Design and Denotative Meaning in Performance Advertising

Abstract

Advertising in the performance sector today can be seen as a contest for consumer attention: from printed posters to online publications and hypermedia. Growing exposure to commercial messages and proliferation of their stylistic diversity create a competitive environment for show producers and marketers alike. The current marketing strategies used by production companies revolve around attracting potential audiences and consumer retention. They focus on building relationships with patrons, instead of relying on casual consumption. This underpins the need for an efficient approach, not only to understanding the various components of the marketing mix and publicity channels, but also to ensuring the quality of each encounter between the consumer and the brand: the audience and the dance company or performance event. Thus, brand-positioning strategies and image-building tactics imply the need to create high quality communication devices for achieving financial success and retaining a positive perception of the performance company. Dance industry advertising is involved in promoting aesthetic products for which functional values cannot be easily defined. It therefore needs to convey its values through purely emotional and experiential means, as any form of art does. Given that visual images are the main method of communication between potential patrons and a production company, a systematic method for analysing and understanding what exactly the image communicates is crucial. A number of approaches have been devised, including McQuarrie and Mick’s pluralistic inquiry into visual rhetoric and Groupe Mu’s taxonomy for general rhetoric. However, these methods are dependent at a certain level on the cultural competency of the observer. It means that they rely on connotation, instead of rooting their deductions in denotation inquiry, leaving out the possibility of unambiguous empirical justification. The aim of my research was to devise a framework that would enable a reader-independent evaluation of the marketing collateral without the same level of prerequisite cultural competency that is needed for reader-response and text-interpretive analyses. In the devised framework, each inference about the relationships between the elements of an image is contained within the image. Its analysis involves a priori knowledge of the methodology and not of the culture or context in which the advertisement may have been produced. My framework is based on Wertheimer’s gestalt theory of visual perception, which describes the general grouping principles that provide the means to identify basic perceptive relationships among the visual elements of an image. The advantage of this theory is that it requires an observer to have minimal familiarity with the history or cultural background of the advertisement. I extended the application of these principles through the findings in the current research in the area, including the symmetric object alignment studies, and combined various attribute types of visual elements to create a comprehensive taxonomy. The classification of visual elements is rooted in the dichotomy of association and difference between the objects in the advertisement. It uses gestalt principles and escalates beyond grouping to the general movement resonance, overall presentational organisation, and meaning extrapolated from the image. These attributes vary from one image to the next and dictate the placement of objects and the degree to which they are related or unrelated conceptually. By placing all the objects in an image into certain arrangements, such as figure and text, the advertiser and the production company can focus the viewer’s attention on certain properties of the advertised performance, while choosing to ignore or detract from others. Through empirical examination, my framework aims to help delineate which properties the observer is more likely to notice due to their interrelationships and shared attributes, such as direction of movement, scale, uniformity of angle and line types. In addition to the two categories of classification found in the case of symmetric object alignment, the framework introduces the third category, presentation-constitutive features, and demonstrates its usability in the results of the analysis of the image sample. The taxonomy provides the basis for identifying attributes that are shared among the objects and the consequent associative links that are formed. Those links determine the primary visual characteristics of the subject of interest in the photograph or image and can also be used to justify conceptual association between objects that seem unrelated at first sight. Objects and object attributes from which the subject of interest draws an association define the main characteristics of the advertisement and the message which it carries to the observer. The method of analysis consists of testing the taxonomy on 50 posters of international origin and finding correlations between two different sectors: live dance theatre and motion picture. Motion picture advertising is drawn on as a source to provide a comparative example. It is anticipated that the framework will find applications in dance, physical theatre, and other industries in which advertising focuses mainly on aesthetic values. It will help us to understand how those values are represented and illuminate the properties through which they are formed, preparing choreographers and brand strategists to create compelling and effective advertising by making more precise and targeted compositional choices. The Recommendations chapter outlines the limitations of the framework and explains the semantic boundaries in which meaning derivation can be produced using denotation analysis. Possibilities for the comparison of results between the Framework for Denotative Analysis and Taxonomy of Visual Elements (FDATVE) and intermodal inquiry are outlined, and a summary of the key findings of the research is drawn. The concluding sections provide recommendations for further consumer research.