Dialogism in Advertising Persuasion

Abstract

This article analyzes two advertisements from the same brand, but produced in different local media: France and Brazil. It aims to pursue the interrelation and nexus needed between the verbal, visual and extraverbal dimensions to produce and understand the effects of persuasive sense. Concepts from ancient and modern Rhetoric, as well as dialogic discourse analysis notions and categories, inspired in the works of Bakhtin and the Circle, are the article’s theoretical-methodological basis. In the chosen advertisements, we observe the tense way they reflect and refract reality and how this is expressed in concrete utterances, constructed according to genre coercions. By analyzing the produced meaning effects, we especially highlight the presence of persuasion in different dialogic relationships allowed by the texts, audience importance in effect construction of text persuasive meaning, and proximity between advertisement and epidictic genre in ancient rhetoric. Persuasive dialogic relationships express broad and different spheres of human activity, in connection with the organization of social life, space and time; in fact, they are not aimed at product purchase, but at access to a way of life, which is linked to ideological values of privilege.