Using cultural colloquial terms to position a brand in the minds of local consumers- a case study of Almarai's L’usine's brand positioning for the product 'cheese puff', using the term "Tasbeera" as a slogan and recurring advertising message

Abstract

Brand positioning strategies and their advertisements have become pivotal to today's business, brand management, marketing and advertising. The various brand positioning concepts scattered among pieces of literature of all the aforementioned need to be combined, and this study does this through a case study. In particular, it examines the extent to which the use of a cultural colloquial term to position a brand in the minds of local consumers facilitates communication of the brand's position to an audience, as well as investigating how such a term is applied in advertisements. The research objectives are to investigate the use of the term 'Tasbeera' in L'usine brand advertisements; to highlight and unpack the L’usine brand positioning strategy; and to provide an example of a brand positioning strategy that utilises a cultural colloquial term. This study seeks to do this through the case study of Almarai's brand positioning for the L’usine product 'cheese puff', using the term ‘Tasbeera’ as a slogan and recurring advertising message. Semiotics analysis is employed as the main methodology. After analysing four Instagram advertising posts and two YouTube advertising videos, the researcher concludes that the use of the term Tasbeera facilitates communication of L’usine's brand position to a high extent. Tasbeera is utilised in L’usine brand advertisements to communicate brand messages related to the brand position. This is done first through a great existence and presence that have the identifying nature of the term Tasbeera in the advertisements; second, pre-known contextual situations, narratives or myths are employed to convey the whole meaning in batches of smaller aspects or meanings; and third, the product or brand is linguistically referred to as Tasbeera in the advertising messaging. This is important to understand the effect of the use of colloquial terms generally in advertising and, particularly, in brand positioning advertising.