Content area
Abstract
This thesis explores the language of industrial purchasing as it is used by participants in an industrial purchasing context. The focus of the study is on the critical analysis of the basic rhetorical tendencies of an organization engaged in business-to-business cataloging. The overriding question posed in the study is: How does a business marketer utilize language symbols in a direct marketing catalog to "invite" favorable buyer response?
To ground the analysis, it was assumed that verbatim buyer focus group transcripts and a seller's promotional catalog provide factual examples of language representative of ongoing social dialogue in the purchase situation. The critical perspective exemplified in this study was Kenneth Burke's dramatism. Dramatism provided both a theoretical and methodological perspective for describing the functional characteristics of language use in the buying situation studied. The two concepts central to this perspective are identification and the pentad. These concepts provided a framework for the description and comparison of buyer and seller experience revealed in the naming, forming, and structuring activities characteristic of language use. Analysis of the buyer's discourse provided tentative criteria for the evaluation of the seller's catalog appeals and aided in the formulation of testable propositions explaining the relationship between the use of particular strategies of naming, forming, and structuring and the inducement of purchase behavior in the context under study.
It was found that the seller's direct marketing catalog appeals failed to make full use of appropriate strategies of naming, forming, and structuring, and thus, do not invite significant identification with buyers. The weighing of the rhetorical features of the seller's catalog appeals against the criteria of effectiveness derived from the Burkeian concepts, and the normative features of buyer discourse suggested that the seller's catalog falls short of what it is possible to accomplish in terms of identification and persuasion in the purchase situation serving as the context of the study.
Theoretical and methodological implications for rhetorical criticism, direct marketing, and qualitative research are suggested, along with recommendations for future research.
