The Effect Of Advertisement Visual Metaphors On Consumers' Cognitive Behaviors

As well known,advertisement visual metaphor,as an important means of marketing is used by an increasing number of advertisement makers and marketers.However,the commercial and social benefits of its use are sometimes far from satisfactory.Consumers sometimes produce cognitive inferences not up to the expectations of advertising production or misunderstand the real intent of the advertising.These negative effects lead to potential economic losses.Combined with the traditional explicit attitude-oriented analysis,this thesis aims to obtain more subtle psychological state and cognitive processing strategies of visual metaphor advertisements on the level of implicit automatic processing,so that the findings of the paper can improve the marketing effect of advertisement visual metaphors.Integrating the cognitive neuroscience,this thesis employed ERP method(Event-related Potentials)and EEG technique(Electroencephalogram)to carry out the research on the effect of visual metaphor advertisements on consumers' cognitive behaviors,with the focus on the cognitive results and attitude evaluation of advertisement visual metaphors.Based on the cognitive constructs of consumers' behavior in advertising,the cognitive processing process of advertisement visual metaphors with four basic dimensions of consumers' cognitive behaviors(including attention,memory,understanding and attitude)were identified and verified.The influence of advertisement visual metaphors on these dimensions were studied from four perspectives,including the cognitive processing course,the perceptual similarity,the cognitive incongruity and verbal anchoring.In particular,the most preferential paths and conditions for the cognitive effects of advertisement visual metaphors were established.The main contents of this thesis are as follows:(1)The study of cognitive processing course of advertisement visual metaphors and its effect on consumers' cognitive behaviors.Comparing the metaphor pictures with the literal pictures of advertised products,the thesis identified the specific cognitive processing patterns of visual metaphor advertisements,including broadly distributed N1(the first negative post-stimulus component occurring 100-150ms),to frontally biased N2(a negative component occurring 200-300ms)and to parietally biased LPC(a late positive component occurring 400-500ms),which is cognitively characterized by initial attention,early semantic conflict and delayed semantic integration of reanalysis.Further analysis of power spectrum of frequency bands(delta,theta,alpha and beta)showed that semantic information of visual metaphor advertisements has an important effect on the consumers' cognitive processing,mainly reflected in the facilitating role it plays in attention,memory,comprehension and the lateralized processing of right brain.This mechanism of attention and recognition,fast and extensive,differs from that of linguistic metaphors due to the involvement of visual pathways.(2)The effect study of perceptual similarity of advertisement visual metaphors on consumers' cognitive behaviors.In terms of the shape similarity between target products and source objects and its influence on the comprehension of products' features,reaction time.judgment accuracy and oral descriptions of metaphorical features were analyzed.It was found that for similarity-based advertisement visual metaphors,shape similarity to some extent plays an inhibitory role in processing time for the comprehension of products' metaphorical relationship,but facilitates the recognition and retrieval of product features.(3)The effect study of cognitive incongruity of advertisement visual metaphors on consumers' cognitive behaviors.In the interactive conditions between perceptual(in)congruity and conceptual(in)congruity,the effect of incongruity on working memory of products feature information and advertisement attitudes was examined.The neural enhancement was detected of EEG component N270 and frequency bands,delta and theta,which are all conflict-related neural markers.It was found that perceptual incongruity of advertisement visual metaphors,which modulates conceptual incongruity,facilitates the detection of cross-domain incongruity and the working memory.Meanwhile,the attitude towards the advertisements of "incongruous in shape but congrous in concept" visual metaphors was found higher.(4)The effect study of verbal anchoring of advertisement visual metaphors on consumers' cognitive behaviors.Comparing literal verbal anchoring,metaphorical verbal anchoring and unrelated verbal anchoring,the thesis found that literal verbal anchoring plays a facilitating role in the advertisement comprehension and advertisement liking.Particularly,in the case of metaphorical pictures of medium-level novelty combined with literal verbal anchoring,the facilitating role is found to be the most obvious.This thesis,integrating the cognitive neuroscience,reveals the consumers' cognitive behaviors of advertisement visual metaphors,opens up a research dimension of implicit automatic processing for the theory and practice of consumers' cognitive behaviors,identifies the visual elements of perceptual similarity and cognitive incongruity and their influencing mechanism on the cognitive processing of advertising information,and puts forward evaluation basis for the application and validity of advertising schema incongruity.It also proposes and validates different combinations of rhetorical features of visual metaphor pictures and verbal anchoring and their cognitive mechanism of the impact on advertising effect,constructing the new dimension for both the evaluation of advertising effect and the advertising production in the field of cognitive science.The findings of this thesis have great significance for advertising design and marketing,both theoretically and practically.