Business Media on Marketing: Metaphors of War, Sports and Games

Abstract

This first empirical chapter will provide an analysis of the dominant cluster of war, sports and games metaphors to be found in media discourse on marketing and sales. Additionally, alternative metaphors will also be investigated, most notably the romance metaphor as emerging in the sub-discourse of Relationship Marketing (Sheth and Parvatiyar, 2000), and its interaction with the prevailing metaphor cluster. From the initial quantitative analysis of the corpus, based on pre-defined lexical fields, it will be seen that the war metaphor is the most frequent one in the corpus, followed by sportsand, lagging far behind, the games metaphor. Alternative metaphors are even less frequent. Further, the quantitative analysis also reveals that metaphoric expressions in the corpus show a nominal bias across all three cluster metaphors. This analysis will be complemented by a more in-depth qualitative analysis drawing on four sample texts. There, the dominance of the war/sportscluster is further corroborated, as the metaphors are observed to occur in salient textual positions and to be conceptually supported by the games metaphor. Similarly, the qualitative analysis of sample texts provides further evidence of the weak standing of alternative metaphors.KeywordsFinancial TimeWord ClassSample TextHegemonic MasculinityMedium DiscourseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.