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6APPLICATION OF ADVERTISING TACTICS THROUGH A HIERARCHY OF NEEDS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (ON THE EXAMPLE OF ENGLISH INSTAGRAM POSTS)
The relevance of the research is explained by the need for the constructive application of advertising tactics to ensure the effectiveness of Instagram advertising. The purpose of the article is to consider English advertising Insta-posts through a hierarchy of needs. The leading approaches to the study of this topic are structural-semantic and functional-communicative. The authors give the typology of the most popular Insta-topics relying on the number of publications with the relevant hashtags on the basis of the hierarchy of people's needs. A correlation between Insta-topics and the hierarchy of basic needs by Maslow is drawn in the paper. There are distinguished a number of key functions of advertising posts, discussed advertising formats. The authors reveal how advertising employs a hierarchy of people's needs to become more efficient and close to the target customers. In conclusion tactics used in advertising posts of the social network Instagram depending on the hierarchy are presented and the explanation of the tactics used is drawn. The article may be useful for philologists, linguists, marketers and advertisers.
Keywords
English advertising posts, Instagram topics, communication, hashtags,
hierarchy of people's needs
AUTHORS Elena A. Yukhmina,
Associate Professor, Department of Business Foreign Languages, Faculty of Linguistics and Translation, Candidate of Philology, Chelyabinsk State University, Chelyabinsk 129, Kashirin Brothers street, Chelyabinsk, 454001, Russia alen_vitamin@mail.ru
Nadezhda V. Obvintseva,
Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages Ural Humanitarian Institute, Candidate of Philology, Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin, Yekaterinburg 51, Lenin Avenue, Yekaterinburg, 620075, Russia n.v.obvintseva@urfu.ru
1. Introduction
Advertising helps to inform customers about the brands available in the market and the variety of products useful to them and it can even create a demand for a required product group (Sachin, 2019). As Dr. R. Kannan and Dr. Sarika Tyagi stated in their article: "Advertising is for everybody including kids, young and old", it is done using various media types, with different techniques and methods most suited (Kannan; Tyagi, 2013). That's why the study of methods and techniques of advertising has attracted linguists, philologists and marketers for many decades. G. Cook in his work "The discourse of advertising" paid attention to the fact that "in contemporary society, advertising is everywhere. We cannot walk down the street, shop, watch television, go through our mail, log on to the Internet, read a newspaper or take a train without encountering it" (Cook, 1992). Thus, being a part
of our everyday life it employs more and more sophisticated strategies and tactics to get people's attention and to attract the target audience. To pay attention to the basic people's needs is one of the tactics that advertising uses on the social network Instagram appearing in the posts dealing with the topics that are urgent and basic for people.
1.1. Importance of the Problem
The problem stated in the article is what tactics Instagram advertising posts based on the hierarchy of people's needs have. Being one of the tactics of the influence, drawing attention to the needs of people is characterized by its own linguistic features that play a crucial role in the advertising campaign on the network.
1.2. Status of the Problem
Studying these features helps to systematize the posts presented on the network from one more aspect and thus, to make a language picture of the social network Instagram described in more detail.
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Tasks of the study
The purpose of our paper is to study the Instagram advertising posts, their systematization from the point of view of the hierarchy of the people's needs dealt in them. For this purpose, the following tasks were set: to make up a topology of the Instagram topics on hierarchy of people's needs, in accordance with the topics to consider how advertising employs these tactics to become more effective and attractive for the users through certain linguistic means used in the frames of the tactics; to define the key functions of Instagram-advertising and advertising formats.
2.2. Methodology
Theoretical and methodological basis of this work relies on the works of G. Cook, K. Emma McDonald, M. Byron Sharp, Clark Jon, R. Kannan, S. Tyagi, M.F. Masgutova, M.N. Tlyaumbetova, M.V. Zagidullina and others which are dedicated to the study of the advertising discourse and its peculiarities from the point of structural-semantic and functional-communicative approaches. The study is based on the principles of the semantic structure analysis with the elements of the pragma-linguistic analysis. There are also used other methods such as descriptive (material compilation, its processing, interpretation and generalization), contextual analysis and semantic analysis.
3. Results
Instagram is a quick-to-share platform. You may not have a writing talent but just take nice pictures and share them with your followers adding some hashtags for better searchability. So a lot of sellers take advantage of that to market their business. Social media marketing (SMM) is becoming very popular today. It is a form of marketing that uses social networks as marketing tools. Depending on the type of the end-buyer companies/sellers have to take into consideration what marketing strategy to choose while creating the advertisement, so that the latter had the required effect on the target market. The aim of advertising is to encourage consumers to buy or use whatever the company is offering them.
There were developed several models that are widely used in advertising, such as AIDA, Rogers, Dagmar and Lavidge Steinet. They describe the steps or stages that occur from the time when a consumer first becomes aware of a product or brand to when the
consumer tries a product or makes a purchase decision. If we compare these models, they all have three things in common: Knowledge or Thinking, Emotions or Feelings, Behavior or Acting. So good advertising and marketing should always take into account these three aspects in the human behavior. It is proved by Emma K. Mcdonald, Byron M. Sharp (2000) in their study state "Brand Awareness Effects on Consumer Decision Making for a Common, Repeat Purchase Product: A Replication" that consumers try to minimize the effort and time they are spending when making a decision, and use the knowledge of brands as a heuristic rule. Brand awareness affects the choice of the buyers, they think that "I'll choose the brand I know", "I've heard of the brand, so it must be good" (Mcdonald; Sharp, 2000).
Communicative exchange is a necessary condition of a human sociability (Zagidullina, 2017). So Instagram fulfills different functions:
- providing information about different events, shows, services and products;
- news-making;
- communication-stimulating;
- showing-off;
- educating;
- promoting;
- advertising.
Instagram users want to read the most exciting and interesting posts for them. Having analyzed the data, we found out that the most popular topics in the English Instagram are fashion, beauty blogging, family, healthy lifestyle or sport, travelling, food blogging and advertising. It is interesting to note that these topics reflect some basic needs of all people, corresponding with the hierarchy of needs offered by Maslow (table 1). He said that human needs are arranged in a hierarchy. "It is quite true that man lives by bread alone — when there is no bread. But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled? At once other (and "higher") needs emerge and these, rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are satisfied, again new (and still "higher") needs emerge and so on. This is what we mean by saying that the basic human needs are organized into a hierarchy of relative prepotency" (Maslow, 1943).
TABLE 1. - Hierarchy of needs vs Instagram topics
Hierarchy of needs Most popular Instagram topics
Physiological needs - these are biological requirements for human survival, e.g. air, food, drink, shelter, clothing, warmth, sex, sleep. food blogging,
Safety needs - protection from elements, security, order, law, stability, freedom from fear. job, work, employment,
Love and belongingness needs - after physiological and safety needs have been fulfilled, the third level of human needs is social and involves feelings of belongingness. The need for interpersonal relationships motivates behavior family, family relations, children, love
Esteem needs - which Maslow classified into two categories: (i) esteem for oneself (dignity, achievement, mastery, independence) and (ii) the desire for reputation or respect from others (e.g., status, prestige). beauty and fashion, healthy life style and sport, advertising,
Self-actualization needs - realizing personal potential, self-fulfillment, seeking personal growth and peak experiences. A desire "to become everything one is capable of becoming" (Maslow, 1943:6). traveling/ discovery art,
We have made a typology of Instagram posts and identified the most popular Insta-topics, depending on the number of publications. A hashtag will be a quantitative indicator of the popularity of Insta-posts. A hashtag is a key word or a figurative, aphoristic phrase
that brings together messages, devoted to the same topic. Hashtags act as hyperlinks clicking on which the user finds similar publications on the topics that are interesting for him: #adventure #pressday #bodywear #teamwork #lingerie #streetstyle #howtostyle #fitness #yummi #howwasyourday. It is a kind of a non-moderated inv'tation to the discussion and therefore the same hashtag can be used for different purposes implied by the users.
Depending on the target market all the variety of Insta-posts can be grouped into the following topics:
food (#food - 395 mln, #foodporn - 232 mln, #foodie - 156 mln, #foodphotography -59 mln, #foodlover - 43,3 mln, #foodblogger - 44,5mln);
family, family relations, children, love (the number of publications in the English Instagram with the hashtags #love - 1,8 bln, #family - 362 mln, #familytime - 52,7 mln, #wedding - 182 mln, #weddingdress - 35,6 mln, #weddinginspiration - 20,4 mln, #husband
- 12,4mln, #wife - 10,5 mln, #mylove - 66, 4 mln, #myloveaffairwithdiamonds - 18,6 mln, #relationshipgoals - 16,3 mln, #child - 30,9 mln, #children - 30,9 mln, #kids, #kidsparty, #kidsmodel is 113 mln);
job, work, employment (#job -22,6 mln, #work - 162 mln, #workworkwork - 3,8 mln, #workinprogress - 16,9 mln, #lovemyjob - 24,6 mln);
travelling / discovery (#adventure - 103,3 mln, #adventuretime - 13,4 mln, #nature
- 538 mln, #naturephotography - 116 mln, #travelgram - 126 mln, #travel, #travelling, #travelholic, #travelblog, #travellife - 413 mln); art (#art - 660 mln, #artist - 192 mln, #artlovers - 10,3 mln, #story - 11,1 mln);
beauty and fashion, healthy life style and sport, advertising ((#beauty 387 mln, #beautiful - 666 mln, #fitness - 399 mln; #sport, #sports, #sporty, #sportcars, #sportscar, #sportlife, #sportswear, #sportsman, #sportster, #sportday - 94, 9 mln, #ad, #adver, #advertising 27,3 mln) (Instagram, 2020).
Judging by the number of hashtags the most popular topic is the topic of love. Love is associated with happiness, beauty and positive emotions by many people. Love is a versatile notion. It can be love to children, to friends, to parents, to husband or wife, to motherland, to job, to nature, to sport etc. The number of publications here is more than 1 billion.
All the mentioned Insta-topics can be encountered in different types of the advertising posts. So, the next question that we have to answer is what types of advertising formats are used in Instagram. J.Clark describes four main types encountered in Instagram:
1) Photo Adverts: Photo adverts allow you to tell your story in a clean and creative canvas, where photos can be in landscape or portrait format. These are also the easiest posts to get up and running, given it's a single image.
2) Carousel Adverts: These enable to create ads with two or more scrollable images or videos by creating different cards.
3) Video Adverts: These allow advertising with the use of videos or gifs. User engagement with videos are fast outpacing that of static images, so if branding or engagements are a key KPI, a video may be worth testing.
4) Stories Adverts: These are the newest form of advertising, giving businesses a platform to connect with over 250 million people using photo or video. It is, however, important to note that Instagram stories disappear from your feed and profile in 24 hours (Clark, 2018).
Some advertisers rely on stories advert and on a daily basis issue several stories a day, others prefer photo adverts. According to our observation most bloggers (opinion leaders: micro-influencers and macro-influencers) prefer stories adverts, large companies usually post either video adverts or photo adverts, but still there should be a balanced
combination of different advertising formats. The difference between business accounts and personal accounts lies in the intensity (number) of publication of this or that type of an advert. To make the advertising more audience oriented the advertisers define their audience and add certain parameters to the setting of their adverts, e.g. location, age, people who match (interests, behaviors etc.), placements etc.
The advertising styles on Instagram are also different. There are no limitations to the style used. It depends mainly on the target audience of the product or service and the advert can be presented in the form of narration, monologue or dialogue, (self) description, original style (jokes, language play, anecdotes etc.) The style works best in combination with the appropriate tactic. So let's consider main advertising tactics the marketers and sellers rely on in Instagram advertising. What is the difference between terms "strategy" and "tactics"? We use the definition of these notions given by Stan Mack (Mack, 2019). The terms strategy and tactics might seem interchangeable, but they refer to distinct elements of an advertising campaign. A strategy is a campaign's overarching plan, and the tactics are the specific means advertisers employ to meet the campaign's goal. To accomplish a strategic objective efficiently, advertisers must use a set of tactics suited to the task. In Instagram advertising we encounter such tactics (in terms of Masgutova, Tlyaumbetova) as tactics of argumentation, the tactics of obtruding one's opinion and the tactics of unification (Masgutova; Tlyaumbetova, 2018).
4. Discussions
The tactics of argumentation relies on explanations, definitions, appeals to the reader's opinion, call-to-action verbs etc.: Events, fashion weeks, press days. You need to carry your phone all the time. What fits more to stylish outfits than these amazing phone cases and bags from our client @miamin_milano. Swing it! We are excited about the newest @commafashion collection pieces. To be active and flexible is more important than the perfect shape @fitx (Esteem needs posts). Lobster tail, filet mignon and shrimp skewers, fries, grilled zucchini and an extra 1/2 lobster tail because why not? (Physiological needs). This tactics aims at persuading the potential customers to make an action or buy the product advertised.
The tactics of obtruding one's opinion is characterized by adjective word-combinations and words-intensifiers: It's actually real and you'll be able to get your hands on one very soon #Edchup; Thanks @hvisk for the cutest white bag! Check out our latest collection called Journey. Chic, edgy and cool - the lights of EGLO can change the entire atmosphere. I wish you a beautiful weekend! Ugly is pretty again! The new KOBE and FLO sneakers @melvinhamilton are the perfect pieces for our street styles with @emvoyoe and its.alix. Bright, cool and fresh! The newest items @wetnwildbeauty are perfect for an outstanding make-up from Monday to Sunday. We welcome the awesome beauty brand in our agency (Esteem needs posts). This tactics aims at attracting the attention of the customers to the products advertised by highlighting the competitive advantages of them.
The tactics of unification is realized by means of the pronouns we, our, nouns and verbs with positive connotation: After a relaxing day there is nothing like the new refreshing zingy special edition ginger to refresh my skin #MakeYourSkinSmile; Gorgeous. Fresh. Ladylike. We absolutely love the new summer pieces; We had a fantastic time with these stunning ladies during our London visit with Olivia Burton ( Self-actualization needs ); Ride as much or as little, as long or as short as you feel. But ride with Kamal Pandey Kartikeya Raina (Self-actualization needs). Easy, innovative and stylish we love the new designs @mepaldeutschland for your kitchen or any outdoor
activities (Esteem needs post). This tactics aims at creating a positive image of the products advertised.
In most cases all these tactics are used simultaneously to make an advert brighter, more outstanding and interesting for the potential clients.
5. Conclusion
Instagram advertising will continue developing. Surely, traditional marketing will still be used. To have a competitive advantage the companies should be on the same wavelength with their end-buyers and target audience, employing the idea of people's needs is very helpful in this. Though the world is constantly changing the hierarchy of human needs remains pretty the same which helps to influence people more successfully. To create a successful Instagram post the marketers should take into consideration what effect it will produce on the potential clients, what emotions and images it will arise and rely on a balanced combination of the advertising tactics. The advertising formats and styles used on Instagram are varied. There can be encountered stimulating advertising (to increase the number of sales), thematic advertising (added value to the product, long-term effect), direct, corporate (it's when not the product is promoted but the company), cooperative (when there are advertised several brands or products together), comparative and noncommercial advertising. Instagram adverts are all rich in various linguistic phenomena that are interesting for the research from both theoretical and practical points of ^ew.
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