Chéngyŭ 成语 in Advertising: Conventional Use and Ad Hoc Modifications in Western Promotional Campaigns for the Chinese Market

This small-scale exploratory study seeks to investigate the use of Chinese idioms (chéngyu 成语) in the advertising messages of Western brands directed to the Chinese market, with particular reference to ad hoc modifications of their original form or meaning. To this end, we analyzed a small corpus of 40 promotional campaigns collected between 2019 and 2022 from the most popular social media in China. Preliminary evidence shows that chengyu are consistently and consciously used in Western campaigns, suggesting the companies’ willingness to adapt to Chinese linguistic and cultural references to promote their products. However, the use of chengyu seems not to be deployed at its full potential, the most common type of modifications being limited to phonetic substitution. Only few, remarkable exceptions are found to creatively combine a variety of modification strategies. These, skillfully complemented by visual information, are able to obtain extremely captivating and communicatively effective results.