Rhetorical Analysis
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
(Childers and Houston 1984; Edell and Staelin 1983; Meyers-
Levy and Peracchio 1992; Miniard et al. 1991; Scott
1994a). The area is now characterized by conceptual and methodological diversity, with a variety of new propositions and findings emerging.
Historically four approaches can be distinguished, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. The archival tradition is perhaps the oldest (e.g., Assael, …show more content…
Kofron, and Burgi
1967). Studies in this vein gather large samples of advertisements and conduct content analyses to describe the frequency with which various types of visual elements appear. Archival studies may also report correlations between the presence of certain elements and specific audience responses (e.g., Finn 1988; Holbrook and Lehman
1980; Rossiter 1981). The weakness of this approach is that it is primarily descriptive and provides only weak evidence for causality. Also, the specific visual elements investigated tend to cover a wide range and are not generated by any theoretical specification.
The experimental tradition systematically varies either the presence or absence of pictures per se (e.g., Edell and
Staelin 1983) or the nature of some particular visual element
(e.g., Meyers-Levy and Peracchio 1995) or the processing conditions under which subjects encounter particular visual elements (e.g., Miniard et al. 1991). The strength of this tradition is rigorous causal analysis combined with theoretical specification. However, the consumer responses elicited tend to be abbreviated or impoverished, and theoretical specification is mostly applied to consumer processing rather than to the visual element per se.
The reader-response approach emphasizes the meanings that consumers draw from ads (e.g., Mick and Buhl 1992;
Mick and Politi 1989; Scott 1994b). Extended depth interviews are sometimes used to show the rich and complex interplay between elements of the ad and consumer responses.
Weaknesses include a limited ability to conduct causal analysis and a relatively vague specification of how specific types of ad elements can be linked to particular kinds of consumer meanings.
*Edward F. McQuarrie is associate professor of marketing and associate dean of graduate studies at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara
University, Santa Clara, CA 95053. David Glen Mick is associate professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706. The authors, both of whom contributed substantially to the research, would like to thank the marketing groups at the University of Arizona, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin, the Faculty Colloquium at the Leavey School, and Barbara Phillips for their insightful comments, and
Hakshin Chan and Raena Shioshita for assistance with data collection.
Mick would also like to thank the Dublin City University Business School for its support during completion of this project when he served as the
Endowed Chair of Marketing (1997–98).
37
© 1999 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc. c Vol. 26 c June 1999
All rights reserved. 0093-5301/00/2601-0003$03.00
The text-interpretive perspective draws on semiotic, rhetorical, and literary theories to provide a systematic and nuanced analysis of the individual elements that make up the ad (e.g., Durand 1987; McQuarrie 1989; Scott 1994a;
Sonesson 1996; Stern 1989). It treats visual and verbal elements as equally capable of conveying crucial meanings and as equally worthy of differentiation and analysis. However, this tradition rarely collects or analyzes advertising responses from consumers. This raises the issue of whether the elaborate systematization of text elements actually maps onto the responses of consumers in an illuminating way.
Similarly, causality is more often assumed than demonstrated.
This brief summary suggests that there is ample need and opportunity for investigations that span multiple traditions and draw on the strengths of each. Although several of these perspectives have been closely linked historically (e.g., rhetoric, semiotics, literary theory, reader-response), with a great deal of mutual borrowing, others have rarely crossed paths (e.g., semiotics, laboratory experiments). This article interweaves two strands of the text-interpretive tradition
(rhetoric and semiotics) with the experimental tradition and the reader-response approach. We show that patterns of stylistic variation parallel to the figures of speech documented in language have a reliable impact on consumer response, and we explain these results using a model of the consumer as an astute and active reader of advertising texts.
Specifically, we present a rhetorical and semiotic analysis of visual figures in advertising, test predictions from this textinterpretive analysis in two experiments, and supplement these experiments by means of a reader-response analysis using phenomenological interviews. This multimethod approach builds on previous attempts to show the value of a critical pluralism for consumer research (Hunt 1991; Mc-
Quarrie and Mick 1992).
TEXT STRUCTURE AND CONSUMERS
AS READERS
As a reader the consumer approaches advertisements as complex texts to be interpreted (Scott 1994b). Approached as texts, ads may be ignored or engaged, disdained or enjoyed, critiqued or endorsed. Of course, these consumer readings will be shaped by idiosyncratic factors as well as text structure (Eco 1979). Nonetheless, we assume that text structure functions reliably as a causal agent. That is, text structure tends to shape or direct consumer response, even though it does not, strictly speaking, fix or determine it. The underlying model is probabilistic; although any randomly selected consumer may or may not read an ad text in a given way, in the mass, more consumers than not will read a text in a way that is predicated on the text structure itself.
Text structure is an encompassing term that refers to any discriminable pattern in any part of the manifest ad. Our focus here is on the more narrow concept of stylistic variation.
We define style to include all those aspects of an ad that can be varied independently of the assertion of a brandattribute linkage, that is, message content. Once we create an ad text that communicates a certain brand-attribute linkage, any subsequent change to the ad that continues to communicate that content, and that is not itself simply the assertion of a second brand-attribute linkage, is by definition a change of style. The separation of style from content in no way implies that ad style cannot convey information, cannot add meaning, or cannot concern the brand. Stylistic variation in advertising can do all these things. In fact, from a semiotic perspective, it is not possible to change the style of an advertisement without also changing some of its meaning. By contrast, it should be possible in an experiment to hold the assertion of a central brand-attribute linkage constant while varying aspects of the ad’s style. Because consumers read ad texts for style as well as content, such a manipulation of style should have a predictable impact on consumer response.
Given our overall commitment to linking the text-interpretive and experimental traditions, rhetorical theory appears ideally suited to the task of generating specific predictions, amenable to experimental test, about the impact of stylistic variation in advertising visuals. With its semiotic foundation, the rhetorical tradition can provide a wealth of ideas for differentiating and integrating aspects of visual style (see, e.g., Durand 1987). Furthermore, the practical bent that has characterized rhetoric from its beginnings facilitates experimentation—rhetoricians have always sought the particular style most able to compel an audience response. Lastly, building on the link to the reader-response tradition developed by Scott (1994b), rhetorical analysis can also be applied to generate a rich account of the consumer meanings that visual style might be expected to potentiate.
In the following sections we first define, explain, and differentiate various types of rhetorical figures, concluding that a visual embodiment of this historically linguistic notion should be possible. We then develop the impact …show more content…
on consumer response that can be expected upon exposure to visual rhetorical figures in advertising. This impact in turn derives from the meanings set in motion by the text structure of the visual figures. Hence, we provide an a priori text interpretation that identifies some of these meanings in the case of the stimuli constructed for this project. That interpretation then provides a context for the empirical studies.
RHETORICAL FIGURES
IN ADVERTISING
A rhetorical figure is an artful deviation, relative to audience expectation, that conforms to a template independent of the specifics of the occasion where it occurs (McQuarrie and Mick 1996).
Familiar examples of figures of speech include rhyme and metaphor; dozens more are catalogued in classical sources (Corbett 1990). Because they are artful, rhetorical figures are not errors or solecisms; and because the template is independent of the specific content asserted, figures may be considered a stylistic device. Under this conception, rhetorical figures could be advantageous to advertisers for several reasons. Most important, artful deviation adds interest to an advertisement. For instance, a cigarette ad that proclaims “Today’s Slims at a very slim price” should be more engaging to the consumer than one that
38 JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH reads “Today’s Slims at a very low price.” Moreover, the advantage of any stylistic device is that it can potentially be added to an ad without disturbing the underlying attribute claim—thus, in the example above, the rhetorical figure still communicates a low-price positioning for the brand but does something more as
well.
Many variations in advertising style are one-shot affairs, specific cases sampled from a plenitude of possibilities. By contrast, rhetorical figures are generated by a limited number of rhetorical operations, and this makes it possible to construct an overarching theory of the causal impact of figures, an enterprise that would be intractable if one had to work with isolated heterogeneous instances of stylistic variation.
The limited number of figures also poses the intriguing possibility that the entire set can be generated from a single compact theoretical specification. McQuarrie and
Mick (1996) suggested that the wealth of rhetorical figures found in advertising could be organized into a three-level taxonomy, with all the figures located at a given node sharing certain formal properties. These properties would in turn be the key determinants of consumer response to figures.
The top level of their taxonomy, which includes all figures, is characterized by the property of artful deviation as defined above. It seems likely that the degree of deviation present in specific instances of figures may vary over a wide range and systematically across types of figures, with a corresponding difference in impact on consumers. Thus, there exists a gradient of deviation, with more deviant figures having a greater impact, up to some point of diminishing returns. In fact, McQuarrie and Mick (1992, experiment
2) showed that a rhetorical figure could be so deviant as to have a negative impact, creating confusion rather than interest. At the second level of the taxonomy, schemes are distinguished from tropes as two different modes of figuration.
Schemes deviate by means of excessive regularity. For example, rhyme, with its unexpected repetition of sounds, is a scheme. Thus, an ad for motor oil that proclaims “Performax.
Protects to the Max” would hold an advantage over the less deviant “Performax. The Top Protection.” Tropes deviate by means of an irregular usage. Metaphors, with their literally false but nonetheless illuminating equation of two different things, and puns, with their accidental resemblances, are tropes.1 Thus, the punning headline by Ford,
“Make fun of the road,” can be construed either as an invitation to scorn or to enjoy. This deviant construction, whose oscillating meanings cannot be completely pinned down, would hold an advantage over the more straightforward
“Dominate the road” or “Enjoy the road.”
At the third level of the taxonomy, specific rhetorical operations, which may be simple or complex, serve to construct schemes or tropes. Repetition and reversal are the simple and complex operations that construct schemes (examples are rhyme and antithesis, respectively), while substitution and destabilization are the simple and complex operations that construct tropes (examples are ellipsis and metaphor, respectively). In the aggregate the four rhetorical operations provide four different opportunities for adding artful deviation to an ad.
The definition of rhetorical figures as templates independent of the specifics of individual expressions indicates that visual rhetorical figures ought to be possible. Nothing in the fundamental definition of a figure either requires a linguistic expression or precludes a visual expression. In fact, the idea of a visual figure has ancient roots in art theory (Gombrich
1960; Scott 1994a). Durand (1987) may have been the first to propose a comprehensive catalog of visual figures. Unfortunately, most prior work in the text-interpretive tradition has focused on visual metaphor to the exclusion of other figures (e.g., Forceville 1995; Kaplan 1992; Kennedy,
Green, and Vervaeke 1993; Phillips 1997). Of the many other figures routinely discussed in the context of linguistic rhetoric, only the pun has been investigated in visual form
(Abed 1994; McQuarrie and Mick 1992).
In light of the various taxonomies of rhetorical figures now available (e.g., Dubois et al. 1970; Durand 1987;
McQuarrie and Mick 1996), the most compelling demonstration of the power of visual figures would utilize multiple figures, rather than concentrating on a single instance such as metaphor, and would predict distinct impacts for different types of figures, rather than lumping all figures together. A successful experimental investigation along these lines would testify both to the cross-modal generality and explanatory power of the idea of a rhetorical figure, and to the potency and flexibility of visual style as a means of altering consumer response to advertising.
IMPACT OF VISUAL RHETORICAL
FIGURES
In this article we argue that rhetorical figures, in whatever form, can be expected to have two primary effects on consumer response. The first is increased elaboration and the second is a greater degree of pleasure.
Elaboration
In cognitive psychological terms, elaboration “reflects the extent to which information in working memory is integrated with prior knowledge structures” (MacInnis and
Price 1987, p. 475). Broadly speaking, elaboration indicates the amount, complexity, or range of cognitive activity occasioned by a stimulus. As noted by MacInnis and Price, elaboration can take the form of either discursive thought or imagery. When a rhetorical figure is embodied visually, it is reasonable to suppose that both discursive and imagistic elaboration may result.
The idea of elaboration can be readily translated into interpretivist language, as the extent to which a reader engages a text or the amount of interpretation occasioned by a text or the number of inferences drawn (Mick 1992). The fundamental property by which all rhetorical figures stimulate elaboration is their artful deviance. As texts marked by deviance, rhetorical figures indicate to readers that they
1For a more extensive list of schemes and tropes found in advertising, see Leigh (1994) and McQuarrie and Mick (1996).
VISUAL RHETORIC IN ADVERTISING 39 should consider the communicator’s reasons for so marking the text (text marking is discussed in detail by the semiotician
Mukarovsky [1964]). As Sperber and Wilson (1986) argue, audiences always assume relevance on the part of the communicator. Hence, if the text is marked, then the communicator must have wanted the audience to take note of it, and the surrounding context should allow the reader to interpret correctly the reason the text was marked, provided the reader makes a competent effort. The assumption of relevance enables Sperber and Wilson to explain why the literal falseness of metaphor is only a problem for logicians— ordinary readers readily recognize that the communicator has deviated from expectation in order to make a point. In the case of metaphor, the point is typically that a variety of predications should be entertained, with no one of them fully adequate to capture the communicator’s intent.
The concepts of deviation and marking can in turn be translated back into more conventional psychological terms.
Deviation can be understood as the stimulus property of incongruity (Berlyne 1971). Incongruity in ad stimuli is known to provoke elaboration (Heckler and Childers 1992).
Hence, it should be possible to demonstrate experimentally that an ad containing a visual rhetorical figure will produce a greater degree of elaboration relative to a baseline ad that lacks the figure.
It should also be the case that tropes will produce a greater increment in elaboration than schemes. McQuarrie and Mick (1996) argued that tropes and schemes fall at different points on the gradient of deviation, with schemes on average less deviant from expectation than tropes.
Schemes are hypothesized to be less deviant than tropes for two reasons. First, in semiotic terms schemes are overcoded while tropes are undercoded. This means that tropes are incomplete, requiring the reader to fill in a gap, while schemes contain redundant cues that more directly suggest multiple meanings. Within the semiotic tradition undercoding is believed to mark the text more strongly (Eco 1979).
Second, the excessive regularity of schemes is constructed from sensory elements (e.g., the duplication of syllables in rhyme), while the irregularity of tropes is constructed from semantic elements (e.g., the different meanings brought together in a metaphor). A depth of processing argument can thus be framed to support the claim that tropes are more deviant than schemes (experimental evidence that sensory and semantic elements differ in depth of processing is provided by Childers and Houston [1984]). If deviation is in fact the primary formal property of rhetorical figures that causes elaboration, then in an experimental setting it should be possible to show both a main effect for the presence of a visual figure and also an interaction in which the effect is larger for tropes than schemes. These effects are conditioned on the deviation being neither so minimal that it goes unnoticed nor so extreme as to be incomprehensible.
Pleasure
Artful deviation is also the cause of the pleasure produced by rhetorical figures, but here it is their artfulness that is key. In semiotics a fundamental tenet is that readers enjoy a pleasure of the text (Barthes 1985). Texts that allow multiple readings or interpretations are inherently pleasurable to readers. Texts that are simple and one-dimensional are less likely to be sources of pleasure. One may take pleasure from the referent of such a text, but the text itself does not offer the reader pleasure. Similarly, texts that are opaque or too difficult to decipher also fail to give pleasure. It is texts that resist simple readings while showing the way to more complex readings that are most likely to give pleasure to readers. Texts of this kind may be said to have poetic or aesthetic value. The initial ambiguity is stimulating, and the subsequent resolution rewarding (cf. Berlyne 1971; Eco
1979; McQuarrie and Mick 1992; Peracchio and Meyers-
Levy 1994).
The notion of a pleasure-of-the-text is readily linked to the concept of attitude-toward-the-ad (Mick 1992). Increased enjoyment while processing the ad text makes it probable that consumers will regard the overall ad more favorably. The importance of this transference is that pleasure- of-the-text is exactly the kind of text-interpretive idea that cries out for empirical testing. Of course professional semioticians derive a great deal of pleasure from teasing out complex strands of meaning from great literature— but what about naive consumers encountering ordinary advertisements?
These consumers’ motivation to process advertisements, their opportunity to process at any length, and even their ability to process are all open to question. It is easy to imagine rhetorical figures, especially those worked into the visual background, as having no effect on consumers at all, however delightful these figures may be to semioticians and other interpretivists. Although some positive evidence does exist for the case of puns (McQuarrie and Mick 1992), and for processes of aesthetic resolution more generally (Peracchio and Meyers-Levy 1994), it remains an open question whether the simple presence or absence of a visual figure can influence consumer attitudes toward the ad (Aad).
If the text-interpretive account is correct, then it can be hypothesized that tropes will produce a greater increment than schemes on Aad as well as elaboration. This follows from the role of deviation in creating pleasure-of-the-text.
There is no pleasure if the text lacks art; but pleasure comes from the successful resolution of incongruity, and the amount of incongruity, and hence the degree of resolution possible, is a function of the extent of deviation. As before, the assumption of greater deviation in the case of tropes yields the prediction of an interaction such that schemes and tropes are both able to produce a more favorable Aad relative to baseline ads lacking visual figures, but the increment is larger for tropes.
A PRIORI TEXT INTERPRETATION
Our text-interpretive analysis of the visual aspects of the four rhetorical ads in Table 1 is based on the synthesis of three traditions. The first, of course, is rhetoric, drawing on the fundamental character of rhetorical figures, their various types, and the underlying operations that construct them, as outlined above and discussed in detail by McQuarrie and
Mick (1996). The second tradition is the semiotic doctrine
40
(Childers and Houston 1984; Edell and Staelin 1983; Meyers-
Levy and Peracchio 1992; Miniard et al. 1991; Scott
1994a). The area is now characterized by conceptual and methodological diversity, with a variety of new propositions and findings emerging.
Historically four approaches can be distinguished, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. The archival tradition is perhaps the oldest (e.g., Assael, …show more content…
Kofron, and Burgi
1967). Studies in this vein gather large samples of advertisements and conduct content analyses to describe the frequency with which various types of visual elements appear. Archival studies may also report correlations between the presence of certain elements and specific audience responses (e.g., Finn 1988; Holbrook and Lehman
1980; Rossiter 1981). The weakness of this approach is that it is primarily descriptive and provides only weak evidence for causality. Also, the specific visual elements investigated tend to cover a wide range and are not generated by any theoretical specification.
The experimental tradition systematically varies either the presence or absence of pictures per se (e.g., Edell and
Staelin 1983) or the nature of some particular visual element
(e.g., Meyers-Levy and Peracchio 1995) or the processing conditions under which subjects encounter particular visual elements (e.g., Miniard et al. 1991). The strength of this tradition is rigorous causal analysis combined with theoretical specification. However, the consumer responses elicited tend to be abbreviated or impoverished, and theoretical specification is mostly applied to consumer processing rather than to the visual element per se.
The reader-response approach emphasizes the meanings that consumers draw from ads (e.g., Mick and Buhl 1992;
Mick and Politi 1989; Scott 1994b). Extended depth interviews are sometimes used to show the rich and complex interplay between elements of the ad and consumer responses.
Weaknesses include a limited ability to conduct causal analysis and a relatively vague specification of how specific types of ad elements can be linked to particular kinds of consumer meanings.
*Edward F. McQuarrie is associate professor of marketing and associate dean of graduate studies at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara
University, Santa Clara, CA 95053. David Glen Mick is associate professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706. The authors, both of whom contributed substantially to the research, would like to thank the marketing groups at the University of Arizona, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin, the Faculty Colloquium at the Leavey School, and Barbara Phillips for their insightful comments, and
Hakshin Chan and Raena Shioshita for assistance with data collection.
Mick would also like to thank the Dublin City University Business School for its support during completion of this project when he served as the
Endowed Chair of Marketing (1997–98).
37
© 1999 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc. c Vol. 26 c June 1999
All rights reserved. 0093-5301/00/2601-0003$03.00
The text-interpretive perspective draws on semiotic, rhetorical, and literary theories to provide a systematic and nuanced analysis of the individual elements that make up the ad (e.g., Durand 1987; McQuarrie 1989; Scott 1994a;
Sonesson 1996; Stern 1989). It treats visual and verbal elements as equally capable of conveying crucial meanings and as equally worthy of differentiation and analysis. However, this tradition rarely collects or analyzes advertising responses from consumers. This raises the issue of whether the elaborate systematization of text elements actually maps onto the responses of consumers in an illuminating way.
Similarly, causality is more often assumed than demonstrated.
This brief summary suggests that there is ample need and opportunity for investigations that span multiple traditions and draw on the strengths of each. Although several of these perspectives have been closely linked historically (e.g., rhetoric, semiotics, literary theory, reader-response), with a great deal of mutual borrowing, others have rarely crossed paths (e.g., semiotics, laboratory experiments). This article interweaves two strands of the text-interpretive tradition
(rhetoric and semiotics) with the experimental tradition and the reader-response approach. We show that patterns of stylistic variation parallel to the figures of speech documented in language have a reliable impact on consumer response, and we explain these results using a model of the consumer as an astute and active reader of advertising texts.
Specifically, we present a rhetorical and semiotic analysis of visual figures in advertising, test predictions from this textinterpretive analysis in two experiments, and supplement these experiments by means of a reader-response analysis using phenomenological interviews. This multimethod approach builds on previous attempts to show the value of a critical pluralism for consumer research (Hunt 1991; Mc-
Quarrie and Mick 1992).
TEXT STRUCTURE AND CONSUMERS
AS READERS
As a reader the consumer approaches advertisements as complex texts to be interpreted (Scott 1994b). Approached as texts, ads may be ignored or engaged, disdained or enjoyed, critiqued or endorsed. Of course, these consumer readings will be shaped by idiosyncratic factors as well as text structure (Eco 1979). Nonetheless, we assume that text structure functions reliably as a causal agent. That is, text structure tends to shape or direct consumer response, even though it does not, strictly speaking, fix or determine it. The underlying model is probabilistic; although any randomly selected consumer may or may not read an ad text in a given way, in the mass, more consumers than not will read a text in a way that is predicated on the text structure itself.
Text structure is an encompassing term that refers to any discriminable pattern in any part of the manifest ad. Our focus here is on the more narrow concept of stylistic variation.
We define style to include all those aspects of an ad that can be varied independently of the assertion of a brandattribute linkage, that is, message content. Once we create an ad text that communicates a certain brand-attribute linkage, any subsequent change to the ad that continues to communicate that content, and that is not itself simply the assertion of a second brand-attribute linkage, is by definition a change of style. The separation of style from content in no way implies that ad style cannot convey information, cannot add meaning, or cannot concern the brand. Stylistic variation in advertising can do all these things. In fact, from a semiotic perspective, it is not possible to change the style of an advertisement without also changing some of its meaning. By contrast, it should be possible in an experiment to hold the assertion of a central brand-attribute linkage constant while varying aspects of the ad’s style. Because consumers read ad texts for style as well as content, such a manipulation of style should have a predictable impact on consumer response.
Given our overall commitment to linking the text-interpretive and experimental traditions, rhetorical theory appears ideally suited to the task of generating specific predictions, amenable to experimental test, about the impact of stylistic variation in advertising visuals. With its semiotic foundation, the rhetorical tradition can provide a wealth of ideas for differentiating and integrating aspects of visual style (see, e.g., Durand 1987). Furthermore, the practical bent that has characterized rhetoric from its beginnings facilitates experimentation—rhetoricians have always sought the particular style most able to compel an audience response. Lastly, building on the link to the reader-response tradition developed by Scott (1994b), rhetorical analysis can also be applied to generate a rich account of the consumer meanings that visual style might be expected to potentiate.
In the following sections we first define, explain, and differentiate various types of rhetorical figures, concluding that a visual embodiment of this historically linguistic notion should be possible. We then develop the impact …show more content…
on consumer response that can be expected upon exposure to visual rhetorical figures in advertising. This impact in turn derives from the meanings set in motion by the text structure of the visual figures. Hence, we provide an a priori text interpretation that identifies some of these meanings in the case of the stimuli constructed for this project. That interpretation then provides a context for the empirical studies.
RHETORICAL FIGURES
IN ADVERTISING
A rhetorical figure is an artful deviation, relative to audience expectation, that conforms to a template independent of the specifics of the occasion where it occurs (McQuarrie and Mick 1996).
Familiar examples of figures of speech include rhyme and metaphor; dozens more are catalogued in classical sources (Corbett 1990). Because they are artful, rhetorical figures are not errors or solecisms; and because the template is independent of the specific content asserted, figures may be considered a stylistic device. Under this conception, rhetorical figures could be advantageous to advertisers for several reasons. Most important, artful deviation adds interest to an advertisement. For instance, a cigarette ad that proclaims “Today’s Slims at a very slim price” should be more engaging to the consumer than one that
38 JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH reads “Today’s Slims at a very low price.” Moreover, the advantage of any stylistic device is that it can potentially be added to an ad without disturbing the underlying attribute claim—thus, in the example above, the rhetorical figure still communicates a low-price positioning for the brand but does something more as
well.
Many variations in advertising style are one-shot affairs, specific cases sampled from a plenitude of possibilities. By contrast, rhetorical figures are generated by a limited number of rhetorical operations, and this makes it possible to construct an overarching theory of the causal impact of figures, an enterprise that would be intractable if one had to work with isolated heterogeneous instances of stylistic variation.
The limited number of figures also poses the intriguing possibility that the entire set can be generated from a single compact theoretical specification. McQuarrie and
Mick (1996) suggested that the wealth of rhetorical figures found in advertising could be organized into a three-level taxonomy, with all the figures located at a given node sharing certain formal properties. These properties would in turn be the key determinants of consumer response to figures.
The top level of their taxonomy, which includes all figures, is characterized by the property of artful deviation as defined above. It seems likely that the degree of deviation present in specific instances of figures may vary over a wide range and systematically across types of figures, with a corresponding difference in impact on consumers. Thus, there exists a gradient of deviation, with more deviant figures having a greater impact, up to some point of diminishing returns. In fact, McQuarrie and Mick (1992, experiment
2) showed that a rhetorical figure could be so deviant as to have a negative impact, creating confusion rather than interest. At the second level of the taxonomy, schemes are distinguished from tropes as two different modes of figuration.
Schemes deviate by means of excessive regularity. For example, rhyme, with its unexpected repetition of sounds, is a scheme. Thus, an ad for motor oil that proclaims “Performax.
Protects to the Max” would hold an advantage over the less deviant “Performax. The Top Protection.” Tropes deviate by means of an irregular usage. Metaphors, with their literally false but nonetheless illuminating equation of two different things, and puns, with their accidental resemblances, are tropes.1 Thus, the punning headline by Ford,
“Make fun of the road,” can be construed either as an invitation to scorn or to enjoy. This deviant construction, whose oscillating meanings cannot be completely pinned down, would hold an advantage over the more straightforward
“Dominate the road” or “Enjoy the road.”
At the third level of the taxonomy, specific rhetorical operations, which may be simple or complex, serve to construct schemes or tropes. Repetition and reversal are the simple and complex operations that construct schemes (examples are rhyme and antithesis, respectively), while substitution and destabilization are the simple and complex operations that construct tropes (examples are ellipsis and metaphor, respectively). In the aggregate the four rhetorical operations provide four different opportunities for adding artful deviation to an ad.
The definition of rhetorical figures as templates independent of the specifics of individual expressions indicates that visual rhetorical figures ought to be possible. Nothing in the fundamental definition of a figure either requires a linguistic expression or precludes a visual expression. In fact, the idea of a visual figure has ancient roots in art theory (Gombrich
1960; Scott 1994a). Durand (1987) may have been the first to propose a comprehensive catalog of visual figures. Unfortunately, most prior work in the text-interpretive tradition has focused on visual metaphor to the exclusion of other figures (e.g., Forceville 1995; Kaplan 1992; Kennedy,
Green, and Vervaeke 1993; Phillips 1997). Of the many other figures routinely discussed in the context of linguistic rhetoric, only the pun has been investigated in visual form
(Abed 1994; McQuarrie and Mick 1992).
In light of the various taxonomies of rhetorical figures now available (e.g., Dubois et al. 1970; Durand 1987;
McQuarrie and Mick 1996), the most compelling demonstration of the power of visual figures would utilize multiple figures, rather than concentrating on a single instance such as metaphor, and would predict distinct impacts for different types of figures, rather than lumping all figures together. A successful experimental investigation along these lines would testify both to the cross-modal generality and explanatory power of the idea of a rhetorical figure, and to the potency and flexibility of visual style as a means of altering consumer response to advertising.
IMPACT OF VISUAL RHETORICAL
FIGURES
In this article we argue that rhetorical figures, in whatever form, can be expected to have two primary effects on consumer response. The first is increased elaboration and the second is a greater degree of pleasure.
Elaboration
In cognitive psychological terms, elaboration “reflects the extent to which information in working memory is integrated with prior knowledge structures” (MacInnis and
Price 1987, p. 475). Broadly speaking, elaboration indicates the amount, complexity, or range of cognitive activity occasioned by a stimulus. As noted by MacInnis and Price, elaboration can take the form of either discursive thought or imagery. When a rhetorical figure is embodied visually, it is reasonable to suppose that both discursive and imagistic elaboration may result.
The idea of elaboration can be readily translated into interpretivist language, as the extent to which a reader engages a text or the amount of interpretation occasioned by a text or the number of inferences drawn (Mick 1992). The fundamental property by which all rhetorical figures stimulate elaboration is their artful deviance. As texts marked by deviance, rhetorical figures indicate to readers that they
1For a more extensive list of schemes and tropes found in advertising, see Leigh (1994) and McQuarrie and Mick (1996).
VISUAL RHETORIC IN ADVERTISING 39 should consider the communicator’s reasons for so marking the text (text marking is discussed in detail by the semiotician
Mukarovsky [1964]). As Sperber and Wilson (1986) argue, audiences always assume relevance on the part of the communicator. Hence, if the text is marked, then the communicator must have wanted the audience to take note of it, and the surrounding context should allow the reader to interpret correctly the reason the text was marked, provided the reader makes a competent effort. The assumption of relevance enables Sperber and Wilson to explain why the literal falseness of metaphor is only a problem for logicians— ordinary readers readily recognize that the communicator has deviated from expectation in order to make a point. In the case of metaphor, the point is typically that a variety of predications should be entertained, with no one of them fully adequate to capture the communicator’s intent.
The concepts of deviation and marking can in turn be translated back into more conventional psychological terms.
Deviation can be understood as the stimulus property of incongruity (Berlyne 1971). Incongruity in ad stimuli is known to provoke elaboration (Heckler and Childers 1992).
Hence, it should be possible to demonstrate experimentally that an ad containing a visual rhetorical figure will produce a greater degree of elaboration relative to a baseline ad that lacks the figure.
It should also be the case that tropes will produce a greater increment in elaboration than schemes. McQuarrie and Mick (1996) argued that tropes and schemes fall at different points on the gradient of deviation, with schemes on average less deviant from expectation than tropes.
Schemes are hypothesized to be less deviant than tropes for two reasons. First, in semiotic terms schemes are overcoded while tropes are undercoded. This means that tropes are incomplete, requiring the reader to fill in a gap, while schemes contain redundant cues that more directly suggest multiple meanings. Within the semiotic tradition undercoding is believed to mark the text more strongly (Eco 1979).
Second, the excessive regularity of schemes is constructed from sensory elements (e.g., the duplication of syllables in rhyme), while the irregularity of tropes is constructed from semantic elements (e.g., the different meanings brought together in a metaphor). A depth of processing argument can thus be framed to support the claim that tropes are more deviant than schemes (experimental evidence that sensory and semantic elements differ in depth of processing is provided by Childers and Houston [1984]). If deviation is in fact the primary formal property of rhetorical figures that causes elaboration, then in an experimental setting it should be possible to show both a main effect for the presence of a visual figure and also an interaction in which the effect is larger for tropes than schemes. These effects are conditioned on the deviation being neither so minimal that it goes unnoticed nor so extreme as to be incomprehensible.
Pleasure
Artful deviation is also the cause of the pleasure produced by rhetorical figures, but here it is their artfulness that is key. In semiotics a fundamental tenet is that readers enjoy a pleasure of the text (Barthes 1985). Texts that allow multiple readings or interpretations are inherently pleasurable to readers. Texts that are simple and one-dimensional are less likely to be sources of pleasure. One may take pleasure from the referent of such a text, but the text itself does not offer the reader pleasure. Similarly, texts that are opaque or too difficult to decipher also fail to give pleasure. It is texts that resist simple readings while showing the way to more complex readings that are most likely to give pleasure to readers. Texts of this kind may be said to have poetic or aesthetic value. The initial ambiguity is stimulating, and the subsequent resolution rewarding (cf. Berlyne 1971; Eco
1979; McQuarrie and Mick 1992; Peracchio and Meyers-
Levy 1994).
The notion of a pleasure-of-the-text is readily linked to the concept of attitude-toward-the-ad (Mick 1992). Increased enjoyment while processing the ad text makes it probable that consumers will regard the overall ad more favorably. The importance of this transference is that pleasure- of-the-text is exactly the kind of text-interpretive idea that cries out for empirical testing. Of course professional semioticians derive a great deal of pleasure from teasing out complex strands of meaning from great literature— but what about naive consumers encountering ordinary advertisements?
These consumers’ motivation to process advertisements, their opportunity to process at any length, and even their ability to process are all open to question. It is easy to imagine rhetorical figures, especially those worked into the visual background, as having no effect on consumers at all, however delightful these figures may be to semioticians and other interpretivists. Although some positive evidence does exist for the case of puns (McQuarrie and Mick 1992), and for processes of aesthetic resolution more generally (Peracchio and Meyers-Levy 1994), it remains an open question whether the simple presence or absence of a visual figure can influence consumer attitudes toward the ad (Aad).
If the text-interpretive account is correct, then it can be hypothesized that tropes will produce a greater increment than schemes on Aad as well as elaboration. This follows from the role of deviation in creating pleasure-of-the-text.
There is no pleasure if the text lacks art; but pleasure comes from the successful resolution of incongruity, and the amount of incongruity, and hence the degree of resolution possible, is a function of the extent of deviation. As before, the assumption of greater deviation in the case of tropes yields the prediction of an interaction such that schemes and tropes are both able to produce a more favorable Aad relative to baseline ads lacking visual figures, but the increment is larger for tropes.
A PRIORI TEXT INTERPRETATION
Our text-interpretive analysis of the visual aspects of the four rhetorical ads in Table 1 is based on the synthesis of three traditions. The first, of course, is rhetoric, drawing on the fundamental character of rhetorical figures, their various types, and the underlying operations that construct them, as outlined above and discussed in detail by McQuarrie and
Mick (1996). The second tradition is the semiotic doctrine
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