The operation of visual imagery as a mediator of advertising effects.

Introduction

Imagery is "a mental event involving visualization of a concept or relationship" (Lutz and Lutz 1978), and it has been defined as "...a process...by which...sensory information is represented in working memory" (MacInnis and Price 1987). The explanatory potential of imagery

is both potent and provocative, especially when one takes into account that the forms of mental impressions include all five senses: hearing, touch, taste, smell, and sight. In other words, it is possible for a person to experience a sensory stimulus without the true stimulus ever being present. Since this is true, advertising strategists should be especially interested in the operation and consequences of imagery as a means of influencing consumers (Rossiter 1982).

There is growing interest in mental imagery for good reasons. First, imagery has ample potential for drawing information stored in long-term memory into working memory. This phenomenon has been called "high elaboration" by MacInnis and Price (1987), and tapping long-term memory is believed to lead to greater communications effectiveness (MacInnis and Jaworski 1989). Second, mental images have potential to be more personally relevant because they are anchored in the person's experience base and generated by his/her own mental processes. Strong relevance is a desirable facet of persuasive communications (MacInnis and Jaworski 1989). Next, imagery has the capability of being multisensory and thus could provide for multiple avenues of information processing. Triggering multiple channels of information processing is believed to enhance advertising effectiveness (Rossiter 1982; Lutz and Lutz 1978). Also, images are experiential rather than discursive; thus, they afford a richer base of raw stimuli. Finally, it can be argued that because imagery is believed to be more closely linked to long-term memory, is more personally relevant, and is richer, its effects on consumer attitudes and intentions will be more robust than stimuli which do not engage such depth and breadth of information processing. In fact, Richardson (1983) claims that the consequences of self-initiated thought imagery are indistinguishable from its genuine sensory counterparts. This contention underpins what should be the strong appeal of imagery to advertising strategists.

Given this backdrop, this paper has several purposes: first, to briefly review imagery research which has taken place in cognitive psychology as well as in consumer behavior studies; second, to identify research needs in imagery related to advertising; and third, to present an appropriate conceptual framework and the research hypotheses derived from it. An experiment designed to test these hypotheses using print advertisements is subsequently described, and the results are reported. Finally, the authors discuss the implications of the research and suggest potentially fruitful topics of future research in this area.