Strategy Variations in Roadside Outdoor Advertising: A Psycholinguistic Perspective of Czech, German and Bolivian Campaigns

This paper explores the role of consumer perception of self within a social setting and how it shapes marketing communication and advertisement strategy formation. The study reflects on current trends of social advertisements by examining traffic safety related messages of outdoor advertisement practices. Utilizing an alternative cross-disciplinary approach, it adopts psycholinguistic analytical tools for interpreting marketing communication strategies with respect to the consumer behavioral patterns. Samples of roadside outdoor advertisements from both the commercial and non-commercial sectors were collected within three different countries – Czech Republic, Germany and Bolivia. Traffic related messages and their conversational functions were analyzed to demonstrate the variation of the communication strategies used. The concept of “face“ described by Brown & Levinson (1978) in their Politeness Theory, further developed by Ting-Toomey (1999) as the Conflict-Face-Negotiation Theory, was used for the interpretation of the advertising techniques. It is to argue that despite overt similarities of the message content and aim, significant differences in the utilization of strategies are adopted according to the type of the advertised subject, campaign objectives, related target market segments as well as the socio-cultural context. It is demonstrated that using an alternative approach to marketing communication can contribute to unfold a set of new techniques which can help to better understand the psychology of the consumer and develop relevant, customer targeted, modern advertising solutions.