Proceedings of 28th International Business Research Conference
8 - 9 September 2014, Novotel Barcelona City Hotel, Barcelona, Spain, ISBN: 978-1-922069-60-3
Mother-in-law Figure in Turkish Advertising
Sibel Kurt
Advertisements are a kind of consumer oriented persuasive communication tool
and have different aims. Defining different message strategies, appeals and
executions for each product are the everyday conflicts of creatives. Because
advertising is a cultural way of communication, it’s unavoidable for creatives to
benefit from the characters and the stories of the culture they live in, in the process
of choosing message strategies and the appeals they use. The tendency of the
cultural values to be recreated in the way that they are idealized in commercials
and the consumer’s cultural meanings’ to be manipulated as well as reflected by
the advertising are the subjects of this paper. In this situation, to reveal how
“mother-in-law” figure is used in Turkish Advertising is the main purpose of this
study.
To reach this purpose, 7 TV commercials which broadcasted in Turkey are
analysed by semiology. Semiology, when applied to advertising, is an attempt to
construct the meaning from both verbal and non-verbal signs through
understanding and interpretation. The semiotic approach suggests that the
meaning of an ad does not float on the surface just waiting to be internalized by the
viewer, but is built up out of the ways that different signs are organized and related
to each other, both within the ad and through external references to wider belief
systems. For advertising to create meaning the reader or the viewer has to do
some work because the meaning is not lying there on the page or screen; one has
to make an effort to grasp it.
The commercials are analysed by semiologic terms that constituted and developed
by different semioticians as Floch, Barthes, and Williamson. Three of the
commercials were chosen from consumer durables, an other three from food
category and one of them from home textile. Five of the brands were local and two
of them were global. But the executions of global brands were local too. Different
mother-in-law, daughter-in-law arguments from different sociocultural groups are
observed in each of the commercial. In this way, it’s assumed that we can see the
reflections of mother-in-law, daughter-in-law relations of each sociocultural group.
As a result of this research, we see that the mother in law figure in Turkish
advertising, is a hard but beatable woman. A little bit jealous, absolutely mad about
her son. Never trusts her daughter in law totally. She is a woman who has all the
skills a housewife must have and is proud of it and put nothing above these skills,
sees her mother in law as a challenge and a “mother of son” who tries to protect
her ruleship.
JEL: M3
Keywords: advertising, culture, mother-in-law, daughter-in-law, TV, communication
________________________________________________
Sibel Kurt, Research Assistant in Communication Sciences Faculty, Public Relations and Advertising
Department, Anadolu University, Turkey, Email: sibelkurt@anadolu.edu.tr