Sales promotion communication as social processes and schematic structures

Abstract

The genre of sales promotion communication can be perceived as social processes; they are apt to be dynamic and evolving. The genre can be realized through socially recognized forms of texts; these forms arise from recurrent social situations and gradually become conventionalized and typified responses to similar situations. Each form is realized through a schematic structure, which refers to the organization of semantic units in a text. This study aims at discussing the development of a move scheme for analyzing the sales genre, based on the analysis of a real-life corpus instead of the subjective evaluation of one or a few discrete texts. To validate the move scheme put forward by the author, five specialist informants who on average had been working in the field of promotional writing and editing for ten years were consulted for their expert opinions and comments. Through analyzing the schematic structures, we can gain an understanding of how users of a sales genre contribute to the shaping of our views and knowledge of the world. The move scheme could form part of the learning materials for any courses or textbooks on the writing of sales promotion discourse.