A Study of the Effects of TV Commercials on Promoting Investment Motivations

This paper uses a qualitative research method to investigate the role of television commercials in attracting investments for the purpose of contribution to the domestic production. Since we take television commercials as becoming increasingly important, we feel this role needs to be studied from the point of view of both producers and consumers. In order to see how the TV commercials are related to attracting investments, we chose 20 commercial cases from amongst 1844 commercials which varied by content and could be classified in 132 commercial genres. The selected samples played in channel 1,2,3 Iranian TV and we observed them in a time span extending from the first 3 months of the year 1391 (Persian calendar). The selected items were studied using a semiotics approach in the sense that producers and consumers point of views played the major role in linking between commercials and their meaning. Some findings of the semiotic analysis of the samples show that the number of commercials that addressed producers are more than the ones addressing the consumers. In addition, these findings show that commercials tend to bring economic wishes into play and to use the best services as main drives. These commercials represented modern life style, and tried to show how the present and future welfare can be guaranteed. In this regard, they used attractive elements to instigate investment; these elements included high quality of the product and so on. Finally, it can be said that despite the fact that psychological and motivational elements are more effective, the commercials used financial elements such as gain and loss, high quality and etc. rather than psychological and mental elements such as insurance, discount, etc.