Editorial: Introduction to the special issue on aesthetics, images and vision

In contemporary marketing the production and consumption of images challenges the production and consumption of products, profoundly influencing marketing practice, transforming marketing theory, and shifting appropriate areas of research.Variously referred to as the aesthetic economy, the attention economy, and the experience economy, this visual turn in marketing calls for new perspectives and approaches.What does the production and consumption of images mean for marketing theory and practice?How does the handling of images in the disparate fields of brand management, art history, consumer research, and visual studies shed light on the relationships between aesthetics, images, vision and marketing theory?Clearly, visual issues are being recognized as important issues in marketing research.Many battles of the brands take place within the visual domain.Design, in particular, depends upon visual understanding and aesthetic expertise.The Web mandates visualizing almost every aspect of corporate strategy, operations and communication; web design has brought visual issues into the mainstream of strategic thinking, and spurred research and thinking about perception and preference of visual displays.Images -including brand images, corporate images and websites -constitute much corporate communication about products, economic performance and corporate identity (e.g.Dowling, 1993;Park et al., 1986;Stern et al., 2001).Today's visual information technologies of television, film and the Internet are directly connected to the visual past (Schroeder, 2005).Research on information technology (IT) or information and communication technology (ICT) usually focuses on complex, sophisticated systems such as mass media, the Internet, telecommunications, or digital satellite transmission arrays.These constitute the basic building blocks of the information society -where information is a crucial corporate competitive advantage as well as a fundamental cultural force.The World Wide Web, among its many influences, has put a premium on understanding visual consumption.