Exploring Discursive Features and Techniques of Manipulating Consumers in Printed Advertisements

Manipulation is an illegitimate mind control that can be performed via the triangular model of social, cognitive, and discursive strategies which leads to social inequality. This study aims to investigate the discursive strategies employed in Persian printed advertisements to manipulate audiences based on triangular model of van Dijk (2006). Since manipulation is a crucial notion of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the researchers have to utilize CDA principles of Fairclough (2013) too. To do this, an analysis was performed on the corpus of 160 Persian printed advertisements collected during one year, from 2016 to 2017. Half of the data were collected from real context of use in three different cities of Iran (Kermanshah, Ahwaz, and Mashhad), and another half were downloaded from different websites. Then, the corpus of data was analyzed employing triangular model of manipulation and CDA in order to determine the strategies used in those advertisements to manipulate audiences. The results revealed that the advertising discourse in Iran is completely manipulative which uses discursive, cognitive and social strategies to manipulate consumers. Furthermore, the results added more strategies such as (a) Religious messages, (b) Challenging hints, (c) Giving discount or rewards, and (d) Deadline, to the findings of previous studies.