Abstract
Promotional language or language used to promote a product or service is commonly used in advertisements, job applications and sales promotional letters. Brochures which aim at selling products and services also typically employ the same mode. Studies focusing on promotional brochures such as tourist brochures and university brochures have shown that brochures employ varied rhetorical structures while sharing similar communicative purposes. Financial institutions such as banks also produce brochures to advertise their products and services to the public. This paper presents results from a corpus-based study of 50 Malaysian banking brochures collected from ten Malaysian banks. Informational structure analysis of the corpus have suggested that banking brochures typically have five strategic moves which include announcing the products, attracting attention, establishing credentials, introducing products and calling for action—moves indicating that they are indeed promotional in nature. However, findings from our corpus differ somewhat from other studies focusing on similar genres in that banking brochures do not have explicit moves for targeting the market, motivating the audience and locating the services as found in tourist brochures. They do, however, integrate strategic visual images for compensating the absent moves. The study shows the multidimensional aspects of promotional language and the use of interdiscursive resources in the genre of brochure. Keywords: brochures; promotional language; genre analysis; rhetorical structure; multimodality
Highlights
Promotional language is important for business professionals to market and promote company‘s products and brands (Cheung 2009), where promoters aim to attract attention from the public (Bruthiax 2000) and influence customers‘ behaviour (Jaganathan et al 2014) especially during company‘s marketing and promotional events (Palmer-Silveira et al 2007)
Henry and Roseberry‘s (1996) study on tourist brochures from Brunei has demonstrated that when the modal verbs can and will are employed with personal pronouns you, they serve as a persuasive tool to convince the readers of the benefits obtainable for purchasing the offered products or services advertised while the imperative verbs work as an encouragement for the customers to take further action
The analysis of banking brochures in this study has shown that banking brochures employ slightly varied rhetorical structures compared to other types of brochures even though they share similar communicative purpose that is to promote their advertised products to the public
Summary
Promotional language is important for business professionals to market and promote company‘s products and brands (Cheung 2009), where promoters aim to attract attention from the public (Bruthiax 2000) and influence customers‘ behaviour (Jaganathan et al 2014) especially during company‘s marketing and promotional events (Palmer-Silveira et al 2007). It aims to identify the informational structure typically found in promotional brochures produced and distributed by Malaysian banks. Henry and Roseberry‘s (1996) study on tourist brochures from Brunei has demonstrated that when the modal verbs can and will are employed with personal pronouns you, they serve as a persuasive tool to convince the readers of the benefits obtainable for purchasing the offered products or services advertised while the imperative verbs work as an encouragement for the customers to take further action.
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