Compensating For The Immaterial. A Lexical And Semantic Analysis Of American Bank Slogans

The aim of this paper is to conduct a lexical and semantic analysis of bank slogans in order to shed light on how the immaterial character of financial services as well as the channel of communication – in this instance the Internet – influence the choice of vocabulary. We chose to focus on the case of the United States of America as there is an online index of over five thousand existing banks with links to their websites if they have a presence online. This allowed us to create a database of over fourteen hundred slogans from as many banks. The methodology, described in the first part of the study, relies on empirical research and content analysis with the help of online tools used to generate a word count based on our sample. The results obtained were presented as bar charts showing groups of words and their number of occurrences in descending order. This allowed to highlight meaningful word clusters and to identify the lexical and semantic patterns of American bank slogans. The findings reveal a small cluster of words (including determiners, conjunctions and prepositions) with an occurrence rate superior to 1%, sufficient, however, to establish the main semantic patterns further supported and enriched by the analysis of two more clusters (0.5%-1% and 0.2%-0.5%). It becomes apparent that, through this form of asynchronous communication, American banks seek to compensate for the immateriality of the service provided by using slogans which help establish their identity within the community they serve and humanize the banking experience through the creation of a meaningful relationship with their (potential) customers.