Hur kaniner, tomtar och humor övertalar dig att köpa ny bil : En semiotisk- och retorisk analys av Volkswagens reklamfilmer av Maja Koch och Linnea Bogren

Sammanfattning: In today’s society, people are flooded with information from different organizations, with companies competing to capture the attention of consumers. Today’s market requires companies to communicate their brand well to overcome the competition and information overload, which is why companies have recently taken the benefits of communication into account. One company that became well known early on for creating advertising in new and creative ways is the car company Volkswagen. The purpose of studying car advertising, and furthermore Volkswagen, is to examine how Volkswagen persuade its customers even though the car and the car’s functions have disappeared from their commercials today. The aim of the study was to identify how Volkswagen's commercials are designed and developed to convince consumers to buy their cars. To answer our purpose, we started from two questions: -  What attempts to convince consumers to buy the car, can be distinguished in the visual and linguistic material of the commercial?-  Which cultural recognition factors does Volkswagen use in their commercials to make consumers aware of their brand and product? To analyse Volkswagens commercials, we have used two different methods, a semiotic analysis and a rhetorical analysis. Within the semiotic method we have analysed with the tools of denotation and connotation. The analysis is based on the semiotic theory, which is the study of signs and how signs create meaning. To perform a rhetorical analysis, we have used the tools ethos, logos and pathos and metaphors. During the analysis, we have also looked at the commercials from the perspective of strategic communication, where we have specifically used marketing communication as an approach to how the commercials convince their stakeholders. In the analysis, we present our findings which show that the films portray and illustrate a true-to-life reality to make us stakeholders recognize us and thus persuade us to buy their cars. The analysis has also shown that using emotion is the most common persuasive strategy in Volkswagen's persuasive approach. By communicating their brand in different ways, they can face the fierce competition on the market with the increased amount of information, hoping they can come through the cluster.