Van Dijk (2006) considers manipulation as a deliberate and hidden attempt by speakers to control audiences’ minds and consequently elicit desired responses; these responses will be more than mere verbal communication and lead audiences to perform actions in the speakers’ best interest. Consequently, a distinction is made between legitimate persuasion and illegitimate mind control or manipulation, inasmuch as “many forms of commercial, political or religious persuasion may formally be ethically legitimate, but people may still feel manipulated and critical analysts may judge such communication to be manipulating people” (van Dijk 2006: 361). Similarly, Danciu (2014) mentions that persuasion becomes manipulation when advertisers having good knowledge of consumers’ needs or purchasing behaviors try to omit certain details or fail to inform consumers about the consequences of their buying decisions.

According to van Dijk (2015), power relations among social groups likewise do not necessarily presuppose a manipulative context; rather, access to social resources such as TV, mass media, newspapers, or advertisements is essential for manipulating others. Among other researchers, Billig and Marinho (2014) have found manipulative material in drug advertisements which informed consumers about one positive effect of a specific drug, while concealing the 25 negative side effects. Furthermore, Mohammadi, Weisi, and Moradkhani (2018) identified manipulative strategies used in written advertisements, such as overall interaction strategies, rhetorical figures, local meaning, religious messages, and patriotism, to name but a few.

Since semiotic resources in advertisements, such as visual images, colors, and icons, are considered as modes of transferring specific meanings and affecting all people with different ages, these features cannot be regarded as neutral (van Leeuwen 2005). Sometimes, visual strategies are utilized to draw audience attention to one particular information, and lead to a partial or biased understanding which serves the best interest of the manipulator group (van Dijk 2006). Similarly, Danciu (2014) argues that advertisements have manipulative power through using deception (they conceal unpleasant facts, use emotional games, exaggerate quality, and instead display images of supermodels, indulge in photo shopping, and selectively use warm or cool colors).

Other semiotic studies (e.g., Harrison 2002; Kress & van Leeuwen 2002) have found that color and size of images, and their location on the advertisement pages (Najafian & Ketabi 2011), are influenced by the social, cultural, and political values of the context in which the ads are created. The manipulating groups use indigenous socio-cultural conventions to represent the content of a particular discourse; these socially understandable messages reduce both the audience’s cognitive effort and their critical thinking, by consistently manipulating the messages. In other words, the manipulative effects of such context on producing or selecting the comprehensible semiotic strategies in advertisements cannot be ignored.

In view of the importance of the visual features and sociocultural conventions in advertisements aiming to control audiences’ minds and actions, the current study will critically analyse the semiotic features of Persian printed advertisements. We intend to determine the semiotic manipulation strategies used in the advertising context of Iran, and to investigate whether these strategies are culturally and religiously significant when depicting the Islamic culture of Iran, or if they just follow quasi-universal, but mostly western conventions.

This research project considered three theoretical frameworks for the semiotic analysis of the collected data. The first is the grammar of visual signs by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996), who claim that all images, signs and colors communicate representational, interactional and compositional meaning. Representationally, the images will depict reality through using real pictures of people, places or things and their true colors. Interactionally, the images’ distance, contacts or points of view can create specific interaction between producers and viewers to convey hidden concepts, e.g., using the picture of a smiling celebrity who directly looks at audiences in order to create a friendly viewpoint; like a friend, the celebrity offers goods and services to the audience. And compositionally, producers can impose their attitude and intentions on audiences via framing, making some elements more salient by using specific fonts and colors, and inserting these elements on the top, middle or bottom of the images. On Kress and van Leeuwen’s view, such semiotic features, regardless of the subjectivity of their producers and the effects of the context in which the features are created, have a universal meaning.

As a second theoretical background, the current study uses van Leeuwen and Jewitt’s (2004) social semiotics. Unlike structural semiotics, which focuses on the universal meaning of signs and images (e.g., highway signs), social semiotics concerns the agentive rules of individuals in constructing the meaning of visual messages, based on the sociocultural context in which these messages are produced and used.

Third and finally, van Dijk’s (2006) manipulation framework has been used as a theoretical basis on which to identify the hidden ideas that are deliberately camouflaged by the advertisements’ colorful and attractive images or signs. Van Dijk (2006) asserts that nonverbal expressions such as images, photos, colors, salient positions (top vs. bottom) and font size (bold or larger) can express intended, positive or negative meanings. Such semiotic strategies are used to direct audiences’ attention to pieces of information which are important for manipulating their short-term memories; the results of these manipulations are manifested in the audiences’ impulsive purchases. Furthermore, Danesi (2015) points out that the visual mode in printed advertisements (by using humor, creating a character, and displaying endorsements by famous people or celebrities) tends to not only promote the products, but to impose implicit, intended content on consumers in order to control their purchases. Similarly, Chomsky (2011) has stated that manipulation strategies used in advertising (such as infantilization, emotional games and distractions) may reduce the audiences’ rational or critical thinking, and divert their attention from serious to less important information.

Printed advertisements are means of commercial interaction between producers and consumers in which visual aspects, written messages and layout have crucial rules in transferring information. There are different varieties of printed advertisements (e.g., magazines, newspapers, direct mail, brochures, etc.) which all have different styles and audiences. In our investigation of Persian printed advertisements, the advertisements were selected from flyers, brochures, billboards, and online pop-up advertisements having a wider range of audiences and being distributed in public places at no extra cost.

In such advertisements, the semiotic features have more effect on consumers’ impulsive shopping than do written messages; people unintentionally face the advertisements when they are browsing shops or searching websites for online shopping, and have no or limited time to read written messages. Semiotic features are further essential aspects of printed advertisements: they convey ideas, a culture, or messages which cannot possibly be transferred by written messages (Domingo, Jewitt & Kress 2014); in addition, they reduce the audiences’ cognitive efforts to understand the advertising messages by providing them with tangible, colorful and pleasant images (Hagan 2007).

Some researchers have pointed out that the semiotic aspects of printed advertisements such as celebrity images (Spry, Pappu & Cornwell 2011), symbolic photos and images (Pavelka 2015), and attractive images (Roozen & Claeys 2010) are used to enhance the sale of the promoted products.

Another reason for the importance of semiotic aspects of printed advertisements is their manipulative effects on audiences. Specifically, these advertisements exert their potential manipulative power through semiotic features of religious images and emotional games (Reihani & Rasekh 2012), through intimate images evoking positive emotions in the audiences (Njiric 2016), or through images appealing to women’s beauty, age and gender in order to promote specific cosmetic products (Qiao & Wang 2019).

The context of this research project is religious. Iran’s population is 98% Muslim (Hasrati, Street & Habibi 2016), the official or dominant religion being Shia. Shia Muslims are those who believe in the prophet Mohammad (PBUH) and his successors (the 12 Imams). One of the successors of prophet Mohammad is Imam Ali ibn Musa Al-Ridha, whose shrine is in Mashad, a holy city in the eastern part of Iran (Hasrati et al. 2016). From the Islamic Revolution onwards, the Iranian context has been governed by Islamic values, along with incorporating some western principles and culture (Gonabad, Fayaz & Naderi 2017) that are not in conflict with Islamic values. For instance, there is Yalda night, a winter festival that occurs at winter solstice on December 21/22, the longest and darkest night of the year. The unique characteristic of this ritual is for families to gather together and celebrate by reading poetry, along with eating nuts and special fruits such as pomegranates and watermelons, whose red colors symbolize the glow of life. Yalda refers to the end of darkness and to light and goodness; after this dark night, the days will become longer, the nights shorter. Another ritual is Nowruz which is celebrated at the beginning of spring; it usually occurs on March 21. An essential feature of Nowruz is haft-seen, haft meaning ‘7’ and seen [sin] being the 15th letter of the Persian alphabet; it corresponds to the English letter ‘s’. Haft-seen refers to seven symbolic items, natural products with names starting with ‘s’, such as sabzeh (‘wheat sprouts’, symbolizing rebirth), seeb (‘apple’, the symbol of health), and so on; other features are symbolic, like pisces, the 12th sign of the zodiac, for freshness, progress and new endeavor, locally represented by the redfish.

Before the Islamic Revolution, Iran was strongly dependent (politically, socially, and economically) on western countries such as the USA and the UK, and Iranian policymakers tried to imitate western culture (e.g., women were forced to wear western clothes, not the hijab, to use hats instead of scarves, and wear western makeup. Similarly, men were encouraged to use specific western hairstyles, clothes, and hats; instead of tea, they were encouraged to drink coffee and alcoholic beverages.

In the post-revolutionary, anti-western era, Islamic religious concepts and rules have governed Iranian culture, ideology, and politics; in addition, religious rules have had effects on economic status, marketing, and advertising (both in general and on the advertising images in particular). For instance, whenever advertisements in Iran depict the images of women to promote products, such images must depict women wearing complete hijab (Kalantari 2012). Moreover, in Iran’s dominant Islamic culture the colors green, gold, and white are sacred to all ethnic groups, as they remind Iranians of heaven and the holy prophets (Ghandeharion & Badrlou 2018); by contrast, black is used as a sign of mourning and to recall the martyrdom of holy people.

As a result, Iranian monolingual printed advertisements and their textual, intertextual, and semiotic features are in large part controlled by sociocultural policies. Whereas the monolingual advertisements only use Persian, in order to support the national linguistic and cultural policies, bilingual printed advertisements make use of foreign languages such as English for added prestige (Shooshtari & Allahbakhsh 2013) and to emphasize their products as being modern. Even though the semiotic features of Iranian printed advertisements have been analyzed to a certain extent, their manipulative effects were largely ignored. Consequently, the current study intends to critically analyze the potential manipulative effects of these features, by posing the following research questions:

The results of the current study revealed that in the context of Iran, especially the advertisements distributed throughout the cities and presented as pop-up online advertisements, use semiotic features to manipulate consumers’ preferences and shopping. Such advertisements are active and have direct effects on consumers’ impulsive purchases, as they are presented at shopping time, when the customers are out in the street for buying merchandise or are searching websites for their online shopping.

A critical discourse analysis of the semiotic features in our corpus of Persian printed advertisements revealed that the producers, by using the advertisements as social resources and manipulating their semiotic features, devise strategies, based on Iranian sociocultural conventions, to manipulate the consumers’ minds and actions. This semiotic manipulation was performed with aid of semiotic strategies having the six subcategories of 1) Celebrity images (13.69%), 2) Creative images (22.02%), 3) Punctuation Marks (23.80%), 4) Personification (7.73%), 5) Nature Images (16.66%), and 6) Seasonal and Cultural Images (16.07%). In fact, cultural images, such as those of specific or seasonal festivals in Iran (e.g., Yalda or Haft-Seen), religious and national images (e.g., the crescent as a symbol of Ramadan, or the Iranian flag), along with the other strategies discussed in previous sections, such as the color of images and the position of given vs. new information, are likewise based on the sociocultural context of Iran. Cultural conventions, such as the direction of handwriting (right to left) places given information on the right side of the picture, then moves toward the new information on the left side; in English handwriting, the position of given vs. new information is just the opposite (Harrison 2002; Jewitt & Oyama 2001; Najafian & Ketabi 2011). In a specific context, the advertisements use cultural symbols as icons and culturally inspired brand names to promote a specific product or highlight certain brands in order to enhance the sale of an intended product (Rossolatos 2018). Analyzing the semiotic features, the researchers came upon novel usages of images, which they classified into categories such as ‘creative images’, ‘punctuation marks’, and ’nature images’. These new categories were used to manipulate the audiences’ attention by using creative images, creating emotionally laden games, inhibiting rational thinking, and by introducing the products as ‘modern’ through using contemporary strategies (e.g., punctuation marks) and exhibiting the product as the newest, being different from other products (e.g., in connection with nature images).

As van Tuinen (2011) and Serban (2014) have argued, modern people do shopping for psychological satisfaction, not just for physical needs; hence producers primarily use advertisements not for promoting their products’ quality, but to influence consumers’ behavior and preferences. Our analysis of the semiotic features in the advertisements provides evidence that through using colorful, eye-catching images and local cultural conventions, the ads intend to provide psychological pleasure to the audiences, while consistently manipulating their minds and controlling their shopping behaviors. The semiotic features of the current study recall a study by van Dijk (2006) of nonverbal expressions as having manipulative power: the semiotic features can inculcate whatever is important to the producers into the consumers’ minds through emphasizing and boldfacing the positive points. This absolves the producers from the need of giving information about the dis/advantages of their products; it suffices to refer to celebrities, use colorful and creative images, or share cultural and social symbols.

Our analysis of the 160 Persian printed advertisements confirmed Leeuwen and Jewitt’s finding (2004) that semiotic codes do not have universal meaning, but are based on the local sociocultural context (here, the Islamic culture). For instance, in the earlier Islamic religious context of Iran, gender appeal (Shams 2005) or stereotyping gender (Rossolatos 2018) were never common strategies for manipulating consumers; following strict religious and Islamic rule, the advertisements using images of women had them dressed in complete Islamic wear (covering hair and body). Iranian sociocultural and Islamic conventions (such as Islamic or Iranian brand names, non-sexual images, religious issues, and historical/cultural ceremonies) were used in the advertisements to manipulate the audiences in their interpretation of the visual messages, so as to control their purchases. Whereas in normal persuasive advertisements, consumers are free to interpret the messages, in the manipulative context of the advertisements collected for the current study, consumers are provided with biased information. In this way, interpretation of the messages will be controlled by the advertising context; however, the consumers are not aware of being controlled, and still believe that they are dealing freely with the messages.

Moreover, the sociocultural context of Iran is under the control of the Islamic revolution with its anti-western ideology. Being based on that ideology, the semiotic features in the 160 advertisements collected for this study provide a specific context for shifting the consumers’ attention from foreign to domestic products, with a view towards supporting Iranian companies and arousing a sense of patriotism. Consequently, instead of using western models, our current corpus turns to culture and language signs; the advertisements utilize Iranian models (e.g., famous Iranian actors and singers), Iranian cultural events (e.g., Yalda Night and Nowruz), religious issues (e.g., Ramadan), and even the Persian language itself, all of which embody meaningful content which is interpretable in the sociocultural context of Iran.

Analyzing the colors prevalent in the collected data, we furthermore became aware that colors, in addition to ideational meaning, also have interactional meaning (Kress & van Leeuwen 1996). As among others Harrison (2002) has pointed out, not only images, but also colors may have different meanings in different societies. While in Ivory Coast, for instance, the red color is a sign of mourning, in India it is a sign of life and procreation; by contrast, in the Iranian culture, red color is used as a sign of celebration, connotating life and happiness, while black is used as a sign of mourning. Another socioculturally dependent color is green, which in the Iranian advertising context is a sign of religious matters. In the current data, colors such as red and yellow are used to attract the customers’ attention by make some images more salient; other colors, such as white and blue, are frequently used in medical publicity and in advertisements depicting the health and cleanliness associated with detergents.

Building upon van Dijk (2006) and Baig (2013), our results also indicate that the images in the advertisements are used to provide accessible interaction to all kinds of audiences (potentially manipulating both the young, the old, the educated and the uneducated). In this case, the semiotic strategies function as means of interaction between different social groups (producers and consumers of various ages) by employing simple, colorful, eye-catching imagery. They relate to Iranian consumers’ sociocultural conventions in their everyday, problem-free interaction; but at the same time, they weaken or eliminate the consumers’ critical, rational perception of the advertisements.

The semiotic manipulation studied in the present corpus was generally operationalized through positive self-representation and by providing few or no details about the advertised products. Instead, the ads used hyperbole (exaggerating their positive aspects), and deflected consumers’ attention from important issues to unimportant matters (by using colorful, attractive and creative images and by applying emotional games to tap into the consumers’ sociocultural conventions). Although the political, cultural, educational and commercial contexts of Iran are governed by anti-western, Islamic rules, still, based on the present investigation, we can see how the advertising context of Iran utilizes both western semiotic features of modern advertising (e.g., creative images and punctuation marks) and semiotic strategies to show adherence to the Iranian national principles and Iran’s cultural or Islamic values (as seeen in celebrity images, personification, nature images, and seasonal/cultural imagery). In the current data, western, modern features (such as smiling stickers, ellipsis, question and/or exclamation marks) were not in conflict with Islamic rules,; rather, they were neutral, universal strategies used to show the state-of-the-art of the presented products.

An important difference between western and Iranian advertisements is the way they use women to promote products. Western countries appeal to women’s beauty and their bodies in a sexual way in order to persuade consumers to buy the advertised products. By contrast, following the Islamic revolution, women were considered the most valuable elements of Iranian society and their bodies should not be used as simple tools for advertising, hence if women are to appear in special advertisements, they must wear the Islamic hijab. Recently however, a mixture of western and Islamic use of women’s images has ocurred, as when women in complete hijab are wearing western or modern makeup, instead of surma (the Iranian women’s traditional makeup, sometimes erroneously called ˆkohl’). Another difference between Iranian and western advertisements has to do with alcoholic beverages (such as beer and whisky) and certain foods (for instance, pork chops) that are not halal and are considered taboo, based on the Quranic rules; therefore, in the Islamic culture of Iran, advertisements are not allowed to depict any such foods or drinks. Using pictures of Iranian cultural or historical ceremonies (e.g., Yalda Night) or religious events (such as Ramadan and its ending, called Eid al- Fitr), when addresssing consumers is another strategy of resisting western hegemony.

Moreover, the semiotic features in this study are not just anti-western; they have been generally ignored in the multicultural context of Iran (e.g. local cultures such as Kurdish, Arabic, Turkish, Balouchi, to name but a few), to the benefit of the Islamic Persian culture which dominates the sociocultural context of Iran. The advertising policy behind using unified cultural conventions is to have advertisements that are meaningful in all of Iran, despite the different cultural backgrounds, and to enhance the integrity among different ethnic groups in Iran.

While most of the prior studies mentioned in the current research project conclude that the semiotic features and written messages in advertisements work together to create a more effective and unified meaning, further investigation is needed into the multimodal manipulative power of advertisements, particularly in the Iranian context. Moreover, to highlight the sociocultural effects of this context on designing semiotic features of advertisements, future studies should compare the semiotic features of the Persian printed advertisements with advertisements in English and other western(ized) languages.