COMMUNICATIVE AND LINGUISTIC DEVICES USED IN ELON MUSK'S PERSONAL BRANDING (BASED ON TWITTER AND ONLINE PUBLICATIONS)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17721/2520-6397.2021.1.05Keywords:
personal brand, personal branding, social networks, Twitter, brand promotion, brand boosting devices, linguistic and communicative devicesAbstract
This research is dedicated to the study of Elon Musk's personal brand. Communicative and linguistic devices used by Elon Musk to build, maintain and boost his personal brand, as well as to counter threats to its status, were analyzed on the basis of Twitter and online publications within the framework of the present research. The study traced the conflict between Elon Musk and short sellers with the participation of the US Securities and Exchange Commission and proved that regardless of the financial losses and legal challenges the businessman faced, the reaction of Elon Musk's followers was mostly positive due to the effective brandbuilding techniques employed by Elon Musk. The conducted Twitter analysis dealt with both Elon Musk's personal publications and the responses of his followers, and found that the main linguistic and communicative devices of Elon Musk's personal branding were provocative tweets, popular culture references, connotatively charged notions, irony, allusions, acronyms and wordplay. As part of the present research, we studied how the linguistic phenomenon shaped reality, as Elon Musk took a literary technique and used it as a real-life enhancement of his personal brand. According to the results of the research, these devices were aimed at reinstating the credibility and authority of Elon Musk's personal brand, attracting the attention of the followers, winning their support and counterattacking the opponents in order to re-establish a powerful personal brand. The research proves that these devices found positive response among Elon's followers and had a positive effect on his brand attracting attention and boosting popularity and recognizability of Elon Musk's personal brand.
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