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Generic patterns in promotional discourse

Chapter · January 2005

DOI: 10.1075/pbns.130.13bha

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Published in Persuasion Across Genres: A Linguistic Approach, (2005) edited by Helena Halmari, Tuija Virtanen,
John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, (213-228).

Generic Patterns in Promotional Discourse

@Vijay K Bhatia
Department of English
City University of Hong Kong
Introductory

If there is one dominant characteristic of professional and, to some extent, even academic
genres that has influenced the essential nature and function of discourse in general in recent
years, it has been the invasion of promotional values in most forms of discourse.
Promotional genres, in this respect, undoubtedly have become the most versatile and fast
developing area of discourse. Promotional concerns have also influenced the nature of the
entire range of professional and even academic discourse. It has been the result of several
factors, some of which include, the availability of new technology in mass communication
and a massive information explosion as a result of this, the compulsive nature of advertising
and promotional activities in business and other areas of social concern, the essentially
competitive nature of much of professional and academic activities and several others. The
most significant changes we found in the eighties in traditional financial sectors, especially
in the banking and investment sectors, which turned advertising into a subtle art form rather
than traditional hard selling. In the last few years, the entire range of advertising activities
has undergone radical changes and in turn has influenced other forms of discourse, which
only remotely and perhaps occasionally displayed promotional elements. As Featherstone
(1991) points out the world of today is a “consumer culture”, where many of our discursive
activities, whether in business or academic, or even in personal context, have to some
extent been influenced by promotional concerns. The inevitable result of this development
is that many of the institutionalised genres, whether they are social, professional or
academic, are seen as incorporating elements of promotion. Fairclough (1993:141),
referring to such changes in discursive practices, points out,
 ...there is an extensive restructuring of boundaries between orders of discourse and
between discursive practices; for example, the genre of consumer advertising has
been colonizing professional and public service orders of discourse on a massive
scale, generating many new hybrid partly promotional genres...

As an instance of such a hybrid genre, Fairclough (1993) discusses the case of

contemporary university prospectuses, where, he highlights an increasing tendency
towards marketization of the discursive practices of British universities.

The main purpose of this paper is to highlight a range of professional and academic
discourse in an attempt to investigate the complexity of promotional generic patterns, and
to further investigate mixing and embedding of non-promotional generic elements to
achieve promotional goals.

Traditional forms of promotional discourse

The most traditional form of promotional discourse one finds in what has been known as
advertisement, which is often viewed as a form of discourse which is intended to inform
and promote in order to sell ideas, goods or services to a selected group of people.
Although advertising is one of most dynamic and versatile genres of public discourse
today, in that it can boast of some of the most varied and innovative uses of lexico-
grammatical and discoursal forms and rhetorical strategies, these innovations are often
used within rather outside the typical generic boundaries of promotional discourse (for
detailed accounts of this kind of variation, see Kathpalia, 1992, Bhatia, 1995). Without
going into any detailed generic and discoursal specification of the general advertising
genre, I would like to point out that most print advertisements of hard sell type make use
some of the following rhetorical moves to persuade potential customers to buy the product
or service they promote. Let me take up the following an example to illustrate the use of
some of the typical rhetorical moves used in ‘hard-sell’ type (See Kathpalia, 1993) print
advertisements.

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Generic Structure of Advertisements:
1. Headlines
2. Targeting the market
3. Justifying the product or service by establishing a niche
4. Detailing the product or service
5. Establishing credentials
6. Endorsement or Testimonials
7. Offering incentives
8. Using pressure tactics
9. Soliciting response
10. Signature line and Logo etc.

Sources of promotional input

Advertising in the context of today is an extremely innovative and versatile artefact. It is

almost impossible to give a comprehensive account of the strategies advertisers may use to
influence their targeted audience. Therefore, without attempting to be comprehensive in
this regard, I shall briefly take up only one of the strategies traditionally used for a long
time.

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Product differentiation in Advertising: The most essential element or essence of much
of advertising activity is in the copywriter’s concern with differentiating products. The
key concept in persuasive advertising is product differentiation. The copywriter must
analyze all the background information, all the ‘evidence’, in the light of discovering
what makes a particular product different from that of competitors. An excellent
illustration of this strategy one may find in an old story, which seems to capture the
essential spirit of product differentiation in promotional advertising. It goes somewhat
like this.

In the good old days, there were two shops selling sausages in the same street in London.
Initially both were doing well, but as days went by, the competition became tough and the
promotional activities intense. Suddenly, one fine morning the shop on the right side of the
road put up a poster claiming, “We sell the best sausages in London”. The next morning,
the shop on the left side, in an attempt to outsmart his competitor came up with the claim
“We sell the best sausages in England”. The next day, the first one came up with the claim,
“Our sausages are the best in the world”. The second one responded by saying, “We sell
sausages to the Queen”, to which the first one responded the following day by displaying
a huge poster saying, “God save the Queen!”

Discoursal Resources for Product Differentiation: The most common form of product
differentiation is achieved by offering a product description which is good, positive, and
favourable. In the modern-day practice of advertising, the traditional practice of direct
comparison of products has become somewhat risky, although subtle forms of comparison,
in the case of a household product, for example, where it is typically claimed that this
“special” brand is so much superior to an “ordinary” one. However, it is the generic values
of ‘description’ and ‘evaluation’, which are most often called upon to serve the cause of
millions of products and services across the corporate world (see Bhatia, 1993, for a
detailed discussion of this). The most common denominator in most of the efforts for
product differentiation is the use of the primary generic values of description and
evaluation. Let me give some substance to this by displaying the relationship between
various levels of generic description.

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Although genres are essentially identified in terms of communicative purposes they tend
to serve, these communicative purposes can be characterised at various levels of
generalisations. These communicative purposes can be realised in terms of a combination
of rhetorical processes, which can also be considered as primary generic values. In
professional genres, it is often possible to posit several levels of generalisation. To take the
case of promotional genres, one may find at the highest level of generalisation
“promotional discourse” in the form of a constellation of several closely related genres
with an overlapping communicative purpose of promoting a product or service to a
potential customer. Some of the common examples of promotional genres may include
advertisements, promotional letters, job applications (in the sense that their purpose is also
to sell the services of the applicant to a potential employer, see Bhatia, 1993), book blurbs,
company brochures, travel brochures, and a number of others. All these and a number of
other instances of this kind have a large degree of overlap in the communicative purposes
they tend to serve and that is the main reason why they are seen as forming a closely-related
discourse colony, serving more or less a common promotional purpose, in spite of the fact

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that some of them may also display subtle differences in their realisations. It is further
possible for us to view any one of these genres, advertisements, for example, at a lower
level of generalisation and make distinctions between more specific realisations of this
genre. Obvious examples will include print advertisements, TV commercials, radio
advertisements, and others. The differences between these are less discernible in terms of
communicative purposes but more in terms of the medium of discourse and therefore as
genres, they belong to the same broad category, popularly known as advertisements.
Taking a step further, this time considering only print advertisements, it is further possible
to view these in terms of categories like straight-line advertisements, picture-caption
reminder advertisements, image-building advertisements, testimonials, pretend genres etc.
(Kathpalia 1992). Whatever the sub-category, all these advertisements serve the same set
of communicative purposes, though most of them use different strategies to promote the
product or service. Straight-line advertisements most often use ‘product appraisal’ as the
main persuasive strategy, whereas Image-building advertisements rely more heavily on
establishing credentials as the main source of persuasion. Another variation one may find
in the use of linguistic resources is that whereas some types rely on verbal strategies
(straight-line advertisements using product appraisal) while others, for example picture-
caption advertisements, rely more on visual inputs. Once again, it is possible for us to take
up straight-line advertisements and differentiate them further either in terms of their use of
linguistic features for product evaluation, or may be in terms of the kind of product they
advertise, or even in terms of the audience they serve. In each case, we are sure to find
subtle differences in the use of strategies for product description, evaluation, product
differentiation, and these eventually giving rise to specific uses of linguistic resources. But
the interesting thing is that all these variations become distinctive genres only at a level at
which they start indicating a substantial difference in their communicative purposes.

Colony of Promotional Genres

As a result of this kind of variation, one may find a variety of promotional genres forming
some kind of a colony, which will have members serving a range of communicative
purposes, of which the most dominating one might be promotional in nature. If we take

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advertising to be the most central member or exponent of such a colony, with marketing as
one of the most dominant characteristic communicative purpose, then sales promotion
letters can be placed very close to it. There may be major differences in terms of the
medium in use, i.e., print, audio or visual and the format they are often associated with,
i.e., somewhat personalised letter format for sales promotion letters as against a general
appeal for a large number of groups of potential customers for advertisements. Book blurbs
can be placed close to these two, although they are different from these two in terms of the
specificity of the product they promote, i.e., books, the selection and size of the market or
audience they target, and also the nature of the strategies and hence lexico-grammatical
resources they employ, of course depending upon the subject discipline of the book.
However, all three of them are almost completely overlapping in terms of their
communicative purpose of marketing, i.e., that of selling for profit (Kathpalia, 1992). Very
closely related to these are will be job application letters, which have traditionally been
regarded as very different from sales promotion letters, but as indicated in Bhatia (1993),
they are very similar in terms of their communicative purpose and the use of lexico-
grammatical and discoursal resources. Somewhat similar to these two types of letters, one
may find the use of a reference letter or a testimonial, which, in principle, may essentially
be a review of the candidate’s suitability to a particular job description, but in practice,
most often it turns out to be a letter of recommendation, i.e., a positive evaluation of the
competence of the candidate in question.

Invasion of Territorial Integrity

As mentioned in the previous sections, genres more often than not operate within their own
territorial boundaries displaying what Bhatia (1993) calls ‘generic integrity’, which is
recognisable by reference to both the text-internal as well as the text-external aspects of
the genre. Text-internal aspects constitute lexico-grammatical, discoursal and rhetorical
features of the textualisation of the genre, and are easily accessible to language experts or
discourse analysts; whereas text-external aspects constitute socio-rhetorical, contextual
and procedural elements which make the genre possible, and are most often used by

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members of a specific discourse or professional community with which the genre if
typically associated. However, in the context of present-day interdisciplinary and dynamic
world of work, it is often difficult to keep the individual generic boundaries intact, which
has become even more difficult because of the explosion of information technology and
the new media and also the overpowering influence of promotional activities in the overly
competitive world of today. Of all the genres, which have invaded the territorial integrity
of most professional and academic genres ‘advertising’ clearly stands out to be the most
predominant instrument of colonisation. It has successfully invaded a number of
institutionalised genres, including academic, corporate, political, journalistic and many of
the reporting genres, displaying the use of a range of strategies from a relatively subtle
appropriation of lexico-grammatical and discoursal resources to a much more conspicuous
‘hybridization’ (Fairclough (1993) or ‘mixing’ and ‘embedding’ of genres (Bhatia, 1994,
1995, 1997a).

Invasion of territorial integrity

(Non-traditional generic patterns used for promotional purposes)
Mixed and Embedded Generic Patterns

▪ Academic Discourse
Academic course descriptions
Job descriptions
Academic Introductions: book introduction, preface, foreword
Book blurbs
▪ Corporate Discourse
Annual Reports
Company Brochures
Financial Statements
Investment Brochures
▪ News Reporting Discourse
News reports v. News stories
Editorials v. News analysis
▪ Political Discourse
Joint Declarations
Memorandum of understanding
Diplomatic Communiqués

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Bhatia (1995), in his discussion of genre-mixing in professional discourse, gives examples from
several settings, where genre-mixing and embedding is becoming increasingly common. He also
mentions several instances where one may find an increasing use of promotional strategies in
genres, which are traditionally considered non-promotional in their communicative purposes. The
examples include job advertisements and academic introductions, where he found rather explicit
indications of promotional elements, which traditionally have been regarded as either purely
informative or at best persuasive, but certainly not promotional in the marketing sense. However,
in all these instances of genre-mixing, there is at least one thing in common. Almost all the instances
of genre-mixing are somewhat compatible with each other, in that, they do not show any conflict
in communicative purposes. A closer look at these instances will indicate that it often is the case
that informative functions are more likely to be colonized by promotional functions rather than any
other. As Bhatia (1993) points out the most popular promotional strategy in advertising has been
to describe and evaluate a product or service in a positive manner, which may be seen as
information-giving function of language. These two functions of language, i.e., informational and
promotional are therefore unlikely to create tension, even if they may not be entirely
complementary to each other. A number of such instances of mixed genres are getting established
and are being given innovative names, as in the case of infomercial, infotainment, or advertorial.
Although it may appear that this kind of genre-mixing is more common in genres that are less likely
to create functional tension, it will be somewhat premature to assume that it will always be the case.
It is possible to view this subtle colonisation of genres in terms of appropriation and mixing of
genres, depending upon the degree of invasion one may find in individual members of the colony.
This can be diagrammatically represented as follows.

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 COLONIZATION OF ACADEMIC, PROFESSIONAL AND ISTITUTIONALIZED GENRES

The primary and most dominant form of promotional discourse is what is commonly known as
advertising discourse, which of course has a number of exponents. Variations, in terms of forms,
(‘hard sell’ and ‘soft sell’), medium (radio, TV, or print), range of products (cars, cosmetics, and
computers), and the strategies employed partly capture the enormous potential that promotional
discourse displays in a culture of consumerism. A very closely related marketing genre which has
remarkable similarities with advertising is what is popularly known as a book blurb or a publisher’s
blurb, to distinguish it from author’s introduction. Most traditional forms of advertisement have a
near overlap with book blurbs in respect of the rhetorical moves both of them use to persuade their
readership to buy the advertised product or book. Sales promotional letter, though remarkably
similar to a typical advertisement is interdiscursively more complex, in that it is always embedded
in a letter format.

This interdiscursivity is also partly responsible for bringing together yet another genre, i.e., job
application letter, which shares not only the embedded format with it but also a striking range of
lexico-grammatical resources, though sometimes different in form but remarkably similar in their
functional value. In spite of their very different contextual configurations, as genres they display
remarkable similarities in terms of the communicative purposes, the lexico-grammatical resources
they use and also in terms of their move-structure (Bhatia, 1993). This probably is one of the most

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interesting appropriations of generic resources across conventional socio-rhetorical boundaries.
Somewhat similar but more radical appropriation of linguistic and discoursal resources we find in
the case of philanthropic fundraising letters, which are very different from sales promotional letters
in terms of the rationale, ideology and the nature of appeal, but are remarkably similar in terms of
their move structures (see Bhatia, 1998). Closely related to job application letters, we have
testimonials, reference letters and CVs, all of which tend to have promotional intentions. In addition
to these appropriated forms, we do get a number of other public and professional genres, which
tend to be persuasive though not exactly for marketing ends. Some of the most notable candidates
for inclusion in this category are genres related to socio-political and diplomatic contexts, such as
consultation papers (see Bhatia, 1997b), diplomatic communiqués, press releases, and what are
popularly known as memoranda of understanding (Bhatia, forthcoming). Although, most of these
are designed to serve informative purposes, they invariably focus on only positive aspects and
incorporate persuasive and sometime even promotional elements.

Somewhat more distant category of discourses, which still have a number of genres, essentially
informative and traditionally non-promotional in intent, are increasingly being influenced and even,
colonised by promotional concerns. The main communicative purpose they serve is still
informative, but they can sometimes be mixed or hybrid in appearance. Fairclough (1993) discusses
several interesting instances of academic course descriptions and job advertisements, which, he
rightly claims, are becoming increasingly promotional. Similarly, Bhatia (1995, 1997a) points out
two interesting developments in the case of academic introductions, i.e., book introductions,
prefaces and forewords. Firstly he finds the traditional distinctions, although very subtle in nature,
between these closely related genres disappearing in practice, so that it is very difficult to establish
each one having separate generic integrity of its own. Secondly, and perhaps more interesting from
the point of view of this paper, most of these forms of academic introductions are becoming
increasingly promotional in practice, so that sometimes it becomes rather difficult not to take notice
of such promotional elements in these essentially informative genres, particularly in the case of
book introductions.

Coming to review as a genre, one may continue to find book reviews as essentially balanced
evaluation, where one may find reasonable description of book, which may incorporate positive as
well as negative aspects of the product in question. However, in the case of reviews of food and
restaurants, software, new cars and a number of other similar products, one may find a majority of
them predominantly promotional in character, focussing mainly on positive description and

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evaluation. Leaflets on services from corporations, banking as well as financial, medical and health
institutions, travel industries, and government departments are primarily informative, but some
mixture of promotional or persuasive overtones cannot be ruled out in most cases. Similarly,
brochures and reports, whether they report on the company services, financial matters, investment
appreciation, or travel opportunities, are essentially mixed genres, incorporating informative as
well as promotional elements.

Concluding Remarks

The foregoing discussion presents an increasingly complex and rather expanding picture of
colonisation of a range of professional, academic and institutionalised genres. The so-called rapid
appropriation of linguistic and discoursal resources has, to some extent, been accelerated by several
factors in the last few years. Although several genre scholars have pointed out that genres are
dynamic constructs (Swales, 1990, Bhatia, 1993, 1995, Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995) and they
often undergo change and development over a period of time, it must be pointed out that such a
large-scale colonisation by just one kind of discourse has some special significance. In my view,
this has been inspired by a number of interesting and significant developments in recent years.
Almost an unprecedented exploitation of new technology to make public discourse accessible to
large audiences across the globe has prompted millions of new ‘makers’ of discourse to give varied
interpretations to conventional forms of discourse, often creating new forms. Appropriation of
lexico-grammatical and rhetorical resources from the discourse of corporate advertising has offered
a very attractive option because of its innovative character and creative use of language.
Advertising has turned the process of writing into an art form, where writers constantly compete
for attention getting by the use of not only innovative use of language but also by the creative use
of traditional expressions and clichés, which are often shunned by good writers in other forms of
discourse. This process of colonisation is given a further boost by the fact that the world we live in
today provides an extremely competitive environment in which academics and professionals are
required to perform. Universities for example, until very recently, have always maintained their
special status and dignity in society, because of their territorial demarcation and also because of
their excellence in specialist areas of knowledge. However, in the present-day competitive
environment most of them are finding it extremely difficult now to maintain their privileged status
of excellence. As a result of an increasing number of students going for higher education, the
universities are gradually coming closer to the concept of a marketplace, where everyone has

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compete with everyone else for clients’ attention. Similarly, in the corporate world, the events in
the past few years have made the present corporate far more competitive than what it was in the
past. In the sixties and seventies, the corporate world was rather small and varied, with very few
multinationals operating globally. The markets were also somewhat segmented and often protected
by governments. With the competition in trade and commerce becoming more and more intense,
multinationals were on the increase in the eighties and became almost a norm in the nineties. From
the point of view of discourse development, there were two important consequences: first,
promotion and advertising activities became almost essential for survival, and second, cross-
cultural variations became a significant factor in promotional and advertising discourse. The most
important consequence of these developments on the discourse of advertising has been that in a
very short period of time this has become one of the most dynamic and innovative forms of
discourse today, which in turn has influenced the construction, interpretation, use and exploitation
of most other forms of academic, professional, and institutional genres, thus invading their
territorial integrity to create appropriated, embedded, mixed or hybrid forms of discourse.

REFERENCES

Berkenkotter, C., & Huckin, T.N., (1995): Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication -Cognition /
Culture/ Power, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

Bhatia, Vijay K., (1993): Analysing Genre-Language Use in Professional Settings, London, Longman.

Bhatia, Vijay K., (1994): Genre-mixing in Academic Introductions, a paper presented at the Penn
State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, The Pennsylvania State University, USA, 13-16
July 1994.

Bhatia, Vijay K., (1995): Genre-mixing and in professional communication: The case of ‘private
intentions’ v. ‘socially recognised purposes, in Bruthiaux (P.), Boswood (T.), & Bertha (B.),
(eds.), Explorations in English for Professional Communication, City University of Hong
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Bhatia, Vijay K.(1997a): Genre-mixing in Academic Introductions, English for Specific Purposes,
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Bhatia, Vijay K., (1997b): Democratizing legislative decision-making in Hong Kong: a study of generic
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Bhatia, Vijay K., (1998): Discourse of Philanthropic Fund-raising, in Working Papers, IU Center for
Philanthropy, University of Indiana, Indianapolis.

Bhatia, Vijay K., (2000): Genres in Conflict, in Anna Trosborg (ed.) Analysing Professional
Genres, Amesterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company.

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 Fairclough, N. (1993): Critical discourse analysis and the marketization of public discourse:
the universities, in Discourse & Society, Sage, London, 4 (2), (133-168).

Featherstone, M. (1991): Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, London, Sage.

Kathpalia, S. S., (1992): A Genre Analysis of Promotional Texts, an unpublished PhD. thesis,
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