Dimensions of Language in Marketing-Effective Brands: A Lexicogrammatical Exploration

This research explores the language features used by leading consumer brands with successful marketing in their promotional messages. Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Mondelez, and Unilever were selected because they appear in Effie’s Most Effective Marketers’ Index and are active on a range of media platforms. A group of 225 marketing texts, made up of social media posts, video advertisement transcripts, and website content, was examined using a corpus-based method based on Biber’s MDA framework. The goal was to find common lexicogrammatical patterns in top consumer brands on five different dimensions. Many advertisements included personal pronouns, commands, and words that suggest possibility or necessity. The findings also show that most social media posts provided information, yet had a moderate impact on persuasion. Abstract nouns, passive voice, and formal connectors were found to make the website and press release texts the most impersonal and explicit. The research discovered that Unilever’s language was more informational and abstract, but McDonald’s language was mixed-purpose and non-abstract. Overall, the results indicate that brands use vocabulary and grammar to fit each platform, but maintain their brand identity. Thus, successful consumer brands use different lexicogrammatical patterns in various media to achieve their objectives.