CONTEXT AND DISCOURSE FEATURES IN THE LANGUAGE OF NIGERIAN ONLINE MARKETING BY BRAND INFLUENCERS ON INSTAGRAM

• Mofayobi O. Afe

  Adeyemi federal University of Education, Ondo.

  Author

In this age of internet, brands and organizations have relied on brand influencers as the endorsed third party to drive their services to the public. These brand influencers anchor on the plethora of social media platforms to engage with their followers/audience by making them aware of latest products/services from brands. Existing literature on brand influencers’ marketing shows how brand influencers use social media to persuade their audience to purchase the brand’s (their clients) products and services, with little focus on the brand influencer’s language use. Therefore, using the traditional notion of context as proposed by Fetzer (2004) and Gumperz’s (1982) Interactional Sociolingiuistics, this study investigates the contexts that mark the Nigerian online marketing as well as the language tools employed by the brand influencers to persuade their audience. Twelve purposively selected marketing content from the instagram page of Lily Odior and Obis Ora (Nigerian brand influencers) were used as data for the study. From the analysis of the data, five contexts were discovered to have marked online marketing. They are: fashion, culinary art, property procurement, drop shipping, importation and exportation. As well, linguistic tools employed by brand influencers in Nigerian online marketing include; literal translation, code switching, capitalization, stress, and borrowing. These tools are employed by the influencers to persuade their audience into purchasing the marketed products and services.

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