this multimodal promotion genre to online sales in Chinese international trade. By analyzing the answers to the questionnaire, results show that these Chinese international trade salespersons are basically convinced that this new promotion genre should be used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their online sales work. However, their attitudes toward carrying out product pitches multimodally by themself tends to show a lack of confidence. The difficulties for Chinese salespersons mainly concentrate on their English proficiency and the appropriate use of non-verbal communication modes. Based on these two difficulties, this paper accordingly proposes some instructions by analyzing an 8 Shark Tank pitch corpus (see appendix 1). On the one hand, an actionable discourse template is designed to help them organize an effective language framework of product pitches. On the other hand, 5 common non-verbal communication modes, including eye contact, hand gestures, body postures, intonation as well as facial expression, are specifically analyzed to help them appropriately use these useful modes in product pitches.