Genre Specifics of Sport Brands Accounts in Aspect of Social Orientation of Business (by Example of Facebook Social Network)

Abstract

The analysis of communication tools of social marketing used for positioning and promotion of products of sports brands such as Puma, Reebok, Adidas Originals is presented. The author proceeds from the fact that sports products are closely connected with sports as a social value system. The author notes that this strategy allows to organically combine commercial goals with socially oriented activities, reducing the criticality of perception of messages of a positioning nature. Within the framework of communicative-pragmatic approach the methods of discourse analysis, linguistic description, intent analysis are used. The author considers the genre specifics of sports brand accounts in Facebook social network. The interaction of advertising and phatic genres of social support, focused on the translation of socially significant priorities and guidelines, is studied. The author states that socially oriented messages occupy almost a third of posts in the text content of sports brand accounts. It is shown that the main trend of positioning activities in social networks is the hybridization of the genres used, involving a combination of genres of advertising and socially oriented nature, which allows to mask the advertising message, veil its manipulative nature. It is emphasized that as a result of this kind of communication policy, users of the social network are transformed into a kind of advertising agents, providing retransmission of information about the company and its products.

Keywords

• mass communication
• social networks
• speech genre
• phatic genres
• advertising genres
• social communications
• social marketing
• sports brands