Did You Get It? Factors Influencing Subjective Comprehension of Visual Metaphors in Advertising

Abstract

Praggyan (Pam) Mohantya* & S. Ratneshwarba Governors State University, University Park, Illinois, USA b University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA Address correspondence to Praggyan (Pam) Mohanty, Governors State University, College of Business and Public Administration, One University Parkway, University Park, IL, 60484-0975. E-mail: pmohanty@govst.eduPraggyan (Pam) Mohanty (PhD, University of Missouri) is an assistant professor of marketing, College of Business and Public Administration, Governors State University.S. Ratneshwar (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is the Bailey K. Howard World Book Chair of Marketing, Trulaske College of Business, University of Missouri.Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/ujoa.This research examines how the degree of incongruity of a metaphor, need for cognition (NFC), and type of processing affect the subjective comprehension of visual metaphor ads. Across three studies, involving different manipulations of incongruity, we find an inverse relationship between the degree of incongruity in a visual metaphor and subjective ad comprehension, as well as a positive relationship between NFC and subjective ad comprehension. Furthermore, we show that NFC becomes more consequential for subjective ad comprehension at higher levels of incongruity. Similarly, the beneficial effects of relational (versus item) processing on subjective ad comprehension are greater for higher incongruity visual metaphor ads.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 65 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.