| Summary: | 碩士 === 銘傳大學 === 設計管理研究所 === 92 === That advertising makes use of metaphors is named metaphor advertising. Based on the analogy theory in psychology, metaphor can be defined as a familiar object, concept, or behavior (Base domain) which is adopted to express an unfamiliar one (Target domain), and the similarity between base and target helps consumers interpret the advertising message. However metaphor deviates from the consumers’ expectation for catching the attention and adding fun to the advertising, but it implicates the possibilities of misunderstanding. Therefore, the similarity between two domains plays a crucial role in transmission of message to understand the metaphor advertising. The principal purpose of this study was to explore the categories of similarity between base and target domains. Additionally, the frequency of using similarity related to “award-winning or not”, “different media” and “different types of products”, which be defined as independent variables, was probed.
Through literature review, the similarity relationships between base and target domains in the print advertising were classified to five categories of relationships: “mere appearance”, “symbol similarity”, “function similarity”, “coordinate relationship similarity”, and “compound similarity”. Except the symbol similarity, the other categories of relationships were further divided into subcategories, the subcategories of mere appearance namely: “shape”, “color”, “material” and “texture”; the subcategories of function similarity namely: “function” and “instinct”; the subcategories of coordinate relationship similarity namely: “cause”, “comparison”, and “status”. The compound similarity means the combination of two or more categories of relationships, such as “appearance pluses function similarity”, or “symbol combines function and coordinate relationship similarity”.
A content analysis was conducted to code and analyze 450 advertisings. The Chi-square tests show that conclusions are described as follows. Firstly, the using frequencies of categories was ranked：1st “function similarity”, 2nd “symbol similarity”, 3rd “mere appearance”, 4th “coordinate relationship similarity”, and 5th “compound similarity”. Secondly, the using frequencies of subcategories: (1) “shape” was over “color”, (2) “function” over “instinct”, (3) “cause” relationship was the most used in coordinate relationship similarity, and (4) “appearance pluses function similarity” was the most used in compound similarity. Thirdly, there were no significant differences in independent variables besides “types of products”.
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