Title: Metaphors in moving images: the effect of metaphor order on message elaboration, ad comprehension, and product attribute beliefs

Authors: Lampros Gkiouzepas

Addresses: Business Administration Programme, School of Social Sciences, Hellenic Open University, 263 35 Patra, Greece

Abstract: Marketing research has just started to explore metaphor in commercials. The present article builds upon metaphor and visual rhetoric theory in order to theorise and examine metaphor order in the realm of moving images. This study demonstrates that animated video ads that employ a linguistically counter-intuitive metaphor order, such as that a source visual object appears before a target product, increase message elaboration, but they also become more difficult to understand. Further, metaphor order interacts with the conceptual metaphor underlying an ad claim. Ad claims that are consistent with a 'container' conceptual metaphor were found to be more persuasive when the source object appears to be metamorphosed into the product whereas ad claims consistent with a 'delivery' metaphor were more persuasive when the product appears to be metamorphosed into the source object. The present article concludes by discussing the implications of these findings and highlights the importance of rendering visual dimensions psychologically meaningful.

Keywords: visual metaphor; metaphor order; moving images; advertising; elaboration; comprehension; persuasion; product attribute beliefs.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTMKT.2017.091745

International Journal of Technology Marketing, 2017 Vol.12 No.4, pp.356 - 374

Received: 20 Mar 2017
Accepted: 13 Sep 2017
Published online: 14 May 2018 *

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