Two essays on visual-based consumer inferences

Abstract

Visual marketing, the use of images, videos, and other pieces of multimedia content to help promote brand and product, is the dominant form of advertising. Despite being more versatile, engaging, and popular than other forms of marketing content, there are still many realistic challenges that may limit the effectiveness of visual advertising across mediums. For instance, it is fundamentally difficult to signal a product’s non-visual attributes in various forms of visual marketing (e.g., video marketing, printing marketing). Also, in many marketplaces, consumers often have to process visual information simultaneously from multiple sources, including distractors such as competitors’ advertisements, which make advertised visual information hard to remember. In this thesis, I present two essays and examine two visual marketing strategies that are commonly employed to overcome above challenges but may backfire under certain circumstances. Specifically, in essay one I show that slow motion effect, a common cinematographic tactic that can provide greater social proof and help signal product qualities that are otherwise difficult to infer visually, may backfire by making the influence agent’s behavior seem extrinsically motivated and subsequently undermine the evaluation of product quality. The second essay documents a phenomenon, “advertising-amnesia”, that may arise when marketers spread product attribute information across two posters or video advertisements so that they form an ad set: When two pieces of visual marketing (e.g., posters for the same advertiser) consecutively presented among a stream of visual targets, consumers are less likely to encode the information from the second one into memory (despite seeing and being aware of it), which results in an inability of consciously retrieving such information. By discussing psychological and cognitive processes that may cause visual marketing strategy to backfire and generate negative consumer inferences in the marketing context, this thesis enriches and extends our knowledge on visual marketing literature, as well as research on social cognition. Findings derived from this thesis may offer useful implications in contexts such as persuasion and trust, and managerial implications for visual marketing, especially on digital and social platforms.