Visual Marketing

From Attention to Action

Michel Wedel,Rik Pieters

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781136676482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Comportamiento del consumidor

This comprehensive volume aims to further research and theory development in visual marketing. By bringing together leading researchers in the field, it strives to contribute to the establishment of visual marketing as a coherent discipline. The chapters represent an array of issues in visual marketing. They address three areas in theory: attention

1

Introduction to Visual Marketing

Michel Wedel and Rik Pieters

The Emerging Visual Marketing Discipline

Visual marketing is widely recognized to be important in practice. As consumers, we are exposed to several hundreds of explicit advertisements daily on television, in newspapers, magazines, billboards, the yellow pages, retail feature ads, and on Internet sites. We experience even more implicit visual messages in the form of product packages in stores and at home. Point-of-purchase stimuli, such as store displays, shelf talkers and flyers, are omnipresent and commercial visual messages appear on the side of trucks, road signs, food wrappers in restaurants, on service provider uniforms, t-shirts, CDs and electronic devices. Often, these are part of corporate visual identity communication, ways in which companies organize to visually present themselves in a consistent manner. Visual aspects are also a key component of marketing collateral, which involves the use of visual aids to make sales effort more effective, after a prospective buyer has been identified. All this requires graphical design of the commercial visual stimuli in question. The basic elements of graphical design, as in many other areas of design, include shape, size, form, texture, lines, and color. But, the visual context in which products, brands, and ads are presented may affect consumers’ reactions to them as well.

All this is part of what we term visual marketing; that is, the strategic utilization by firms of commercial and noncommercial visual signs and symbols to deliver desirable and/or useful messages and experiences to consumers. An important component of visual marketing is the actual design of the visual communication, including logo, packaging, and advertising design, and more recently web page design. If indeed “seeing is believing,” and “believing is buying,” it is important to manage what consumers see to maximize profit. This is increasingly recognized in business. A search for Visual Marketing on Google produced about 46 million hits in November 2006. Firms and consulting agencies in such diverse areas as web design, advertising, retail merchandising, store and mall design, packaging, and company image and identity development all associate themselves with visual marketing, many times even using “Visual Marketing” in their names.

But in spite of the prevalence of visual marketing in practice, and the large amounts of money invested in it, sound theoretical underpinnings have long been lacking or were not synthesized in marketing science, and thus its potential effectiveness was insufficiently reached. The body of theoretical knowledge backing visual marketing efforts is still limited and scattered. This situation is changing, with leading research groups in marketing and consumer behavior establishing this new field. Much can be gained from the emerging insights into the effects that brands, package designs, print and banner advertisements and other visual tools have on consumers’ visual perception, and into the role that visual perception plays in shaping consumer behavior.

Theory development in visual marketing is situated at the intersection of vision science, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. Vision science is interdisciplinary itself and sometimes considered the most successful branch of cognitive science, having its roots in psychology, neuroscience, computer science, optometry, and aesthetics, among others (Palmer, 1999). Central is the idea that vision is the computation occuring in the eye and brain to build a representation of the world surrounding us. One of the goals of vision science is to uncover these mechanisms and reveal their implications. It covers the (neurological) make-up of the visual system, including that of the eye and the visual cortex. Insights from vision science help to understand what consumers are most likely to perceive centrally or consciously when, for instance, standing in their local supermarket in front of the soft drink shelf; what they perceive peripherally or subliminally, without conscious awareness; what aspects of the visual stimuli (packages, displays, shelves) affect this; and how they move the eyes to build up a representation of the shelf.

Vision science overlaps with cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology has gained much knowledge about the influence of perceptual characteristics of rudimentary stimuli on attentional and cognitive processes. This research has laid the very foundation of the understanding of visual perception of marketing stimuli, and many studies in visual marketing build directly on it. For example, the extensive literature on eye tracking in psychology (see Rayner, 1998, for a review) has led to an important set of tools to evaluate visual marketing effort and to insights that help improve its effectiveness. It has impacted both the theory and practice of visual marketing, even early on (Russo, 1978). Initially this research emphasized fundamental attentional and perceptual processes, using abstracted stimuli under controlled conditions, with some notable exceptions including Broadbent's (1958) and Gibson's (1986) ecological approach to perception. As such, early research could not concentrate on the realistic, complex stimuli that consumers encounter daily, or on individual differences in processing due to consumers’ momentary states and stable traits. This situation has rapidly changed, and fundamental research on scene perception and target search in cognitive psychology, for example, increasingly employs realistic scenes and complex stimulus configurations, under the typically cluttered exposure conditions that characaterize the marketing environment. Kingstone and his colleagues (Kingstone, Smilek, Ristic, Kelland-Friesen, & Eastwood, 2003) recently urged cognitive researchers to “get out of the laboratory and study how individuals actually behave in the real world” (p. 179), for example by observing and describing cognition and behavior as it happens in front of them. The spectacular findings of such work are immediately relevant to visual marketing.

Visual marketing is also at the intersection of vision science and social psychology, with the latter offering theories and methods to assess and understand the role of motivation and emotion in vision. Recent research in this area is fascinating, allowing insights into the influence of consumers’ states and traits on attention and perception, and the other way around. This interface between motivation and attention may attract much interest in years to come. Research may build for instance on recent studies showing that people are more likely to perceive desirable than undesirable objects in ambigious figures (Balcetis & Dunning, 2006). Likewise, goal research in social psychology has found that priming a particular goal tends to activate the means to attain the goal, and to simultaneously inhibit conflicting goals (e.g., Kruglanski et al., 2002). This is in line with the research stream on activation and inhibition in vision science and cognitive psychology. Combining insights from social psychology and vision science will lead to better theories and models, and to better visual marketing practice.

It is important to establish that the focus on the “visual” aspect of marketing activity does not preclude a role for textual information, and other sense modalities. First, text is presented in a visual format, and logotype, word size, color, and other text features all may affect consumer experience and behavior (Doyle & Bottomley, 2006). Thus, both texts and pictorials are visual. Second, whereas a single picture may convey a thousand words, a single word may stimulate vivid images that may move consumers to attend, prefer, or buy (Maclnnis & Price, 1987). These visual imagery effects of text can be part of the domain of visual marketing as well. Third, textual and pictorial processing may cooperate or conflict, and such cross-presentation effects are important to understand. For example, textual descriptions change the memory for pictures (Gentner & Loftus, 1979), and consumption vocabularies change and refine consumption experiences and memory, and allow them to influence future behavior (West, Brown, & Hoch, 1996). Fourth, the senses cooperate in task completion, and there is increasing insight into the role and influence of video, audio, tangible, smell, and other stimuli, and about the consumer operations on them (Meyer & Kieras, 1997). Such insights may be important for the development of, for example, visual radio (http://www.visualradio.com).

In sum, visual marketing covers the role and influence of visual (pictorial and textual) marketing stimuli in consumer behavior, as well as the visual processing mechanisms underlying consumer behavior. It is founded in vision science, cognitive psychology, and social psychology, and aims to understand and assess the influence of visual marketing activity, and to improve visual communication design.

Contributions

This book aims to further research and theory development in visual marketing. By bringing together leading researchers in the field, it strives to contribute to the establishment of visual marketing as a coherent discipline. The chapters represent a representative array of issues in visual marketing. They address three areas in visual marketing theory: attention and perception (chapters 2–5), visual cognition (chapters 6–9), and action and choice (chapters 10–12). The chapters go beyond what is known, and offer in many cases a more speculative and visionary account of the directions that visual marketing research could and should take.

In chapter 2, Rayner and Castelhano review foundational research on eye movements in reading, scene perception, and visual search. They discuss research in cognitive psychology on issues such as the size of the perceptual span and how decisions are made about when and where to move the eyes in each of the three tasks. Understanding eye movements in these three tasks is required to understand eye movements when viewers look at advertising. They show that the tasks differ considerably, and that eye movements also differ considerably as a function of the task. Research on eye movements while looking at ads is reviewed and discussed.

Pieters and Wedel, in chapter 3, propose six cornerstones to further eye tracking theory and research in visual marketing, and in this process remedy six common delusions about the role and utility of eye movements in assessing visual marketing effectiveness. The influences of consumers’ processing goals on eye movements to print advertising are discussed as an important illustration of the new insights that can be gained from eye tracking research of visual marketing stimuli.

In chapter 4, Tavassoli shows how visual selection has affective consequences beyond and counter to mere exposure. This research promises a variety of new insights central to marketing. Instead of the old marketing dictum that every exposure is a good exposure, his research shows that marketers need to heed the fact that the mere act of observing an object changes it.

In chapter 5, McQuarrie develops a new rhetorical framework for differentiating the pictures that appear in magazine advertisements. This framework offers a system of distinctions among kinds of pictures. He shows that pictorial strategies in American magazine advertisements have changed significantly. Strategies that were common in the 1980s are relatively scarce today, and vice versa. Going beyond a mere statement of the phenomenon, he then discusses the changes in both the advertising environment and in consumer response to advertising that might be hypothesized to explain these changes.

Greenleaf and Raghubir revisit in chapter 6 a fundamental question in aesthetics: whether people prefer certain proportions for the sides of rectangles. This issue has attracted relatively little research in marketing, even though rectangles are perhaps the most common shape that consumers encounter in package design, product design, and print advertising. They show that people do prefer certain ratios of rectangular products and packages, and that people favor a range of proportions rather than any single proportion alone. They show that the ratios of rectangular products offered in the marketplace appear to reflect the effect of the marketing context.

Raghubir proposes a new hard-wired model of perceptual judgments in chapter 7. The model accounts for documented patterns of visual biases in spatial perception. It adds to information processing models that have been developed in the domain of semantic information processing.

Krishna, in chapter 8, brings together spatial perception research relevant to marketing in an integrated framework. She aims at making managers more aware of spatial perception biases. She focuses on factors that affect spatial perceptions, in particular, length, area, volume, and number perceptions, and their implications for consumer behavior.

Chapter 9 by Meyers-Levy and Zhu explores how structural aspects of shopping and consumption environments may affect consumers’ cognition and responses. They consider a wide array of architectural, and free-standing, in-store elements that are often present in such environments. An application that they discuss pertains to ceiling height, showing that a high versus a low ceiling prompts individuals to activate concepts associated with freedom versus confinement, respectively. These then prompt more abstract and more specific associations.

In chapter 10, Chandon, Hutchinson, Bradlow, and Young show how commercially available eye-tracking data can be used to decompose a brand's consideration into its memory-based baseline and its visual lift, using a novel decision-path model of visual attention and brand consideration. They show the importance of visual-based factors in driving brand consideration. They also provide insight into the interplay between consideration decisions and visual attention to prices and packages during consumers’ decision-making processes at the point of purchase.

In chapter 11, Cho, Schwarz, and Song describe the feelings-as-information perspective. They illustrate the misattribution of affective reactions to the visual context in which a product is presented as reactions to the product itself. They use the context of websites that provide consumers with an opportunity to virtually “try on” a product by displaying it on their own image. In a second application of the perspective, they show that the ease with which a print font can be read can have a profound impact on consumer judgment and choice.

In chapter 12, Janiszewski provides an epilogue to the book, with the goal to provide ideas that may spur additional research on visual communication. He reconsiders the role of key constructs in the information processing literature and reorients the focus of inquiry from information analysis to meaning and experience creation. In doing so, he uses construction and sculpturing metaphors.

The book is based on the presentations during the two-day IC1 Conference organized at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, in June 2005, with the support of the Ross School and the Yaffe Center for Persuasive Communication. IC means “I see,” and we did. Video streams of the presentations are available at http://www.bus.umich.edu/ic1/.

The collection of chapters in this book provides a representative sample of excellent research in the domain of visual marketing. The chapters are not meant to provide a definitive view on an issue or topic, but rather based on initial research, provide pr...