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The present paper will illustrate..

-The Body

Diesel Ads Exploit Polysemy
The Diesel brand has a long tradition of polysemic advertising, and it tends to show the same ads all over the world. Its website, www.diesel.com has, at the time of writing in early April 2009, no mention of clothing but a series of short movies, some featuring Pete the meat puppet. The movies are entertaining in an off-the-wall, genre-subversive way. The Diesel spring 2009 men’s print campaign continues the edgy, polysemic style begun in the 1990s which made use of both polysemy and intertextuality to try to draw the consumer into a deeper engagement, and at the same time to signal the quirky, witty, but irrelevant values of the brand. One ad (in the 1990s series) featured an enigmatic scene of bodybuilders wearing white sailor caps and bathing briefs. The scene included scientific equipment and puzzled spectators viewing from behind a red rope, as if they were at an exibition or performance. The only direct reference to the brand was a brand name logo in small type in the corner.

Such ads are visually intriguing because they challenge our preconceptions about images and visual context. The viewer wants to make connections between the images: humans actively try to make sense of data, even where there is little to be made. Perception is subject to a Gestalt impulse whereby humans try to complete visual cues to form a coherent whole. In polysemic ads that mix visual cues drawn from unconnected discourses, this impulse draws us into the ad as we try to make the visual cues into a story we understand.

Visual Rhetoric and Metaphor in Advertising
Covert meaning is often conveyed in advertising though pictorial, auditory or linguistic metaphor. If a branded bottle of alcoholic drink is pictured juxtaposed with scenes of fit, young, affluent people, then the metaphoric link is clear. For example, Martini used to be advertised in the UK as a drink enjoyed by swimsuited young men and women diving from a yacht moored at a tropical island. The juxtaposition of a branded alcohol drink with apparent wealth, attractiveness and physical fitness is exactly the opposite of what one might reasonably expect, since alcohol drinking is quite likely to make exponents fat and unfit, and may also make them poor if they drink enough. The covert communication in this campaign was preposterous but was nevertheless clear. The Martini brand was used as a metaphor for sexual attractiveness and the good life. It matters little that the drink may often be consumed in social contexts that are, on the face of it, as far from the good life as one might wish to be.

*Guinness Advertising and Polysemy
Guinness advertisements are often media events in themselves. The brand has created a strong tradition of creatively flamboyant and often expensive advertising that does not carry a sales message as such. The famous ‘White Hourse’ ad produced by London agency, AMV BBDO, portrays a group of middle-aged beach bums on an exotic island waiting for and finding their perfect surfing wave. The creative strategy exploited the frustrating fact that ordering a pint of Guinness in a bar entails a fairly long wait while the beer settles. The voice-over states that ‘he waits, and he waits…’ until the perfect wave arrives. There is no explicit (or ostensive) marketing message, other than a brief shot of a pint of stout to help those completely in the dark about the identity of the manufacturer generously funding this lavish entertainment. Guinness is well aware that its famous stout is an unusual, acquired taste. They are, it seems, content that their legendary creative advertising tradition is polysemic in that it can often be interpreted in many ways, including the interpretation that it means nothing at all.

In principle, any communication is open to varied interpretations since meaning itself is rooted in culturally-based forms of understanding. Once the incorrigibility of meaning is acknowledged, the complexity of the task facing marketing communications specialists can be understood. Creative professionals in advertising overcome the problem of the indeterminancy (or polysemy) of meaning in advertising by hinting through a suggestive juxtaposition that certain values are associated with certain brands, rather than by making claims which, if taken literally, would seem ridiculous. More importantly, advertising agencies put up claims that, if they were made explicit, would open them up to criticism or censure. It is a measure of a poor general understanding of communication when advertising regulation and legislation focus on the ostensive content of ads and largely ignore the implied or covert meanings that ads carry.

Polysemy of meaning creates the space for consumers of advertising to use some license in reinterpreting ads creatively according to their own cultural reference points and reflecting their own sense of identity. The text of advertising, its prima facie meaning, can sometimes be its least interesting aspect because consumers may reject marketing strategies that seem too contrived or obvious. They may, however, use advertising and the brands that are advertised in ways that subvert the marketing text but reflect the consumers’ own values and social strategies. For example, UK consumers once mocked ads for the Skoda car, inventing jokes at the brand’s expense. Skoda improved the quality of their products and then exploited the fact that their brand had become so well known by creating ads that referred to its poor public image with strap lines such as ‘It’s Skoda - honest’. Consumers knew that the brand was mocking their poor (and flawed) perception of it, but the manufacturer gambled that consumers would enjoy the joke at their expense and understand that there was a serious point: that Skoda cars were much improved.

We define advertising meaning as a subjective decoding of an advertisement shaped by the individual's sociocultural milieu (Martin, Strack, and Stapel, 2001; McCracken, 1986; Ringberg and Reihlen, 2008). We define advertising polysemy as the existence of at least two distinct interpretations for the same advertising message across audiences, or across time and situations. Given the prevailing focus of advertising research on attitudinal process, it should be stressed that interpreting an ad is inherently different from liking it. Polysemy occurs when people generate different basic understandings of the same message, not merely different attitudes (Condit, 1989).

1 Synchronic Polysemy
One form of polysemy in advertising occurs across two or more audiences at a certain point in time-the synchronic aspect of advertising polysemy. The typical case is an ad that means one thing to one group of consumers and something different to another (e.g., Grier and Brumbaugh, 1999). For instance, an ad targeting members of a subculture may feature cues that can mean different things to different people depending on their level of subcultural knowledge. For example, an Australian TV ad for Kentucky Fried Chicken caused a media storm when it was replayedin America (O'Malley, 2010). The ad featured an Australian cricket supporter sharing his chicken meal with West Indian cricket fans. To the Australian cricket subculture the ad was a harmless portrayal of enthusiastic West Indian cricket fans. But to African-American audiences, devoid of the sporting and cultural references on which the ad depended, the result was a racist depiction of people of color and their stereotypical love for fried chicken.

Brands allow firms to serve mass markets with a standardized offering. In recent years, however, the trend toward market disaggregation due to new technology and shifting social trends has started to raise questions about the role played by brands in society (Dawar, 2004). In the age of "one-to-one marketing," "mass customization," and online forums such as YouTube, brands must be able to serve the specific goals and situation of each consumer or otherwise risk becoming obsolete. One way for managers to adapt to this changing landscape may be to create ever narrower brands focused on specific benefits (Rust, Zeithaml, and Lemon, 2004). Another strategy may be instead to create more flexible brands that are able to speak to consumers with different needs and concerns (Kates and Goh, 2003). The notion of purposeful polysemy- advertising polysemy emerging as a consequence of a firm's strategic efforts-should therefore become increasingly relevant to both academics and practitioners.

Occasionally, advertisers deliberately design ads to support multiple interpretations. For instance, Absolut vodka is often described as a brand that tailors its meaning to different audiences using visual cues that are amenable to multiple interpretations (Kates and Goh, 2003; Schroeder, 2002)-as in an ad featuring a painting by artist and AIDS victim Keith Haring that could be interpreted as stressing Absolut's support of the avant-garde or the fight against AIDS, depending, for example, on the media context or the audience's knowledge.

2 Positioning Goal
Purposeful polysemy with a targeting goal relies on synchronic polysemy (i.e., between individuals) to accomplish its strategic role. Firms, however, can also meet strategic objectives by focusing on diachronic polysemy (i.e., within individuals). Specifically, purposeful polysemy can be implemented to communicate and underline to target customers (multiple) core features of a brand in a succinct and effective way (positioning goal). To exemplify this notion, consider Flowserve, the worldwide leader in the production of valves and pumps for the oil and chemical industries. Flowserve's mission statement is "Experience in motion." This statement stresses two different characteristics of the company: (1) "Experience in motion" as "experience in the business of moving fluids," which emphasizes the core area of operation and helps identify what the company does; and (2) "Experience in motion" as "experienced company that does not rest on its laurels," which focuses attention on the firm's heritage while at the same time highlighting its drive to remain at the leading edge of its industry in the future.

Protecting and reinforcing core brand associations should be a paramount concern of brand managers (Roedder John, et al., 2006). Adopting purposeful polysemy with a positioning goal in a brand's communication strategy, such as slogans or mission statements, should result in strengthening of multiple brand associations over time. These associations, moreover, may become better connected in memory as a consequence of being simultaneously presented to consumers. These aspects-strength and fit of core associations-are crucial building blocks toward a high order and differentiated brand positioning (Keller, 1998). Besides the documented positive response to artful expressions in marketing communication (e.g., Dimofte and Yalch, 2007), which is the focus of the next type of purposeful polysemy-stressing multiple core brand features should therefore have beneficial repercussions. Inparticular, relative to simpler statements focusing on one association:

4 Social Norms Goal
The fourth type of purposeful polysemy occurs when the use of ambiguous messages allows the advertiser to promote a controversial message without breaking advertising conventions or societal standards of appropriateness (social norms goal) (e.g., Stern, 1992). An example is the 1910 slogan "The skin you love to touch" by Woodbury soap. As pointed out by Scott: "if the reader was interested in looking sexy to her husband (or to others), then the line might win her interest in the product. At the same time, the mask of the double meaning satisfied the need to appear chaste". Purposeful polysemy with a social norms goal becomes an increasingly attractive strategy as the potential backlash from the intended message grows. As a consequence:

P4: Purposeful polysemy with a social norms goal is more likely to be used to promote a given message in more socially conservative markets or, more generally, when the intended message breaks a taboo within a society.

2 Transmission Meaning (до этого - Encoding Meaning)
Semioticians, linguists, and social psychologists concur that contextual variables play a key role in opening and closing an ad's range of possible interpretations (e.g., Bakhtin, 1981; Eco, 1976; Kishner and Gibbs, 1996; Kleine and Kernan, 1991). Contextual influences on advertising polysemy can take many forms. We focus on the media context surrounding an ad and on the social context at the time of message exposure.

1 Media Context
Consumers interpret advertising messages based on their content as well as the medium used to transmit it (e.g., Malthouse, Calder, and Tamhane, 2007). For example, Diesel built a fashion brand positioned at the delicate intersection of youthful playfulness and exclusive luxury. Brand management relies on careful media planning-the same message can be perceived quite differently by consumers depending on whether it is placed, for instance, in a fashion magazine versus a lifestyle publication targeting the young. This discussion stresses that media context is a critically important antecedent of advertising interpretation. Media context-the programming or editorial content surrounding an advertising message-can close or open an ad's range of tenable interpretations by making its meaning more or less ambiguous. The importance of such effects is demonstrated by the breadth of advertisingresearch dedicated to the influence of media context (e.g., Pavelchak, Antil, and Munch, 1989; Yi, 1990).

P6: Social and media contexts can either provide cues for the disambiguation of a polysemic message or turn an apparently "closed" text into a polysemic one.

Advertisers are sometimes able to anticipate features of the social context. Examples are social viewing during the Super Bowl (Pavelchak, Antil, and Munch, 1989) or specific forms of communication such as transport or outdoorsadvertising. Nevertheless, in general, it is difficult to predict the social situation in which a given consumer is likely to be when encountering a message. For example, print ads in a magazine may be read in the privacy of one's home or in a public space. Their greater ability to control the media than the social context at the time of ad exposure suggests:

Considering psychology's epistemological tradition, it isn't surprising that much psychological research endorses the structuralist notions of denotation and connotation (Richins, 1994). Psychologists often distinguish between lexical meaning and psychological meaning (Friedmann and Zimmer, 1988). Lexical meaning refers to the conventional relationship between a word and its referent. Psychological meaning refers to a person's subjective perception of a stimulus (Szalay and Deese, 1978). The notion of psychological meaning opens the possibility of polysemic readings (Kleine and Kernan, 1991; Mick, 1992). Structuralist semiotics and psychology therefore argue that polysemy occursin most cases at the second, ideologically charged, stage of the meaning-making process.

Semiotic models empower the individual with the capability of selecting a specific reading from a potentially infinite number of interpretations. Texts are defined as open or closed as a function of the breadth of tenable interpretations (Eco, 1976). The range of possible interpretations for a message, however, is not the same across all readers. A text's degree of openness is jointly determined by characteristics of the text (i.e., its inherent potential for polysemic readings) and of the reader (i.e., his or her cultural competency in detecting such ambiguities; McQuarrie and Mick, 1999). Connotative meanings are less stable than denotative meanings because in general more knowledge is needed to decode connotative meanings than denotative meanings. As a consequence:

P9: Groups of readers will share certain reading strategies in ad decoding, leading to the emergence of a discrete number of viable interpretations.

2 Consumers' Goals: Resistive Readings
When approaching the issue of how a reader relates to the message and to the author who produced it, we have often found mention in the multidisciplinary literature examined to a confrontational dialectic-for example, to the existence of a "power struggle" between reader and writer. The struggle for control over ad meaning characterizes interpretive disciplines such as reader-response theory, cultural studies, and poststructuralist semiotics (Ceccarelli, 1998; Scott, 1994). Psychological models of subjective text comprehension also underscore the role of the reader's experience and goals in generating meanings that are at odds with those intended by the authors (e.g., Mick, 1992). Similarly, within pragmatics, a field that studies how language is used in conversations, Nerlich and Clarke (2001) stress the issue of power by introducing the concept of "semantic trap," which occurs when a speaker's naive expression of an ambiguous phrase is exploited by the listener, as in a slapstick comedy where an unintentional double entendre generates laughter in the audience and embarrassment in the speaker.

Thus far, our discussion of resistive readings has focused on social tensions as a key antecedent for their occurrence. The notion of resistive reading is, however, useful for understanding advertising polysemy in a broader set of circumstances than implied by this approach. Advertising polysemy as active resistance can simply be the product of consumers' social use of advertising (Ritson and Elliott, 1999)-for example, when a resistive reading is used as a source of jokes in conversation (Nerlich and Clarke, 2001). In this context, the act of forcing an alternative reading on an ad is motivated by the social benefits afforded by the exploitation of ads for conversational purposes (Ritson and Elliott, 1999). Thus:

P12: In the absence of political overtones, resistive readings are likely to be generated by consumers in social situations and for social purposes.

3 Proximal Context (до этого - Social Context)
The second layer of influence on consumer interpretation processes is proximal context: the immediate circumstancesin which the decoding act takes place. In general, advertisers have control over the medium through which their message is transmitted. Media planning therefore forms an integral part of the strategy of purposeful polysemy. Advertisers have instead much more limited control over the other main source of transmission meaning: social context. The influence of social context on advertising interpretation can take many forms, from explicit ones (see, e.g., the concept of hermeneutic depth) to more implicit ones (e.g., social context as a prime for knowledge structures).

4 Distal Context
We distinguish between proximal and distal contexts to discriminate between the effect of the broad cultural context that influences both encoding and decoding within the communication process and the effect of the specific situationin which decoding takes place. Advertising does not exist in a vacuum-variables such as cultural norms and mass media influence advertising reception (Brown, Stevens, and Maclaren, 1999). These macro variables have been demonstrated by priming experiments (e.g., Hong et al., 2000) and subculture studies (e.g., Kates, 2002). It has long been established across a number of disciplines that culture shapes the interpretive frames that consumers use to perceive cultural products such as advertisements (McCracken, 1987). Culture influences not only the act of decoding, but also that of encoding. Advertising copywriting relies on a canon of established rules (Scott, 1994; Solomon and Greenberg, 1993). These dos and don'ts of advertising practice are the expression of cultural conventions. Moreover, beyond the advertising canon, advertisers are influenced by their cultural background when they design ads. For example, research has documented cross-cultural variability in advertising copy (e.g., Albers-Miller and Gelb, 1996).