Emotional advertising in Morocco during the COVID-19 pandemic: A semiotic analysis

Abstract

The world recently went through the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic – a highly infectious disease that has changed people’s lives drastically in many ways. This pandemic has also pushed the government and companies to use numerous advertising strategies either to promote their products or attract people’s attention. Emotions, most of which are manifested subconsciously, are significantly exploited by advertising agencies, because the former are deemed to be the very fabric nature of the human soul and are, as Heath puts it, ‘so powerful that we cannot make a decision unless our emotions concur with it’ (p. 10). One of the many effective strategies used is emotional advertising which is exerted on the consumer’s subconscious chiefly at two levels: (1) the need for a product or service and (2) the fear of a particular adversity. This study, thus, is an attempt to examine and analyze Moroccan emotional advertising during the COVID-19 pandemic from a semiotic perspective. This article uses the principles of a qualitative approach, taking into account Barthes’s basic notions of meaning. Through the verbal and nonverbal signs, the semiotic analysis at hand is an attempt to demonstrate the covert messages behind the emotional strategy of advertising manifested amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The results lead to a relative understanding of how these advertising agencies took advantage of the health crisis then so as to promote goods or services.