Producing and communicating electronic sales messages in Hong Kong: insights from a discourse study and from industry practitioners

With the globalization of business and the advancement of technology, understanding communication across media is becoming increasingly important. This study compares the discourse structure of 80 online sales letters with that of 80 printed sales letters. These letters were randomly selected from a database of over 10,000 sales letters collected from 36 categories of recipients in Hong Kong. It is argued that an integrated theoretical framework of social discourse analysis and genre analysis is needed to explore how meaning is created in text, context, and interface of new media communication. Similarities and differences are found to exist in the discourse structure of the two corpora. The digital medium seems to provide writers of the online letters with more space for information provision and more choice in persuasive appeals, such as exercising just-in-time pressure tactics. Results of the analysis are verified by findings derived from in-depth interviews with 17 specialist informants working in the field of new media and sales promotion communication. The knowledge and findings derived from this study can be of value to the development of corporate training materials in the field of marketing communication. Although this study is Hong Kong based, the use of electronic sales messages is not limited by geographical regions. Results of this study can thus have both local and global significance.