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Article published In: Metaphor and the Social World
Vol. 14:2 (2024) ► pp.233–257

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The journey metaphor in Huawei mobile phone commercials

 | University of Amsterdam
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Amsterdam.

Published online: 15 October 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.24010.jia
Abstract
This paper investigates the creative use of the structural, embodied journey metaphor within the genre of video advertising using Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). Conducting a qualitative analysis of eight Huawei mobile phone commercials, I examine how multimodal resources — visual, verbal and written language, as well as music and sound — are orchestrated to construct and communicate the metaphorical narrative of using a Huawei mobile phone in terms of a journey. The analysis reveals a heavy reliance on visual elements, supported by the strategic use of sound and music, to create metaphors that communicate progress and exploration — themes central to the journey concept. This paper shows how the journey metaphor in audio-visual advertising diverges from its purely verbal varieties by drawing on medium-specific capabilities such as time and space compression, and on hyperbole. It is argued that the journey metaphor’s embodied nature and its potency in aligning the mobile phone with consumer aspirations contribute to the universal appeal and understanding of the commercials.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The journey metaphor through the lens of genre and medium in advertising
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Metaphor identification procedure
    • 3.2Corpus selection and annotation
      • Metaphorical journey representation
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Case descriptions
      • Ascend Mate7_0914
      • CX6_1016
      • MateRS_0318
      • P9 Plus_1018
      • Mate30_0919
      • Mate30RS_0919
      • Nova7_0420
      • Mate40RS_0321
    • 4.2Categorization of the journey metaphor in Huawei’s advertising
      • 4.2.1mobile phone is a path to discovery
      • 4.2.2mobile phone is a vehicle of discovery
    • 4.3Analysis of multimodal distribution in metaphor construction
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Pertinence of the “incongruity” criterion for identifying metaphors
    • 5.2Synergizing music and sound modes with visual narratives
    • 5.3Medium-specific and genre-specific dimensions of the journey metaphor
    • 5.4Interaction of the journey metaphor with other metaphors
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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