Background of the Study

1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

Humans are social creatures. Human needs language as media communication of delivering a message, aim, or meaning of things. 1 Language is tools to express ideas, feelings, or experiences and to communicate with other people. Therefore, everyone can express opinion or message to the others. Beside that, according to sociological view, language is a basic to communicate of human being. 2 Accordingly, it shows that the language can make social interaction. Nowadays, in the globalization era people not only use language as communication media, but also people use technology which does not involve people directly, such as magazine, newspaper, radio, television, banner and poster. By those media, the advertisements are promoted. The advertisement uses several signs in promotes their product to the reader. Advertisements it‟s self is defined as any paid form of non-personal communication about an organization, product, services or idea by an identified sponsor. 3 The advertisement must be able to influence audience or customers and make them change their perceptions of the product. 1 Ferdinand de Saussure. Course in General Linguistics; Translated by Wade Baskin New York: McGraw-Hill Paperback, 1966, p.16. 2 Alex Sobur. Semiotika Komunikasi. Bandung: PT. Remaja Rosdakarya. 2004, pp. 274- 275. 3 George E, Belch and Micahel, A. Belch, Advertising and Promotion: An Intergrated Marketing Communications Perspective, New York : Mc. Graw-Hill, Inc, 2004, p. 16 Advertisements seek primarily to gain the reader‟s attention or stimulate interest in hopes that purchases will follow, because advertisements ads have a big power to change state of mind. Advertisement media pull the psychological aspects. An early production process, all companies produce some products to be sold and to be beneficial to fulfil customers as what their needs are. But, nowadays the globalization era stimulates the process of creative production. The companies of advertisement should be creative in producing the advertisement. The most important functions in making advertisement is to promote products. 4 Advertisement has capability to change state of customer mind with the word “new or modern”. Advertisements often change the paradigm in societies which are beautifulsimple, suitableunsuitable, high classlow class, and trendyodd. How could it be? In producing the product, the advertiser uses several signs to promote it. The advertisement has a great development and we can find it anywhere. For example, when people want to go somewhere they will find any kind of advertisement, such as; poster, banner and videotron megatron or led screen billboard. In the first sight, it seems they are commanded by the first signal in their mind. The successful advertisement is when it can influence people‟s mind. There is a lot of money that are needed on advertisement in all around the world. In the globalization era, to attract attention audiences, 4 Agus S. Madjadikara, Bagaimana Biro Iklan Memproduksi Iklan Jakarta: PT Gramedia Pusaka Utama, 2005, p. 25 advertisement has to open state of mind to imitate the new values above, good, beautiful, unique, high class and trendy. Electronic media is delivered on television, radio, film, internet and videotron. Printed media is delivered on newspaper, brochure, billboard, banner and magazine. Magazine is one of mass media that has many images, and can be as an instrument to interpret the advertising, because magazine has more pictures so the customers may look them easily and continually. Magazine facilitates reader to open and read it every time. Therefore, the writer choose magazine as a corpus of the research with Starbucks advertisements. In attracting the audience attention, Starbucks Coffee creates many creative designs. Starbucks advertisement uses a combination of icon and symbol to convey the message. Most of people guess the function of advertisement in order to promote their products, but actually there are certain messages that want to be given by creator of advertisement to the reader. Not all people can understand or catch the idea of the advertisement well, at least the reader will find the difficulties on the interpreting the advertisement. It cause the creator of advertisement uses the sign as a language to express their message, but the reader cannot receive the meaning completely. And, this is also used by Starbucks in their advertisement. To analyse the advertisement language, we can use semiotics approach. Semiotics is study about sign. Every advertisement implies delivering meaning from sender to receiver with purpose the receiver will attract and buy the product. Therefore, to uncover the meaning of the signs in Starbucks advertisement it is important to analyse through a certain research. In this case, the writer will do research entitled “A Semiosis Process Analysis on Starbucks Coffee Advertisements.”

B. Focus of the Study