Stereotypical Gender Images in Advertising: A Relevance-theoretic Approach

Abstract

Advertising is nowadays everywhere in this consumer society. We are constantly being persuaded and manipulated without even noticing it. This work aims to study advertising from a relevance-theoretic perspective to prove that this theory can be applied to advertising and to analyse how advertisers adapt their persuasive strategies to the audience the advertisement is addressed to. Therefore, I have considered two different advertisements, one addressed to men and another one addressed to women, to explain how addressees process and understand speaker´s meaning. The results of this analysis prove that the aforementioned theory is able to successfully analyse advertisements by means of overt and covert communication, implicatures and explicatures, intentions and the extension of the context, achieving thus some cognitive effects that offset the processing effort. Moreover, the present work shows that the persuasive strategies used in advertising vary depending on the potential customer and on the manipulated cultural stereotypes. Nevertheless, this analysis has been applied to two advertisements from the same culture, so future studies should be carried out dealing with advertisements from different cultures.