Visual Consumption

Jonathan Schroeder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134542468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

A key characteristic of the twenty-first century economy is 'the image'. Brand development is based on image, products are advertised via images, and corporate image is critical for economic success. This book draws from art history, photography and visual studies to develop an interdisciplinary, image-based approach to understanding consumer behaviour.

Focusing on four themes: representation, photography, images and identity, it presents a theoretical perspective on visual consumption, providing wide-ranging examples from advertising, the internet, photography, design, theatre and tourism, and discusses the importance of the internet in bringing visual issues into the mainstream of strategic thinking; spurring research into perception of visual displays.

Incorporating case studies from the US, Europe and the UK, this book provides an unparalleled guide to the visual consumption processes necessary for understanding and succeeding in today's market.

Part 1
Consuming representation

1 Introduction
A visual approach to consumer research

We are exposed to hundreds of images every day. Not in church, or at museums–but all around us in advertising, on the Internet, on television, in newspapers, on billboards, magazines, buildings, radio, cable, t-shirts, credit cards, shopping carts, and cash register receipts. We live in a visual information culture. In no other time in history has there been such an explosion of visual images. And yet we seem to pay little attention to them, we do not always “understand” them, and most of us are largely unaware of the power they have in our lives, in society, and how they function to provide most of our information about the world.

This book is about visual consumption. By visual consumption, I mean not just visual-oriented consumer behavior such as watching videos, tourism, or window-shopping, but also a theoretical approach to the interstices of consumption, vision, and culture, including how visual images are handled by consumer research. Visual consumption is a key attribute of an experience economy organized around attention. We live in a digital electronic world, based on images designed to capture eyeballs and build brand names, create mindshare and design successful products and services.

How do images communicate? How do people decode and understand images? How do images circulate in a consumer society? In other words, what are the conceptual and historical foundations of consuming visual culture? What can a visual approach to consumption bring to consumer research? Contemporary consumption involves looking, watching, spectatorship, seeing sites, gazing, window shopping, browsing, perusing, traveling, viewing, surfing the Web, navigating the Internet, and many other visual processes. These consumer behaviors rely on images, including brand images, corporate images, artistic images, and digital images. My goal is to understand how visual images function within a cultural system of meaning influenced by advertising, consumption, marketing, and mass media.

My perspective is multidisciplinary. I am not anchored to a particular academic discipline or interpretive school. This approach reflects the interdisciplinary roots of consumer research. I draw on several streams of research and scholarship, including consumer behavior, marketing, art history, and visual studies to develop the concept of visual consumption as a way of thinking about, understanding, and researching consumer behavior. Four themes flow throughout the book: vision, images, photography and identity.

I do not intend to argue that visual consumption is inherently distinct from consumer behavior, instead I want to articulate and conceptualize visual aspects of consumption from an interpretive perspective. The topics and examples I discuss are meant to be illustrative, not necessarily representative or typical instances of visual consumption. I have proceeded much like a photographer who makes a contact sheet from a roll of film’s negatives–an image made from the negatives’ contact with photographic paper–and then uses the contact sheet to quickly scan the roll of exposed film. Some images are marked for enlarging and cropping, others are crossed out as unusable or poorly exposed. Often, only one or two images are then enlarged and subjected to further scrutiny. This book, then, is like a contact sheet of visual consumption; a few aspects are selected, enlarged, and inspected to represent interesting or illuminating ideas. Most are left as possibilities for the future–indicators of how things appear through the lens of visual consumption. Further, it is my “camera” that has produced this contact sheet, and I have made editorial choices in what to enlarge and expand upon. I leave the contact sheet for others to look at, they may see potential in the images I have captured.

The visual consumer

The information technology revolution of the past twenty-five years revolutionized marketing. Computers, the World Wide Web, mobile telecommunications, and audiovisual technology have had a profound impact on management practices, the structure of the market, and society at large. Whereas technology was the primary source of innovation and strategic advantage in the twentieth century, information is becoming the key ingredient for success in the twenty-first (Castells 1999). At the center of this shift is what I call the production and consumption of images.

A key characteristic of the twenty-first century economy is the image. Brands are developed based on images, products are advertised via images, corporate image is critical for managerial success (Chajet 1991). Marketing is fundamentally about image management: “in marketing practice that is most likely to succeed in contemporary society, image is primary and the product is treated as merely a variable that attempts to represent the image” (Fırat et al. 1995: 46). As consumer theorist Susan Willis states:

In advanced consumer society, the act of consumption need not involve economic exchange. We consume with our eyes, taking in commodities every time we push a grocery cart up and down the aisles in a supermarket, or watch TV, or drive down a logo-studded highway.

(Willis 1991: 31)

If we understand that the market is based on images–brand images, corporate images, national images, and images of identity, then we realize that vision is central to understanding management in the information society. Visual consumption starts with images.

The awareness that global consumers are enthusiastic consumers of images, that brand image, corporate image, and self-image are critical economic and consumer values, and that global market culture is largely the construction of symbolic environments makes visual consumption critically important for understanding contemporary consumers. In the turbulent world of the twenty-first century, the real skill of marketing management and consumer research may shift from problem solving to problem recognition, from the production of goods to the production of images.

How do we develop an appreciation for visual consumption? Marketing scholarship will be well served by expanding its domain to include the most profound explanations of human and market behavior. As my former Dean at the University of California Berkeley Haas Business School stated: “We may come to see the search for themes, patterns and metaphors in literature and the arts as a source for hypotheses to explain the increasingly complex global economy” (Miles 1989: 3). This book brings a visual perspective to bear on consumption issues, and provides disparate, wide-ranging examples of how this interdisciplinary enterprise leads to recognition of novel patterns and unique solutions.

Following the interpretive turn in management and marketing scholarship, my research on the production and consumption of images draws from art history, photography, and visual studies to develop an interdisciplinary, visual approach to understanding behavior in the consumer society. I focus on the image and its interpretation as foundational elements of visual consumption. I turn to an array of research from disciplines concerned with image and representation to build a multidisciplinary approach to visual consumption. In addition, visual communication and images are central to my pedagogical philosophy, and I have developed a visual curriculum for management students to stimulate their critical thinking skills, visual literacy, cultural capital, and a more sophisticated understanding of the image-based economy.

An image serves as a stimulus, a text, or a representation that drives cognition, interpretation, and preference. As psychologist and art historian Rudolf Arnheim argues, “one must establish what people are looking at before one can hope to understand why, under the conditions peculiar to them, they see what they see” (Arnheim 1977: 4). I draw upon several image theorists to develop a way of understanding images for consumer researchers. One of my goals is to make visible particular possibilities of meanings relative to certain images. Images function within culture, and their interpretive meanings are subject to change. The goals of this study are interpretive rather than positive; my aims are to show how images can mean, rather than demonstrate what they mean. As art historian Richard Leppert suggests:

To talk about an image is not to decode it, and having once broken its code, to have done with it, the final meaning having been established and reduced to words. To talk about an image is, in the end, an attempt to relate oneself to it and to the sight it represents.

(Leppert 1997: 7–8)

Image interpretation is never complete, or closed. Interpretations are meant to be contested and debated. Visual consumption of images is an important, but by no means comprehensive approach to understanding consumers. Rather, by focusing on visual issues in consumer behavior, we place consumption more fully within the realms of other disciplines that engage with images.

Overview of book

This book is focused on how visual representation works within a cultural system of meaning influenced by marketing, the Internet, and mass media. I offer theoretical reflections about consumption that integrate work from disparate areas of visual theory in a way that links marketing as a visual representational system that produces meaning to visual consumer behavior theory. In part 1, “Consuming representation,” I present a theoretical perspective on visual consumption from the point of view of the consumer. My interest in what I call visual consumption encompasses touring, watching, viewing, and other seemingly non-use activities that to me are indeed consumption.

Chapter 2 “Visual representation and the market” deals with the concept of representation. Representation remains a central concept within the humanities but it is not well researched within consumer behavior and marketing (cf. Stern 1998). When I talk about representation, I am thinking of it as a system that produces meaning through language. The conventional view of representation, from Plato, held that representation is a copy-like process that creates clear, one-to-one meanings about the things that exist in the material and natural world. These things have natural and material characteristics that have a meaning outside how they are represented. Representation, in this view, is only of secondary importance, it enters the picture only after things are fully formed and their meanings constituted.

In another, emerging social constructionist view, however, representation is conceived as entering into the very constitution of things. Culture is conceptualized as a primary or constitutive process, as important as the economic or material base in shaping social subjects and historical events–not merely a reflection of the world after the event. In this view, eloquently and forcefully articulated by Stuart Hall, one of the founders of cultural studies, representation research falls into two broad approaches: the semiotic approach, which is concerned with the how of representation, that is how language produces meaning. The discursive approach is more focused on the effects of representation, the consequences and political ramifications (Hall 1997).

For my purposes these two approaches to representation correspond roughly to the interest in understanding how marketing creates things like brand images, customer satisfaction, product identity on one hand, and more macro issues such as the role of marketing in society, ethics, and consequences of consumption. Chapter 2 focuses on three interrelated visual consumption issues: representation, identity, and advertising. I discuss implications of an approach that takes representation seriously. I introduce art historical concepts for understanding visual consumption, and I draw on consumer research, social psychology, cultural studies, and advertising to build a model of visual representation’s place in the market.

If we agree that products are marketed via visual images, then we need to think carefully about what this implies economically, managerially, psychologically, and politically. One logical conclusion that this implies a rethinking of competition. From a consumer point of view, competition need not be constrained by standard industrial classifications, product categories, or corporate discourse such as the Pepsi vs. Coke wars. If we consume images, then products may reflect fitting in, being cool, and belonging. In what I call a hyperaffluent society such as ours, we no longer buy necessities as necessities. For example, most of us have many shoes. If we truly understand how consumers and marketers alike build brands psychologically, it may force us to reconsider how we think about competition. Shoes may compete with other clothes, watches, compact discs, or haircuts–each might contribute similarly to a consumer’s image and each may be marketed as products or services that exemplify desired lifestyles. Current discussion about competition often reflects a modernist, rational, physical product-based view of the market that is at odds with the way the consumption really works.

In chapter 3, “Through the lens: reflections on image culture,” I present a theoretical discussion of photography as a vibrant, essential visual information technology. Image culture concerns how people understand and decode them, as well as how images circulate in culture. The image concept is important to strategic marketing issues–brands, corporate communication, advertising, and investment information depend on images. Photography is the foundation for corporate communication and advertising. Technology often subsumes previous forms, photography used the camera obscura, film developed from still photography, the Internet adopted earlier audiovisual technologies. Photographic images–scanned, digitized, and incorporated into Web pages as graphic elements–helped transform the Internet from a text-based communication network into the image-dominated World Wide Web.

Photography is an information technology that is part of everyday life. As a photography dealer observes: “the impact of photography in today’s world is relentless. We are a photographic-picture generation” (Sotheby’s Philippe Garner, quoted in Suder 2001). Chapter 3 reviews historical conceptions of the image, and draws upon current thinking in photography to articulate how the image functions in consumer culture. Several examples of photographic-based consumer research are presented to illustrate its potential as well as point to the underestimation of photography’s role in consumer behavior and marketing communications. Consumption is inherently visual, yet consumer researchers have seemed reluctant to embrace art history and visual studies as critical fields for study. I discuss reasons for this neglect, sketch some remedies, and prepare the way for research that incorporates visual aspects of consumption.

Consumers can be compared to tourists; they are “sensation-seekers and collectors of experiences; their relationship to the world is primarily aesthetic; they perceive the world as a food for sensibility–a matrix of possible experiences …” (Bauman 1998: 94). In part 2, “Consumption domains,” several arenas of visual consumption are discussed to demonstrate the visual approach’s potential for consumer research. This section demonstrates the usefulness of the visual approach to consumer research via three case analyses that provide readers with tools and insights into the visual domain of consumption. Photography, the World Wide Web, architecture, and advertising design represent visually varied yet related domains that well serve the goal of explicating certain processes of visual consumption. Each are examples of a language, or a system of representation that interacts with consumer behavior in important ways.

Current marketing communications promotes Kodak as your memory deliverer–“keep all your photos on line, to be ordered and viewed when you want them!” Chapter 4, “Photography as a way of life,” frames photography as a key consumer practice. Photography is one of the central ways that consumers understand the world, yet few consumer research studies specifically address photography as a separate domain. Why do people spend so much time taking pictures? Travel and tourism provides answers to how people consume visually. Furthermore, travel is a convenient metaphor for analyzing global issues of identity, economic power, and marketization. Travel and photography are intertwined–pictures, postcards, travelogues, and now the World Wide Web have put a world before consumers’ eyes, a world in which “the ability to visualize a culture or society almost becomes synonymous with understanding it” (Fabian 1983: 106). This theoretical point is reflected in a popular guide to travel photography: “If the photographer’s attitude is open, frank and friendly, all barriers will come down and he will capture on film his impression of a person, a people, and a nation” (Time-Life Guide to Travel Photography 1972: 199). Tourism, then, is a powerful metaphor for consumption. Spectacular consumption sites offer visual experiences to consumers, art museums promote their gift shops as much as their collections, virtual reality promises travel without movement. Travel writing and travel have become central to postcolonial studies; travel often invokes economic, ethnic, and social inequities and the gaze of the conqueror or tourist (e.g., Clifford 1997; Desmond 1999; Pratt 1992; Torgovnick 1991). I analyze several photography guides that reflect an optimistically progressive and liberating mindset to investigate how photography functions in consumer practice.

In chapter 5, “E-commerce, architecture, and expression,” the World Wide Web’s role in visual consumption is addressed via a close look at how financial institutions visualize consumer values. The colossal California financial conglomerate Wells Fargo Bank’s 1999 Annual Report announced that “the basic financial needs of our customers, however, do not change that much. They want to borrow, invest, transact, and be insured. They want convenience, security, trust and dependability” (Well Fargo Annual Report 2000: 4). The Internet has fundamentally altered banking and financial services, yet basic customer desires continue to rest on stability, security, and strength. These psychological needs were often symbolized with architectural form: “banks adopted the canons of classical architecture as appropriate forms to house their functions, the less tangible (psychological) attributes of strength, security, and stability characterize them as a distinguishable building type” (Chambers 1985: 20). Although space and time are transfigured within the information-based electronic world of contemporary commerce, architecture and design remains a viable method for communicating corporate values.

Chapter 5 builds upon several assumptions about visual communication. First, architecture is a visual language as well as a functional art. That is, buildings signify–they communicate cultural, economic, and psychological values. The architectural style known as classical is a particularly powerful example–classical temples were used by the Ancient Greeks to house their gods, classical style was revived during the Renaissance for church, state, and the elite citizens, and classical buildings played important roles in the United States and its rise to world power....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Visual consumption
• Routledge interpretive marketing research
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Part 1: Consuming representation
• Part 2: Consumption domains
• Bibliography