Brand Tone of Voice:

18 brand tone of voicebrand position. Brands seeking a more subliminal presence might be betterreinforced by typography, layout, image, and colour.This preliminary survey of referring expressions suggests that further systematicresearch would be useful in revealing the relationship between patterns oflexical cohesion and brand position. We can suggest, then, our first hypothesis,testable with consumers:Hypothesis 1: Brand strength. The strength of the reader’s impression ofthe brand will vary depending on the number and strength of referringexpressions that activate the brand or brand-related concepts.Testing this hypothesis will, of course, require a clear notion of what ‘strengthof impression’ might be in cognitive terms, and how to measure it.3.2 Participant rolesThe second technique for correlating language use with brand position isthe analysis of participant roles and the processes they are associated with inclauses. What kinds of processes is the brand associated with, particularly asagent or doer? What kinds of roles are left to or ascribed to readers? What otherparticipants are there in the processes reported in the text?This kind of study is related to what Fairclough (1989: 202) has called ‘buildingrelations’ between the producer/advertiser and the consumer, ‘buildingimages’ of products (in our case, brands), and ‘building consumers’ themselvesby associating them with ideal ‘subject positions’ in which they might be likelyto accept or reject the product and their relationship with it. We can captureits manifestation in language through applying the framework for looking atclause structure offered by Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday, 1994:101ff). This framework categorises verbs (known in the framework as processes)not through their form, but through their meaning, so that we can look at theeffect certain kinds of verbs have on the meaning of the text.The technique of looking at process types and their doers and done-tos hasbeen used successfully to analyse bias in newspaper reporting (Fowler et al.,1979), in the apportioning of blame in the reporting of crime of domesticviolence (Clark, 1992), and in an analysis of presumption of innocence or guiltin the Tracey Andrews ‘road rage’ murder (Delin, 2000: 28ff). Vestergaard andSchroder (1985: 27ff) have a useful discussion of the application of a similarapproach to an advertising text. A clear introduction to the categories of analysis(a useful supplement to Halliday) is given by Thompson (1996: 78ff).We can start our analysis with mental processes – those processes that areconcerned with mental states. Because mental processes are only available to