Social Semiotics of Advertisements with special context of

Indian Tourism Sector.

Research Problem

The research area would be the on The Semiotics of advertising in Social Advertisements
especially in the context of tourism in India. The research will cover the significance of
advertisements of Indian Tourism Industry which is growing drastically every year. The
research will be done through Halliday's metafunctional theory (1978), which has been
used to theorize numerous semiotic resources in western cultures: language, visual
images, speech, music, sound and movement and also Umberto Eco advertising codes
which also illustrate different levels of visual codification like, Barthes’s uncoded iconic
message which states that every ad has both a denotative and a connotative meaning. The
iconographic which is based upon the historical, cultural and genre conventions and its
purpose is to understand and explicate the meaning behind what is represented. The
tropological level, with the visual equivalents of rhetorical figures and the enthymematic
level, with the actual structure of the visual argumentation—that is, an incomplete
syllogism that is implied by the juxtaposition of images.

Semiotics serves as a useful set of tools for identifying many of the formal patterns that
work to make meaning in many aspects of our culture, and especially in the
communication media. Media in today’s world is not medium of communication but it
plays an important role of effectively convincing people for the product for solving
problems which people are unaware until unless some clever public relations campaign
persuades them that something natural is really unnatural and unacceptable. Media has
convinced millions of American women that what every medical source considers
“normal body weight” is really abnormal and cause for severe dieting (Wolf, 1991).
Similarly, grey hair which naturally develops with age is now something to all are
supposed to cover up (Greer, 1992). Barthes identifies the signifier and signified as the
model of object. The term ‘alibi’ Barthes used in Mythologies functions to identify signs.
Advertising also faces huge criticism as it uses stereotype gender specific roles of men
and a woman reinforcing existing clichés and it has been criticized as inadvertently or
even intentionally promoting sexism, racism, and ageism. It was Roland Barthes’
Mythologies that showed how a semiotic approach to French culture can offer astonishing
insights and his study of Japanese culture and society. Barthes was a tourist when he
visited Japan. Empire of Signs offers us a model for the semiotic analysis of tourism.

Introduction

Semiotic advertising research was first laid by Roland Barthes in Elements of

Semiology and “Rhetoric of the Image” (1967). This semiological approach is
characterized by the application of principles and methods of structuralist linguistics with
concepts such as system, structure, pertinence, distinctiveness, segmentation, and
combination to the visual, verbal, and symbolic messages in advertising. Barthes's main
tool of investigation was Louis Hjelmslev's semantic dichotomy of denotation versus
connotation. Denotation is the literal or core meaning of a sign and connotation refers to
secondary meanings associated with it, the theory of connotation appeared to be a most
appropriate tool for the discovery of “hidden” layers of meaning in the advertising
message. For Barthes, advertisement conveys a denotational meaning in the form of a
noncoded iconic message and also photographic image of the product as a denotational
“message without a code” and connotational meanings in the form of a coded iconic or
symbolic message based on our associated cultural knowledge. In general, advertising the
signifiers of connotative signs amalgamate into systems of connotations that form the
rhetoric of advertising.

Semotics plays a crucial role in catching the attention of targeted audience such as
women, men, adults or teens. The position of images, text, colors, and other signs is a key
part of the overall success of an advertisement. Print advertisement is an excellent
example of identity-image producing media. The nature of the product is tied directly to
identity—those objects with which we encase our bodies for public display—and fashion
is acknowledged as a cultural language of “style”. Most of these signs simply seem to
denote things or people which the images represent, or to assign the referents of the
linguistic signs.

Aims and Objectives

The Aim and the objective of the research are to work upon the semiotics aspects of
Indian advertising which undertake the advertising of Indian Tourism Industry, as all
over the world it is promoted as a means to achieving development, and India is no
exception. When combining already sensitive ‘conflict’ zones with tourism development,
it is likely that more conflicts will surface. When movies like Slumdog Millionaire and
Salaam Bombay scathingly depicted the abject poverty and a general backwardness of the
populace; the constant presence of terrorist threats & lack of proper disaster management
techniques, it is a mockery by the Indian tourism industry along with the advertising
world to flout such glaring realities.

Method of the research

The problem of the research is to look into significance of advertising in Indian Tourism
industry. The primary method of the research will be to Advertisements, mages, texts etc
and also collation and synthesis of existing research on semiotics of advertising and
Indian Tourism. Narratives, Stories based upon advertisements. Understanding of signs
and there signification of the Indian Tourism advertisements. Story Boards of electronic
as well print advertisement also part of collection and interpretation.

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