Business’s Social Orientation: Genre Specificity of Sports Brands’ Accounts in the Social Media

Abstract

The research focuses on the analysis of social marketing communicative tools used for positioning and promotion of products manufactured by sports brands Puma, Reebok, and Adidas Originals. Sportswear and equipment are connected with sports, being a system of social values. That is why PR and advertisement specialists pay much of their attention to the resources of social marketing, which allow combining commercial goals with socially oriented activities, thus decreasing a critical perception of brand positioning materials. The authors research genre specificity of sports brands’ accounts on Facebook to define the correlation of advertising and phatic genres of social support, aimed at broadcasting socially important priorities and guidelines. The research is carried out in the frameworks of communicative-pragmatic approach; the methodology used includes the methods of discourse analysis, linguistic description, and intent analysis. According to the results of the analysis, socially oriented messages posted on sports brands’ Facebook accounts amount to one third of all uploaded messages. It helps the companies to promote not only their products but also some socially important values, such as healthy lifestyle, a way in which people should perceive their bodies, themselves, and the whole world around them. The main trend of positioning activities on Facebook is hybridization of the genres used, which consists in combining advertising and socially oriented genres. It helps to camouflage the advertising message, making its manipulative character more obscure. As the result of such communication policy, social networks’ users become a sort of advertising agents distributing information about the company and its products.