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Relevance is a key concept in understanding advertisements, because it is a
primary component of all aspects of human communication. The term was introduced
by Sperber and Wilson (1995), building on earlier work in pragmatics, in particular
the work of H. P. Grice. Sperber and Wilson's approach to communication is based
on the observation that much natural communication does not involve sequences
of totally directly informative utterances, or questions followed by literal
answers. However, speakers and hearers in a conversation each assume that the
others are rational and cooperative participants, and therefore conversation
moves forward as each hearer finds the relevance of what was just said. You
can read more about the strictly linguistic side
of relevance on a separate page. Tanaka (1994) presents a very thorough
analysis of advertising based on the concept of relevance. Every advertisement
is interesting from the perspective of relevance. Here are two examples
of text that have relevance in the advertisement in which they appear. Click
on each image to see the original and a discussion of the relevance and how
it is constructed in the advertisment. 40 La-Z-Boy (Metropolitan Home, March/April
2002) Finally, it is sometimes the case that the intended relevance in an advertisement
is not fully clear. We noticed a striking example of this in a series of advertisements
for Rave hairspray. The first advertisement that appeared chronologically is
28rave_1, shown here: The issue of relevance here is simply about the visual aspects of the advertisement:
What does the picture have do with the product? Can you tell? To find out more
about these advertisements, click on the picture above.
45 Venus (Jane, August 2002)
| References | |
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Sperber,
Dan and Deirdre Wilson (1995) Relevance: Communication and cognition
(2nd ed.) Oxford: Blackwell [First ed. 1986]. |
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