Designing Visual Metaphors in Advertisements:

Abstract

A visual metaphor is an advertising creative that can evoke cognitive elaboration and improve comprehension. To offer useful guidance in designing effective visual metaphors for target markets, the present research focuses on the cognitive effort required to interpret visual metaphors and explores how configurations of five factors can increase cognitive elaboration and comprehension. These factors are visual structure complexity, conceptual similarity, explicitness, verbal messages, and need for cognition. Our fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis reveals that visual metaphor ads evoke increased cognitive elaboration in the presence of visual structure complexity and need for cognition, and in the absence of conceptual similarity, explicitness, and verbal messages. The analysis also shows that consumers accurately comprehend visual metaphor ads that include conceptual similarity, explicitness, and direct verbal messages, and do not have visual structure complexity.

Keywords

• visual structure complexity
• conceptual similarity
• explicitness
• verbal messages
• need for cognition