Challenges of the Knowledge Society (May 2012)
DEDEMAN CAMPAIGNS: THE COMPENSATION OF BEING A MAN DOMINATED BY A MOODY WOMAN
Abstract
Advertising seems to be the perfect field for playing gender games, either as a relationship between authority and subordination or as a conflict. Dedeman campaigns are very well-known for targeting men by using their family background, especially women, considering product specificity. The company focuses on retail construction for home design, and is the brainchild of two Romanian owners. Basically, this company offers all the consumer needs to build a house on the outside and the inside as he or she wishes, or to modernize an existing construction. Dedeman advertising is very rich and distributed on diverse media channels, even if the company is still young. The following research aims to highlight the relationship between masculinity and femininity in promoting brand values and service quality by analyzing print and outdoor advertisements. Therefore, we are very interested in establishing the role of the product in this difficult relationship of communication, given it is equally designed for men and for women, but establishes a different connection with them. The main purpose here is to discover the involvement of the brand and products in family life, and to identify the male and female target profile. This research relies on the visual and linguistic sample of Dedeman print campaigns and the method approach is the analysis of the advertising discourse in texts created for billboards and print advertisements. We are very interested in the types of advertising texts (argumentative, narrative, descriptive), the linguistic representations of femininity and masculinity, and syntactic relationship between product and gender. At the end of this research, we expect to reveal a Dedeman advertising strategy applied in promoting brand’s values which may involve the gender roles in a creative way.
