Visual Rhetoric in Advertising:
Text-Interpretive, Experimental, and
Reader-Response Analyses
EDWARD F. MCQUARRIE
DAVID GLEN MICK*
Introduction:
Visual elements are an important component of many advertisements. Although the role of imagery in shaping consumer response has long been recognized (Greenberg and Garfinkle 1963), only recently have visual elements begun to receive the same degree and sophistication of research attention as the linguistic element in advertising
Body:
Only in recent years have consumer researchers begun to treat visual imagery in advertising as something other than a peripheral cue or a simple means of affect transfer. Today the visual element is understood to be an essential, intricate, meaningful, and culturally embedded characteristic of contemporary marketing communication. However, detailed theoretical specifications for ad imagery have yet to be fully constructed. In pursuit of this goal, the rhetorical figure emerges from this project as a general principle of text structure that can be embodied in visual texts as well as verbal texts (McQuarrie and Mick 1996). In particular, the researcher showed that the artful deviation characteristic of figures, and also the over- and undercoding that produces schemes and tropes, can be constructed out of pictorial elements in advertising.
This text-interpretive analysis of four magazine ads suggested that their pictorial elements comprised a variety of rhetorical forms (rhyme, antithesis, metaphor, and pun) and different types of signs (iconic, indexical, and symbolic) so as to evoke a diverse set of meanings about the brand and/or user (e.g., sophistication, beauty, safety, fun). Two experimental analyses showed that these four ads, as compared to the same ads with the visual figures broken or removed, stimulated more elaboration and a more positive attitude toward the ad. Moreover, the effect of visual rhetoric was robust over different samples, across different ad executions, and over multiple product categories. Visual figures, like the more familiar verbal figures (Leigh 1994), would appear to deserve a place among the executional devices available to advertisers that have a consistent and reliable impact on consumer response.
The main boundary condition the researchers uncovered is that the consumer must be sufficiently acculturated to the rhetorical and semiotic systems within which the advertising text is situated; that is, s/he must be a culturally competent processor of the advertising message. However, although this was notably true for visual tropes, it did not condition responses to visual schemes. This finding both corroborates and refines Scott’s (1994a) provocative theory. She argued that ad visuals should not be conceived as photocopies of a pancultural reality; rather, they are often highly stylized representations that compel consumers to engage ads as meaningful texts that require an active reading in accordance with an existing stock of sociocultural insights. This is precisely what we found with respect to the visual tropes that require intricate semantic knowledge structures concerning the objects, activities, and products artfully depicted in the ads (e.g., car seat, safety belt and buckle, and motion sickness medicine; croissants, almonds, and the smiling “have-a-nice-day” face). In contrast, all subjects and informants— foreign nationals as well as Americans—seemed to appreciate the schematic visuals that are constructed by similarities and/or differences in such surface features as shapes, sizes, and colors (e.g., black fur coat, black fur hat, and thick black eye lashes). The robustness of the effect for schemes may stem from pattern-recognition ability basic to human visual perception. Alternatively, the cultural perspective can be reasserted if it is argued that the experimental subjects were all members of literate cultures, who know how to interpret duplicate or mirror-image elements on a page. Had the experiments included members of primitive preliterate cultures, then perhaps the schemes as well as the tropes would have been shown to be dependent on cultural knowledge, of a very general sort in the case of schemes and of a much more specific and localized sort in the case of tropes. In either case, our data suggest that Scott’s (1994a, 1994b) theory about the role of cultural competency in processing advertising rhetoric appears correct with respect to tropic rhetorical operations that are strongly dependent on sociocultural semantic knowledge but may be less germane to schematic rhetorical operations determined by structural regularities.
Lastly, in study 3 the reader-response analysis with 12 interviewees revealed some of the actual meanings that consumers generate when processing the four rhetorical ads in the experimental studies. It reconfirmed that those who were less culturally attuned to American society and advertising were less likely to appreciate the visual tropes, as compared to the visual schemes, in light of the meanings reflected in the earlier text-interpretive analysis.
Overall, in concert with some prior work, this research testifies to the acute sensitivity of consumers to the visual element in advertising. The present research also advances prior work in several respects. Like Meyers-Levy and Peracchio (1992, 1996) within the experimental tradition, the researchers showed how very subtle alterations to the visual elements of an ad can, nonetheless, have a measurable impact on consumer responses. Unlike them, our suite of visual manipulations was generated by a theoretical specification that integrates and differentiates a range of possible alterations to the visual style of an ad under the concept of a rhetorical figure. Moreover, other researchers within the text-interpretive and reader-response approaches, they postulated that consumers encounter advertisements as active readers of texts; that visual elements can be structured as rhetorical devices; and that a sufficient stock of cultural knowledge is required to interpret the rhetorical structure assembled by the advertiser. Unlike them, however, the researchers conducted an experimental investigation to provide more secure causal inferences concerning how particular visual elements in advertisements would map onto specific consumer responses. Lastly, going beyond prior studies of visual persuasion, we attempted to synthesize the strengths of the text-interpretive, experimental, and reader-response approaches, and demonstrated how this union can be achieved, along with the benefits it can provide to the development of advertising theory.
Conclusion:
This article has sought to understand in a more refined and systematic manner the persuasive impact of visual style in advertising, using explanations offered by rhetorical theory. In turn, the melding of text-interpretive, experimental, and reader-response traditions reinforces the promise of critical pluralism as a philosophy for generating new insights into consumer behavior.
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