Unpacking stanbic bank's pan African brand campaign using critical discourse analysis
| Author | Violet Bridget Lunga |
| Position | University of Botswana |
| Pages | 102-118 |
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This paper examines Stanbic Bank's Pan African brand campaign using Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1989, 1993, 1995, 2000, 2003). The advertisement sets out to brand Stanbic Bank as an African bank by relying on African symbols and images and visuals. However, an examination of the advertisement using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) problematises the bank's uses of African texts, symbols and images and shows how the advertisement fails to entrench the bank as an African bank, but rather perpetuates stereotypes and myths about Africanness and black African woman's identity. It succeeds in reproducing and maintaining power relations between South Africa, the originator of the advertisement, and Botswana, the consumer other.
Stanbic Bank is a trading name for the Standard Bank Group (Different from Standard Chartered Bank). The Standard Bank Group trades under the name Stanbic Bank in Botswana, the Democratic republic of Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Stanbic Bank is known as Standard Bank in Namibia, Swaziland, South Africa, Lesotho, Mauritius and Mozambique and is represented by Union Commercial Bank in Madagascar. In Botswana. Stanbic Bank has branches in most of the major cities of Botswana.
The advertisement as a text is characterized by tension, contradiction and hybridity. In its representation of the African woman, the advertisement sets up a contradictory and hybrid female identity by simultaneously presenting an image of an independent woman and that of a traditional woman. As
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part of its branding campaign the advertisement also uses a strategic text capturing Kwame Nkrumah's famous words: "We face neither East nor West: We face forward."
The paper shows how references to Kwame Nkrumah's Pan African words in a commercial advertisement produce a contradictory effect on the viewers. Tension is experienced between the possible Africanising effects of the words and the trivializing and/or a commodifying effect of the way the words are used in the text. Tension is created also by juxtaposing Kwame Nkrumah's words and an image of an African woman. Kwame Nkrumah was Ghana's first President, a revered Pan Africanist (revered almost to mythical proportions) and a pioneer of the liberation of Africa from European imperialism. The placing side by side of two different things can be read as both empowering and disempowering for the woman represented in the advertisement as a black woman. Visually, placing the headline words: "We face neither East nor West: We face forward" next to the woman creates the impression that the words are hers, especially given that the name Kwame Nkrumah is so small and hardly readable from a distance. The juxtaposition of the Nkrumah's words with the woman succeeds in making the woman the centre and originator of the discourse. That indeed seems to build an image of an empowered, speaking woman. But drawing on male discourse, instead of words spoken by significant African women, proves problematic and can have a subordinating impact on women.
A critical discourse analysis of the advertisement traces a trajectory of unequal economic power relations between South Africa, the source of the advertisement, and Botswana, the constructed consumer other. The paper shows that South Africa is constructed as the economically powerful other, while Botswana is the objectified other.
In order to adequately illustrate how the advertisement operates as a site where gendered discourses are discursively constructed the paper will draw on some aspects of feminist critical discourse analysis.
Critical Discourse Analysis is a type of discourse analytical research tool (Van Dijk, 1985, Janks, 1997), which can be located within the broader field of Discourse Analysis (DA). Discourse Analysis is an approach to the study of language and texts which draws on a number of areas such as linguistics, literary theory and cultural studies, philosophy of language, sociology and psychology (Luke, 1996). The difference between CDA and DA may be traced in their definitions of discourse and the emphasis on the term critical.
Discourses have been generally taken to refer to all language (spoken interaction, written texts and visual texts) and practices.
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For CDA, however, the emphasis is on discourse as social practice (Wodak, 1996) and not just language per se. The idea of discourse as text is grounded in Foucault's (1982) theory of discourse which has several implications for power relations. For Foucault (1982), discourse is not language per se, but is a system that under-girds the language as well as the values and beliefs hidden in language, including the ways such beliefs construct subject positions for people. This thinking underscores a constitutive view of discourse which implies that discourses shape identities and social relations.
Discourses are never innocent in that they involve "coherent use of language, or signs where certain (imperial) interests are promoted at the cost of others- "(Olivier (2003), in C von Maltzan (Ed.), quoting Foucault (1982)). Concerning discourse, Foucault (1972) defines discourses as "systematically form[ing] the objects about which they speak" (p. 49).
Discourse as a social practice also means language use as social action, that is, discourse, is a form with which people might act on the world and upon each other. In addition, discourse as a social practice implies a view of language use as a form of representing the world, and a signifying system. When language use is viewed as social practice, it implies seeing its inevitable role in the domination of others, the reproduction and maintaining of existing social orders, including existing power relations.
Grounded in Foucault's theorization of discourse, CDA specializes in uncovering the close links among language, ideology and power in society and further seeks to show up connections that may be hidden from people and questions the taken-for-granted notions of discourse, identity or gender. CDA aims to expose unequal power relations in public discourse by showing how public discourse often serves the interests of the powerful forces over those of the less privileged (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1990)). According to CDA, texts such as public discourse, including advertisements, are discourses that may enact social power abuse, dominance, and inequality and reproduce and maintain social practices. CDA is explicitly about exposing and ultimately resisting social inequality. The term critical, in critical discourse analysis, signals a view of language that locates language as significant in the workings of ideology and mobilizing meaning to sustain or contest relations of domination in society. Such preoccupation with power issues distinguishes CDA from other kinds of discourse analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1990). CDA proceeds by emphasizing, through an examination of the dialogical relation between language use and social practice, and the relationship between discursive structures and social practice.
Conceptualizing discourses as social practice involves seeing discourse as always constructed and therefore having the capacity to serve particular interests. It also involves understanding how social practices do "control the selection of certain structural
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possibilities and the exclusion of others and the retention of these selections over time in a particular area of social life" (Faiclough, 2003 p. 226). Although CDA is preoccupied with issues of power and inequity, there are critics who challenge CDA for not providing in-depth analysis of gender. In order to counteract that criticism, feminist critical discourse analysis is an approach to discourse, which takes into account the concept of gender in more detail. Feminist critical discourse analysis can offer useful insights in the analysis of questions related to gender and representation.
Feminist critical discourse analysis is located within the broader framework of critical discourse analysis, and is a recent development whose foundations can be linked to a general absence of interest in in- depth gender analysis by mainstream CDA theorists such as Fairclough (1989) and Teun, A. van Dijk (1985).
Feminist CDA shares some distinctive characteristics with critical discourse analysis, such as, its critical orientation. However, feminist critical discourse analysis works from a more developed theoretical analysis of gender (Lazar, 2005). Feminist critical discourse analysis views gender as fluid and constitutive. That is, it views gender as a continuum and as shaping and as being shaped by contexts. In feminist critical discourse analysis, just like in CDA, language and ideology plays a significant role in the construction of gender so that language can be used to construct gender from a particular ideological perspective. Feminist critical discourse analysis will then focus on how language constructs identity and gender...
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