Thinking into it: Consumer Interpretation of Complex Advertising Images

The qualitative study reported is based on a new conceptualization that characterizes complex advertising images as figures of rhetoric from which consumers infer advertising messages. Informants interpreted the meanings of six ads containing pictorial metaphors. The interpretations indicated that shared strong implicatures as well as multiple weak implicatures were drawn from images in the ads. In general, consumers' interpretations matched the intentions of the ads' producers. Informant responses also suggested that consumers use cultural, product, and advertising knowledge to infer meaning from advertising images.