Critical visual analysis: advertising, branding and identity

Marketing depends upon images in on and offline environments, and research methods in marketing must be capable of addressing the issues such images signify. By connecting images to the cultural context of consumption, researchers can gain a more thorough understanding of how images embody and express cultural values and contradictions. This chapter presents qualitative methods for conducting critical visual analysis of images, including brand and advertising images, film and photographs. It draws on a theory of visual consumption to show how cultural codes and conventions inform contemporary marketing images, infusing them with visual, historical and rhetorical presence and power. We discuss how marketing communication draws upon the ideology of the group portrait as a visual technique for representing identity. We treat advertising imagery much the way art historians treat pictures, analyzing examples using classic art-historical techniques framed within representation understood as a cultural practice.