Ethos and its modalities in advertising

Resum

This study focuses on the status of ethos in contemporary advertising strategies and aims to understand, using examples, how brands present themselves and manage their credibility from a discourse perspective. The research is composed of three parts, each discussing different aspects related to this topic, from a rhetoric and text semiotics standpoint.
The first part answers the question of what the Aristotelian ethos is. To what extent this concept concept includes two major features: one concerning a sender’s character based on tradition, and another referring to a charismatic reputation connected to the sender’s ability to project an appropriate (persuasive) subjectivity?
The second part aims to further develop these ideas, answering the following questions: what form do those features of ethos take in advertising? How can advertising discourse centred on ethos management connect with brand image strategies?
The last part puts forward the position that it is in some advertising utterances that is possible to attest to how the advertising ethos is managed, namely among those by which the advertising sender is explicitly or implicitly presented as an enunciator. How is this management embodied in some textual markers?
This study reviews epistemological contributions from Aristotelian rhetoric, textual and advertising semiotics to complement and deepen ideas already developed in other studies.