An Analysis of Adjective Uses in Business Advertisements: A Desk Review

Abstract

Business advertisements are communication tools used by marketers to introduce and inspire customers to purchase their goods or services. The study examined how adjectives, as a linguistic resource, play a critical role in promoting the persuasive power of advertising messages. This study scrutinized the use of adjectives in business advertisements through a desk review of published literature. Specifically, the study sought to identify the adjectives commonly used in advertisements, examine their morphological forms, and analyze their communicative functions in advertising discourse. This study reviewed the uses of adjectives in business advertisements from journal articles published between 2018 and 2025. The articles were retrieved through Google Scholar and analyzed using descriptive statistics (frequencies and percentages) alongside content analysis. The findings identified 83 adjectives frequently employed in business advertisements, with long, best, last, safe, smooth, comfortable, and new among the most recurrent. Most adjectives appeared in their base forms, although derived forms, superlatives, and adjective phrases were also widely used to strengthen persuasive appeals. The analysis further revealed that adjectives primarily function to describe quality, quantity, time, colour, and comparison, thereby enhancing product differentiation, emphasizing desirable attributes, and influencing consumers' purchasing decisions. The study concludes that adjectives constitute an essential persuasive linguistic resource in advertising because they enrich product descriptions, reinforce positive perceptions, and stimulate consumer action. The findings contribute to advertising linguistics and marketing communication by providing a synthesized understanding of how adjective use enhances persuasive business communication. The study recommends that advertisers strategically employ appropriate adjective forms to improve advertising effectiveness and that future research should examine the persuasive roles of other word classes across different advertising media.