Social Manipulations in Advertising: Impact on Consumers’ Perception of a Product

Manipulations in advertising serve the advertisers’ purpose of control over people’s minds and artificial improvet of perception of the represented product. In general, there are two levels of manipulation: peripheral and central (Darrel Muehling, Russel N. Laczniak, 2013) which imply several techniques, which are different for each stage of advertisement production. Nevertheless, before regarding classifications of influence on the customer engagement, the following key factors should be examined: the popularity and period of existence of the brand (Robert J. Kent and Chris T. Allen, 1994) and the levels of perception of the reproduced information (Grenawald, Leacitt, 2001). However, taking into account general features of the production of manipulation in advertising including "substitution of the beneficiary», «insistent invitation», "sociocultural significance" and "growth indicator" (Melnichuk M. V., Klimova I. I., 2019) which suppose different attractive oral and written utterance is an insufficiently studied dimension. Hence, a more detailed consideration of these techniques can become an opportunity to develop an effective counteraction to manipulation in advertising in the future. 

 

This work is devoted to an analysis of advertisement discourse based on theoretical specification of manipulation and its general classification in particular how specific language affects society and its engagement in market. The questionnaire takes place of the leading instrument of identifying Russian community awareness of manipulations' existence and people’s ability to imply the right method to resist it. First, we provide complete analysis of three different types of advertisement including the commercial, printed advertising text and online ad of a game. Second, we design a questionnaire consisting of 10 questions and collected 107 responses among Russians between the ages of 18 and 24. Third, the responses were interpreted. The analysis of the responses shows that despite the fact that the majority of respondents are aware of implication of manipulation in advertising for active consumers’ engagement they cannot identify all peculiarities that are used in proposed promotions. Therefore, it may be noted that the society pays little attention to the wording aimed at manipulating in ads and cannot control it consciously giving into the desire for advertisers to sell as many products as possible. 

 

Based on the classification of manipulations and its specification in advertisement, this research seeks to integrate the usage of special varieties of written and spoken utterance in advertising in the unified system that could be regarded as a specific sociolinguistics domain, which can be applied as a counteraction instruction against manipulation on a psychological level.

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