covert communication
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Section 4
Covert Communication
An advertisers primary goal is to persuade his audience. However, in achieving this goal, the advertiser faces problems,
(1) Lack of trust
Advertising is typical of a situation in which the speaker is not trustworthy and the hearer is not trusting. This makes the task of persuasion more challenging, but not impossible,
"Trust is not in itself necessary for belief to occur. If there is trust between the speaker and hearer, it will be just an extra contextual assumption and it will help the hearer believe what the speaker communicates. But it is possible for belief to be formed, without trust between them"
(Tanaka, 1994:37)
(2) Negative social reactions
Certain implications made in an advertisement can give rise to negative social reactions. For example,
it's very common for advertisers to make implications of sex, snobbery or anything which may be
considered taboo in a society. Advertisers use this technique to secure the attention of their audience
to the advert,
"The slightest hint of sex draws an audiences attention, because the cognitive system of human beings
is organized in such a way that they are more suspceptible to this kind of information, than to other
kinds"
(Tanaka, 1994: 54)
An advertiser wants to continue using these techniques, but not have to take responsibility for any
negative social reactions which may arise as a consequence.
This section investigates strategies used by advertisers in overcoming these obstacles.
(i) Ostensive and covert communication
Sperber and Wilson (1986, 1995) have shown that a communicator can get his audience to believe something in two ways
:
(1) Ostensive communication
Through an ostensive stimuli, a communicator requests for an audiences attention and makes it mutually manifest that he intends to convey a particular piece of information. As ostensive communication bears a guarantee of relevance; when an audience is ostensivly addressed, they pay attention, as humans are conditioned to turn their attention to what is relevant to them...