Reconstructed ethnicity tourism and cultural identity in third world communities

The thesis of this paper is that ethnicity is produced by group-level interactions and ethnic forms evolve as a result of changing structural relations between groups and rhetorical explanations and accounts of inter-group similarities and differences. The evidence for this argument is composed mainly of statements made by leaders and representatives of one group about other groups, and responses to such statements. These statements and associated behaviors are analyzed semiotically in that no distinction is made between the words of movement leaders and such matters as the wearing of an Afro hair style: they are both read as statements about group structure and the history of inter-group relations, although one may be in a more accessible idiom than the other. The paper concludes that the institutions associated with modern mass tourism also function as powerful shapers of ethnic identity.     

符号学视角下的旅游地竞争力解读——以清东陵为例

将符号学理论引入旅游地竞争力研究,分析旅游地符号化运作的内在动因,探索根据旅游符号识别特征建立显性符号系统和隐性符号系统两个主类。以世界文化遗产清东陵为例进行实证研究,对旅游符号系统进行符号语言统计与解读,从旅游地景观展示、旅游形象和旅游者行为3个方面认知符号学带给旅游地竞争力的启示。     

Consumer Culture and Political Ideology Plots in Social Media Campaigns

A number of studies are devoted to explicating global consumer culture and political ideology plots in traditional advertising. Nevertheless, studies of these plots in social media campaigns are scarce. In order to fill this gap, our study examines consumer culture and political ideology plots utilized by global brands in social media advertisements targeted to US Millennials. Employing semiotic analysis, a series of advertisements from automotive, food and beverage, electronics, personal care products, fast food, athletics and financial sectors were evaluated and interpreted. Our findings uncovered one unique main plot labeled “identity-of-self” and three subplots: 1) successful and young living, 2) Peter Pan syndrome, and 3) purposeful connectedness. Implications for practice and directions for future work are suggested.     

Positioning in political marketing: How semiotic analysis adds value to traditional survey approaches

Abstract

The 2010 British election particularly focused on the party leaders’ images – a departure in fifty years of British elections. The principal contribution of the article is to illustrate how a combined approach to assessing leadership positioning using both the traditional survey and semiotic analysis can provide insights into what image attribute dimensions end up in the minds of members of the public (actual positioning) and on what image attribute dimensions party marketers are trying to position themselves (intended positioning). Using data from the 2010 British general elections, our findings indicate that the combined methodological approach would be particularly useful for brands that need repositioning, those whose image attribute positions change dramatically over time, and those who wish to target previously unresponsive target audience segments.     

Marketing hedonics: Toward a psychoanalysis of advertising response

The author advances a psychoanalytic theory of advertising response to theorize the intersection of brand positioning, the semiotics of gender, and consumer desire in advertising discourse. Researchers traditionally focus on the iconic representation of desire in advertising imagery. However, by drawing upon Lacan's theory of scopophelia, the author focuses on the dialectical implication of the spectator/consumer's psychic drives in the visual semiotics of advertising discourse. The consumer identifies with the brand discourse primarily by means of projective identification with the voyeuristic gaze of the camera referenced in the image, and only secondarily because of perceived parallels between consumer lifestyle and the content of the advertisement. By way of illustration, the author analyzes the positioning of consumer desire in homoerotic advertising for Calvin Klein and Dolce & Gabbana, which draws upon resistance discourses in contemporary art to hold the consumer in a passion play of alternative sexualities and subject positions. Though these campaigns deconstruct the conventional binary opposition of male voyeur/female object of the gaze, they have contributed to the broad popularity of these brands because the brand discourse – logo, product placement, and rhetoric – restores a conventional logic to these advertisements that would have been censored from the worlds of popular culture and fine art.     

Consuming symbolism: marketing D-Day and Normandy

This exploratory study examines experience engineering at select tourist sites of the D-Day landing area in Normandy, France. Using Holt’s 1995 typology of symbolic consumption as an interpretive frame, a number of significant museums, cemeteries, gun batteries, beaches and plinths were examined. Interactions with the public at these sites including the introspection of five academics were compiled, compared and interpreted. The experiences of D-Day visitors were then considered in relation to the range of consumption metaphors afforded by Holt’s model. The results are consistent with Holt’s explanation of symbolic consumption. These rich and nuanced examples of experiential consumption are typified by the four consumption metaphors of Holt’s model; namely, Experience, Integration, Play and Classification. By doing this the widespread practise, scale and techniques of experience engineering by site managers/curators is evident. The differing and inconsistent staged authenticity by stakeholders and curators invites implicational consideration.     

How advertising elicits desire and provides role models: insights from colonialism

Through application of the visual social semiotic approach, this study analyzes and compares the images of women represented in the promotional artifacts for mooncake and firecracker products, which have different gender identities, in the early-to-middle twentieth-century colonial Macau. The study identifies two types of images of women – the role model targeted at female consumers of mooncakes and the desire elicitor targeted at male consumers of firecrackers, both of which resemble the ideal image of women defined in the Confucian patriarchal system. The study implies the limitations of applying the Western gender framework in a complex socio-cultural context and offers a framework for analyzing the semiotic resources that have historically been inherent in the representation of women in the Chinese dominated culture.     

Rosanzerusu is Los Angeles an anthropological inquiry of Japanese tourists

The popularity of Los Angeles with Japanese tourists prompts the anthropologist to ask what they are seeking there. An ethnography of that tourism discloses a number of “must see” sights for first time tourists. Subsequent tourists may seek more esoteric sites, as disclosed by an examination of tourist guide texts. Tourists progress from “mass” to “elite” status. Against a theoretical perspective of life as “sacred journey”, and of pilgrimage, tourism is seen as a ritual of modernity, amenable to semiotic analysis in the manner of Barthes. Los Angeles' ecumenical tourism reflects the mythology of the movies. Japanese tourists select sites drawn from this mythology which also reflect Japanese preferences (e.g., the Hollywood Bowl). They also emphasize sites where they may purchase souvenir or “marker” goods (e.g., UCLA). They thus attach importance to some sites thought to be quite minor by Angelenos.     

An alternative structuralist approach to the psychology of tourism marketing

The paper begins with a brief discussion of the way in which traditional psychology would approach the subject of decoding the myths and meanings which package holiday companies seek to communicate through their holiday brochures. This approach is contrasted with an analysis using semiotic techniques. The approach is essentially a cognitive one in which it is suggested that holiday companies attempt to attract holidaymakers not through the overt and superficial attributes of holiday destinations as portrayed in the brochure photographs, but by providing the reader with a range of cultural tools with which fantasy, meaning, and identity can be created and constructed. The holidaymaker becomes an active participant in the creation and maintenance of ideology and myth.     

黑色旅游及其符号研究

汶川5·12地震后，关于四川是否开展以及如何开展黑色旅游曾在国内引起广泛的争议，但黑色旅游在西方国家发展良好，并已经成为一种独特的旅游形式。从符号学视角出发，建立“黑色旅游”符号的三角体系，对黑色旅游名称及其表征、内涵进行分析，解读其内在涵义（公共探讨死亡，纪念英雄、缅怀死者和思想教育），以期为全面地认识黑色旅游提供参考。