Power and Manipulation in News Paper Advertisement

Abstract

This paper aims at analyzing an advertisement advert and campaign for body care products in order to investigate power and manipulation techniques of consumer product and companies to reach more customers and sell more products. This paper aims at analysing an advertisement campaign for the body care products in order to investigate power and manipulation techniques of consumer product and companies to reach more customers and sell more products. The discourse fragment analyzed is based on the Fairclough (2001) theory of Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA), Van Dijk's concept of Manipulation in CDA and Multimodality in discourse by Kress and Van Leeuven (1996). The data used for this research is an advertisement publication placed in THE MIRROR (the most popular Ghanaian weekend News Paper), by the FC BEAUTY COLLEGE. Key findings indicate that, (a) producers of advertisement employ several degrees of language in advertisement to enact power over its targeted audience; (b) there are divergent strategies and techniques used in adverts by a producer to manipulate the reader or targeted audience, and (c) that positioning of positive self-representation and negative other-representation are exhibited in the discourse of advertisement.