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Keywords
Advertising, Marketing communications, Qualitative techniques, Evidence, Psychology
Abstract
Visual imagery has potentially powerful effects on human psychology and physiology, affecting ideas, perceptions, beliefs, feelings, behaviour and health. It plays a central role in most advertising, especially posters, print and TV, but also radio through the ability of language and description to conjure up images internally. In order to investigate the effects of imagery and devise appropriate tools to analyse its influence on the consumer, we need an understanding of the mechanisms involved. Techniques that are grounded in knowledge and theory have greater validity and credibility as to their effectiveness, and can give clients more confidence when buying qualitative research.
Introduction
Imagery is part of everyday experience, and has been since early cave painters and temple decorators. It surrounds and intrudes into modern life to a greater extent than in the past through popular and commercial art, pictures and calendars on walls, newspapers, magazines, advertising and packaging. It is not just a visual world that we inhabit, but one filled with selected, carefully cropped images that carry symbolic and emotional meanings. These images have been studied by many disciplines, including, sociology, media studies, semiotics and psychology.
It is the use and effects of imagery in advertising and packaging that are of particular relevance for market research. Its role is to understand, and predict, the way this imagery is perceived and processed, as well as its impact on mind and body. The reliance on imagery has grown sharply over recent decades, for a number of reasons, including:
The drive for global marketing and the development of international brands, such as Coca-Cola, Levi-Strauss, Nike, or Mercedes (Segar and Brehm, 2000). To achieve consistent branding across many markets required advertising campaigns that could transcend languages and cultures (Lannon, 1991). As a result, imagery (and music) have come to play an increasingly important role.
In a climate of intensifying competition, where there is little functional differentiation in product performance, and consumers have become more marketing-literate, articulate, powerful and even cynical, explicit brand claims and messages are scrutinised, deconstructed and dismissed unless they offer genuine news and credible benefits. Paradoxically, brand building has to rely increasingly on non-rational, implicit communication.
With increasing legal restrictions on what...