Designing signs that stick: graphic design influences tourist attention capture and retention of litter messages in a beach setting

Litter in freshwater beach environments represents a pervasive problem globally. Research aimed at understanding how this problem can be addressed is especially lacking in the realm of tourism, despite tourism-related waste being a significant source of litter in beach environments. Additionally, there is a gap in tourism research related to how graphic design and visual rhetoric influence attention capture and message retention among tourists—especially in nature-based settings. Accordingly, this research applies the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion and the theory of visual rhetoric to assess the effectiveness of varying signage strategies (including varying messaging and design strategies) in capturing tourists’ attention and fostering retention of a message targeting the action of picking up litter on a beach at Lake Tahoe, Nevada (USA). Through an experimental design, we find that, controlling for other factors, use of an engaging character helps foster attention capture and retention of the message, and, while a personal normative messages captures less aggregate attention during observations, it achieves the highest rate of message retention among a quizzed sample. Implications for beach destination management are subsequently presented, including the use of graphic design, harnessing of visual rhetoric, and activation of moral norms.