The globalization and localization of persuasive marketing communication: A cross-linguistic socio-cultural analysis

Abstract

In the context of the globalization and localization of business, it is becoming increasingly important to better understand the cross-linguistic persuasive communication conveyed through electronic media. This study compares 40 Chinese and 40 English direct-marketing sales e-mails. These 80 e-mails were randomly selected from a database of 7664 sales e-mails collected from 36 categories of recipients in Hong Kong over a six-month period. Based on a Cross-linguistic Socio-cultural Model proposed by the author, this study investigates the similarities and differences in the encoding of persuasive messages in the two corpora. It considers how far the similarities can be attributed to generic considerations, that is, to the contextual configuration of the field, mode, and tenor of the texts, as well as how far the differences can be attributed to the social and cultural contexts of those texts with regard to their audience, purpose, and content. Depending on the rhetorical goals the makers wish to achieve through these texts, the viewer–maker relationships they would like to establish, and the social and cultural contexts in which the texts unfold, the sales genre is likely to adapt in terms of its discourse strategy and textual features in today's marketplace, which is experiencing not only increased globalization, but also increased localization.