Semantic and syntactic evaluations of food brand slogans / Noraziah Mohd Amin, Nursafwah Tugiman and Mohamad Noor Salehhuddin Sharipudin

Food is one of the most purchased products by consumers and therefore, food advertising is omnipresent. Advertising slogans’ choice of language is crucial to the meaning they wish to communicate and the meaning they convey depends on the words they contain. Realizing this, the present study was implemented with the objective to investigate the syntactic and semantic elements of the selected fictitious food slogans. Firstly, to confirm food as the item that consumers buy the most, a pre-test was conducted involving consumers rating product importance, relevance and familiarity. Then, six food slogans were fictitiously created based on the linguistic properties proposed by several scholars for a brand slogan. Next, seven language experts were recruited from a local university to perform linguistic analysis of the slogans. Convenience sampling method was used to recruit the seven reviewers from a nearby university. Following this, an examination of their background was performed to screen for its relevance to the topic at hand as well as necessary experience. The findings show that the slogans mostly are evaluated as being easy to comprehend, having clear messages and being suitable for advertising campaigns especially the slogans, “My new favourite juice”, “Healthy or tasty? Why not both?” and “Has healthy ever tasted so good?” These results seem to suggest that a slogan can be in the forms of a statement or a question, and its form will not affect its comprehension and compatibility for advertising purposes but rather the words it contains that contribute to its meaning.