Yoruba Indigenous Advertising: A Preliminary Report

Abstract

Traditionally, the Yoruba do not use stalls, shops, or malls for carrying out buying and selling activities. Instead, they operate open market systems that come up at specific intervals of days when people converge at a designated place, usually a market square, where all forms of trading activities take place. There is also street hawking where individual traders go about with their wares and advertise them for patronage. However, this Yoruba indigenous advertising and marketing has not been thoroughly studied. Very few research works on indigenous advertising are found only in a few literary texts. Over the years, indigenous dynamics of market transactions between sellers and buyers have been eroded by new advertising strategies, and this has continued to throw the traditional method into oblivion, which has created a gap in the indigenous knowledge production. On the foreign scene, many scholars have largely explained the relationship that exists between language and advertising, especially in the Western world. This paper, therefore, focuses on the indigenous nature of advertising across Yorubaland[1] where diverse traditional formats and strategies are utilized to entice potential buyers to purchase advertised goods. These advertising dynamics are carefully presented in ways that easily appeal to buyers. The study presents different types of goods/products and services that are advertised vis-à-vis the sociological and linguistic features of such advertised products. The classification of the advertising mechanisms is based on the various (descriptive, beckoning, deceptive, etc.) ways through which goods and services are advertised. Data collection points were divided into seven Yoruba zones based on their proximity and dialect delineation using Mixed Research Methodology. Interviews and observations were also carried out to obtain data for the analysis. The paper demonstrates that there is a high degree of interdependence between sellers and buyers in Yoruba indigenous advertising as advertisers rely on their language-use dexterity and communicative competence to attract buyers. Findings also show that trade advertising using the speech form of a language of the people is key to successful business transactions.