Communicative strategies of Mark Hamill’s personal branding

Abstract

The article deals with linguistic aspects of personal branding, exploring communicative strategies and stylistic devices used for the purposes creating, maintaining and promoting celebrity’s personal brand. Branding is an indispensable instrument of modern-day marketing and its focus has long since shifted from companies to human brands. Self-branding has become an important component of a successful public career and its linguistic realization gains increasingly more weight. Multiple online platforms and social media grew beyond their initial purposes and became primary mediators of personal branding initiatives. The present research analyses Mark Hamill’s Twitter activity in 2021 and identifies main communicative strategies that facilitate self-promotion. The results suggest that the strategy of establishing the rapport with the target audience, the strategy of the display of the social awareness, career promotion strategy and the strategy of creating the sense of exclusivity are the main communicative strategies of Mark Hamill’s personal branding. Each one of them establishes or perpetuates one or multiple traits associated with the actor, thus building and strengthening his personal brand. On the other hand, all communicative strategies are realized through certain linguistic and rhetorical means, which facilitate their implementation and help produce the desired effect on the target audience. The present research identified various linguistic and stylistic devices used in Mark Hamill’s personal branding, namely quotation, parallelism, irony, parody, creolized text (hashtags, emoji, uppercase letters, expressive punctuation, pictures, gifs, cartoons, videos), hypertext, slogans, rhymes, rhetorical questions and clichés. The research showed that Twitter activity is extremely instrumental in attracting attention, projecting the desired image of oneself and connecting to the target audience, and, thus, effective from the personal branding perspective.