Conversational marketing: Advertising at its best?

Generic messages are no longer the choice – companies now chooses to deliver targeted messages in which consumers will want to hear, learn and be entertained through the means of interactive features of multimodality advertising.

The characteristics of multimodality include the synchronization of different modes through the interplay of texts, visuals, sounds, videos, animations and hyperlinks when communicating a message (Walsh 2006, p.24). Texts can no longer stand alone to attract without the means of other modes such as visuals. Visuals fulfil a ‘prosodic’ role of highlighting and emphasizing and it complements the texts, providing it with the means of persuasion which texts alone cannot accomplish (Kress and van Leeuwen 1998, p. 187).

Conversational marketing – The Dove Real Beauty Campaign in which the company tackled the common perceptions of beauty – the campaign generated a huge amount of debate and buzz on blogs including those of mainstream media and it contributed significantly in sales, an additional $500 million (CNET News, 2007).

image source: Dove - Campaign for Real Beauty

With the practice of conversational marketing, advertising is becoming a three-way conversation - where it engages rather than dictates, invites rather than demands and listens as much as talks.

Schirato and Yell (1996, pp.54 – 61) quotes Halliday in explaining the three aspects of contexts of situation – field; the social action and subject matter, tenor; participants and the interactive dimension of communication and mode; codes and medium in which the message is delivered.

Advertising through the means of conversational marketing allows three different tenors – the marketers, producers and audiences.

In the field of promoting the brand and its products, the power relations between the tenors, producers, marketers and audiences are equal and as the concept of conversational marketing places an emphasis on interactivity – it promotes and encourages audiences to provide feedbacks and opinions.

Compared to print advertisements, the social distances between the tenors can be said to be much closer with the availability of interactive options such as hyperlinks back to the official website where there are feedback forms, forums, option for forwarding a video and so on.

All above sees that this mode of advertising promotes ‘synthetic personalisation’, in which is the process of framing an interaction as personalised and individualised although it actually involves large numbers of people who are treated identically (Schirato and Yell 1996, p. 64).

A Dove Film: Onslaught. Multiple 'voices' of visuals, words and sounds engages audience in a sense of interactivity. Video can be found at the official website, Campaign for Real Beauty.

video source: YouTube

With conversational advertising, every form presented has its function – multiple ‘voices’ are being presented simultaneously to audiences through the affordances of the digital modes that combines visuals, words and sounds (Walsh 2006, p.35). All in which contributes largely to an increase in audience interactivity.

In conclusion, the modes of advertising will continue to evolve – with each step placing further emphasis on audience interactivity as the power of sales, is in the hands of consumers.

Reference:
Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T 1998, ‘Chapter 7: Front pages: (the critical) analysis of newspaper layout’, in Bell, A & Garret, P (eds) 1998, Approaches to media discourse, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 186-219.

Mills E 2007, Want to ‘converse’ with advertisers? Me neither, CNET News.com, viewed 30 October 2007, <http://www.news.com/Want-to-converse-with-advertisers-Me-neither/2100-1024_3-6207642.html?tag=item>

Schrirato, T & Yell, S 1996, Chapter 1: Communication as social practice, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, Australia.

Walsh, M 2006, ‘The ‘textual shift’: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.