This article adopts and extends a meaning-based approach to advertising. We emphasize the consumer's perspective and seek to address important factors that motivate and shape actualized advertising meanings. A graphic model is delineated that focuses on consumers' life themes (e.g., being true...

A rhetorical figure can be defined as an artful deviation in the form taken by a statement. Since antiquity dozens of figures have been cataloged, ranging from the familiar (rhyme, pun) to the obscure (antimetabole). Despite the frequent appearance of rhetorical figures in print advertisements,...

This re-inquiry examines the robustness of research showing that rhetorical figures such as rhyme and metaphor can have a positive impact on consumer response to advertising. Prior empirical research explicitly directed subjects to process the ads and generally examined either visual or verbal...

This article reports the results of a study meant to portray a detailed picture of self-gift experiences in four contexts, focusing notably on reward and therapeutic self-gifts. Extending prior conceptual discussions, the findings suggest that self-gifts are a form of personally symbolic...

Although technological products are unavoidable in contemporary life, studies focusing on them in the consumer behavior field have been few and narrow. In this article, we investigate consumers' perspectives, meanings, and experiences in relation to a range of technological products, emphasizing...

Print ads exhibit resonance when they combine wordplay with a relevant picture to create ambiguity and incongruity. This article uses multiple perspectives and methods within a framework of critical pluralism to investigate advertising resonance. Semiotic text analyses, a content analysis of...

Two fundamental orientations toward message comprehension have appeared in advertising research: the traditional objective view, which applies an accuracy criterion to conceptualize and evaluate comprehension, and the subjective view, which applies other criteria related to the individual...

Text interpretations, two experiments, and a set of reader-response interviews examine the impact of stylistic elements in advertising that form visual rhetorical figures parallel to those found in language. The visual figures examined here--rhyme, antithesis, metaphor, and pun--produced more...