Unstable relationships in advertising: A changing text

The article is analysis of ten letters addressed to a customer. In these letters an international magazine attempts to convince the customer to renew his yearly subscription.

The discourse of advertising

The discourse of advertising is a socio-cultural reflection of the society in which occurs.
From the critical perspective the adverts are messages that exert some degree of power in our lives.
Because the adverts are so changing we can observe that there are unstable relations between the people who produce them and the receivers.

The nature of advertisements

Adverts: Genre?
Can all the adverts be considered a genre? Are they sharing a sufficient number of elements of structure to make them a homogeneous class?
The organisational properties of genres
Generic Structure Potential – series of obligatory elements, a series of optional elements, and the order in which they appear. Two texts belong to the same genre if they share the same GSP.
Adverts have too many changes – changes in the field of discourse, the mode of discourse and the tenor of discourse (relationships between participants).

The use of language associated with a particular social practice

For specifying the structural features of adverts we need a definition of a participants and relations between them.

The “Direct mailing marketing campaign”

That is a sub-genre of adverts.
That is very elaborate, based on a sociological survey of the features of the subscriber prototype.
This is a set of letters in which some company attempts to convince the customer to do something
(in case of this article – to renew a subscription for magazine).