ABSTRACT
Visual marketing is widely recognized to be important in practice. As consumers, we are exposed to several hundreds of explicit advertisements daily on television, in newspapers, magazines, billboards, the yellow pages, retail feature ads, and on Internet sites. We experience even more implicit visual messages in the form of product packages in stores and at home. Point-of-purchase stimuli, such as store displays, shelf talkers and flyers, are omnipresent and commercial visual messages appear on the side of trucks, road signs, food wrappers in restaurants, on service provider uniforms, t-shirts, CDs and electronic devices. Often, these are part of corporate visual identity communication, ways in which companies organize to visually present themselves in a consistent manner. Visual aspects are also a key component of marketing collateral, which involves the use of visual aids to make sales effort more effective, after a prospective buyer has been identified. All this requires graphical design of the commercial visual stimuli in question. The basic elements of graphical design, as in many other areas of design, include shape, size, form, texture, lines, and color. But, the visual context in which products, brands, and ads are presented may affect consumers’ reactions to them as well.
