Revisiting Visual Communication: Conceptualizing How Extremity of Claims Work in the Context of Advertising Visuals

Introduction

The development of “an integrated visual rhetoric” would allow for greater understanding of how visual imagery works to persuade consumers (Larsen, Luna, and Peracchio 2004, p. 109). The present chapter contributes to the specification of one of the subsystems within “the overall system of verbal and pictorial communication” (Larsen et al. 2004, 109) by examining how visual metaphor works within advertising. In contributing to the theory of visual rhetoric, we specifically consider interpretation as a process of assigning visual objects to categories. Consider, for example, the visual metaphors in the ads in Figure 1 with the headline “pure energy”. In order to understand these ads, consumers might have to transfer an attribute, such as energy, from the wall socket or the pylons to the advertised car. We have some understanding of the decoding process (Garber and Hyatt 2003; Grancea 2012; Larsen 2008; Malkewitz, Wright, and Friestad 2003) but rather less understanding of how visual persuasion works. In this chapter, we seek to examine some of the knowledge structures and cognitive processes underlying the interpretation of visual images in advertising. For example, what is the role of consumer's knowledge about the level of energy evoked by different objects such as a wall socket, a pylon, or a car? Although such aspects of consumers' knowledge seem relevant to persuasion, how does this knowledge affect consumers’ interpretation of visual images?

Figure 1.

Examples of visual claim strength in advertising

One of the major debates within the communication subsystem of visual rhetoric theory has been about whether images merely reflect external reality or individuals read images like a symbolic language (Scott 1994). This is an important starting point for understanding how consumers interpret visual images. Despite the intuitive appeal of the view that pictures copy reality, scholars have identified several limitations to this premise, most notably the failure to account for the richness of visual meaning (McQuarrie and Mick 1999; Mick and Buhl 1992; Mick and Politi 1989; Scott 1994). In contrast, text-interpretive and reader response approaches (Durand 1987; Mick and Buhl 1992; Mick and Politi 1989; Sonesson 1996; Stern 1989) paved the way for appreciating the complexity of visual meaning. This tradition, however, did not fully specify the causal relationships between visuals and consumers' responses (McQuarrie and Mick 1999). Studies within a visual rhetoric context have tried to fill this gap. These studies analyzed the visual form in linguistic terms–for example, as metaphors or similes–and linked form to consumers' responses (McQuarrie and Mick 1999; Scott 1994).

Understanding visuals to be complex messages in their own right was a great advance in the status of pictures in the literature. The theoretical framework introduced by the visual rhetoric tradition underpinned many efforts to understand visual communication. Recent studies, however, have tended to move away from this tradition and its associated debates concerning resemblance and representational correspondence, seeing these issues as distracting attention from more central theoretical concerns (Pracejus, Olsen, and O'Guinn 2006). These later studies broadened the scope of visual research by highlighting the role of the extended visual environment and consumers' interaction with visuals (Jiang et al. 2014; Labroo, Dhar, and Schwarz 2008; Phillips and McQuarrie 2010; Pracejus et al. 2006). Similarly, studies within embodied cognition and spatial metaphor (Barsalou 2008; Giessner and Schubert 2007; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Meier et al. 2007; Schubert 2005) further suggested that ostensibly unrelated factors, such as an object's position on the vertical axis, might influence visual interpretation.