Promotional language for bank accounts: a corpus driven analysis through web sites comparable corpora.

Generally speaking, finance and banking language is very specific and technical. However, when dealing with promotion, banks tend to use a simpler and more effective linguistic style as the target of the communication is obviously common people that assume the role of prospective clients.
Promoting a bank account or a financial product is nevertheless very different from general advertising. With contrast to usual 'commodity goods', a customer who has to choose a bank needs to be more persuaded and reassured. If one wants to buy a shampoo, for example, he will be probably influenced by its advertisement, its packaging and all that concerns its promotion, but he knows that if the product would not fulfill his expectations he can simply stop using it. In this case the risk involved by the choice is very low, and so the promotion has only the purpose to attract people and basically to let them know about the existence and the validity of the product.
A financial product like a bank account, instead, needs to be published in a more sophisticated way as its choice would imply a longer and more important relationship with the customer. The risk in this case is higher and a wrong choice can lead to a very high degree of dissatisfaction. Moreover, as dealing with money, problems which may occur can be obviously more serious than those which can be encountered with other goods or services.
The focal point of this kind of promotion is therefore reliability. Banks need to gain our trust to make their products successful and to achieve this they have to highlight in their communication their positive important features for the customers.
Banks have therefore, to use a language which attracts customers but, as it happens in many other fields, when comparing two languages the focus of the communicative strategy can shift as it strictly depends on culture. A significant study in this field, has been conducted by Katan in 2006 who analysed some brochures of Italian and English pension providing institutions. The question he wanted to answer to is: does the culture-bound nature of communication affect the choice of promotion strategies? The answer is nearly obvious but the differences which arise from such an analysis are not always easy to notice.
Katan underlines the differences between the two styles of promotion with regard to language use and advertising strategy. One of the main difference is the level of implicitness/explicitness. Generally, English is considered as a “Low Context Communication” (LCC) language/culture while Italian, in contrast is seen as a “High Context Communication” (HCC) language/culture (Katan 2006: 6). This difference has been noticed, for example, analysing the slogans of the two groups of brochures. Even if both contain HCC and LCC styles,«the UK HCC text is still much more explicit and more transparent than the Italian HCC titles» (ibid.: 8).
Another interesting feature is that the average length of English texts is three times that of Italian ones. The explanation proposed by Katan is that English tends to be over-explicit, expecting from the addressee a low background knowledge. In addition to this, Italian is usually a more direct language while English tends to «cushion perceived face threatening acts by adding extra words» (ibid.: 11). Moreover, he focuses on how the two languages/cultures focus on different concepts such as urgency, independence, security or certainty (for the whole work refer to Katan 2006 “It’s a Question of Life or Death: Cultural Differences in Advertising Private Pensions”).