Visual Analysis of Images in Brand Culture

Cultural codes, ideological discourse, and rhetorical processes have been acknowledged as influences on consumer's relationships with advertising, brands and mass media. If brands exist as cultural, ideological, and rhetorical objects, then researchers require tools developed to understand culture, ideology and rhetoric, in conjunction with more typical branding concepts, such as equity, strategy, and value. This chapter argues for an art historical imagination within advertising research, one that reveals how representational conventions - or common patterns of portraying objects, people, or identities - work alongside rhetorical processes in ways that often elude advertising research. Several new theoretical concepts, including snapshot aesthetics - the growing use of snapshot-like imagery in marketing communication - and the transformational mirror of consumption - which reflects basic assumptions about how advertising works - provide productive directions for research.