A Critical Discourse Analysis of Advertising Language Used in “Femina” and “Prestige” Magazines

Abstract

Advertising in era globalization becomes an "effective tool" for companies to offer their products, good and services, but there are some negative sides regarding content because its contents tend to be “powerful, persuasive and manipulative”. Beauty product advertisements commonly portray stereotypes of standard "beautiful" person through the language features used in the advertisement. The advertiser also uses language features to build an image of the product and build a relation to the audiences in certain ways. This phenomenon requires readers to be more aware and critical when reading of advertisements. By using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)’s Fairclough model as a framework, this study attempts to compare beauty products advertisements between two woman magazines. Language features show power relation between advertisers and audiences on the mood choice. It shows the position of advertisers and audience. Language features show how advertisers build a relationship to their audience and how they build an image of their products in personalization, cohesion, parallelism, modality, and disjunctive syntax. The language used in advisements also bring to stereotypes about “ideal” woman stereotypes through their vocabularies and adjectives because both magazines have different views about ideal appearances of a woman. Prestige portrays woman as “friend” to the man, and Femina portrays woman as “wife” to their husband. The beauty advertisements are taken from Prestige magazine which has a high-class audience and Femina magazine that has medium to lower class of audiences. Both magazine published from September 2015 until June 2016. The result is that two magazine uses certain ways in the use of language features to build image and relation.