How language and image construct synaesthetic metaphors in print advertising

Abstract

Research in (multi-)sensory marketing suggests that engaging consumers’ senses is an efficient way to create effective advertisements. In this study, the authors explore how sensory cues are used in print advertising. In particular, they identify and describe print advertisements featuring instances of synaesthesia, that is, a metaphor by which properties of a given sensory modality are attributed to a concept that relates primarily to a different sensory modality. They propose that these advertisements can be classified based on the role played by the image and the text, as well as based on the way visual and linguistic elements interact. They also outline how their contribution can set theoretical groundwork for the design of new empirical research questions in cognitive sciences and marketing studies.

Keywords

print advertising sensory marketing synaesthesia visual metaphor

1. Introduction

Within the wide and interdisciplinary research area called ‘visual communication’, during the past decades metaphors have gained increasing attention, especially in the fields of cognitive linguistics, communication and media studies. Drawing from previous research on visual rhetoric (e.g. Barthes, 1977[1964]; Kennedy, 1982), in the past 20 years authors from different scholarly traditions have proposed models to describe how metaphorical messages are conveyed by visual means (e.g. Bolognesi et al., in press; El Refaie, 2003; Forceville, 1996, 2009, 2012; Phillips and McQuarrie, 2004; Šorm and Steen, 2013). Despite the increasingly large body of literature on visual metaphors, research on specific types of metaphors and other figures of speech within the visual mode is still limited (with the exception of metonymy, for which several recent studies are available, see for example Feng, 2017; Pérez-Sobrino, 2016, 2017).

Our aim is to investigate how words and images construct synaesthetic metaphors in print advertising. Synaesthetic metaphors, typically studied within the domain of language, connect concepts that refer to different sensory modalities (see section 2). For instance, in sweet voice, a hearing-related concept is qualified through a taste-related adjective. In the present study we describe and try to understand the complex interaction between visual and linguistic elements in expressing synaesthetic messages within the prolific and widely investigated genre of print advertising. The reason for choosing this specific genre is twofold. First, advertising often appeals to the senses (section 3). Second, as already observed by Barthes (1977[1964]: 33), print advertisements are relatively easier to analyse, compared for instance to artistic paintings, because their pragmatic purpose is to sell a product; this goal is achieved if the commercial message is communicated in a clear way.

We analyse several examples of print advertisements featuring synaesthetic metaphors that we selected through a specific methodology (described in section 4). We suggest that such examples can be organized according to a three-pronged typology, based on the different degrees and kinds of interaction between text and image (section 5). Such typology can serve as a framework to identify image–text synaesthesia in print advertising. Furthermore, the results of our analysis suggest possible implications for studies in the fields of cognitive science and marketing, as discussed in section 6.

2. Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia has recently received much attention, both as a neuropsychological phenomenon and as a figure of speech. The term synaesthesia was originally used in the 19th century in the medical field as a label for a rather rare neuropsychological condition, by which in some individuals the stimulation of one sensory modality provokes (automatically and involuntarily) the response also of another sensory modality (more recent studies usually provide wider definitions which also highlight the role played by cognitive and emotional factors, see Macpherson, 2007; Simner, 2012; Simner and Hubbard, 2013). In synaesthetic subjects, hearing musical notes may induce the simultaneous vision of colours: for example, F might be accompanied by the vision of yellow, A# by the vision of red, and so on. According to many diagnostic tests and neuroimaging experiments, synaesthetes simultaneously experience real perceptions in both involved modalities (for a critical review of such studies and an alternative proposal, see Hupé and Dojat, 2015). In the case of the vision of colours evoked by hearing musical notes, synaesthetes’ brains display the simultaneous activation of both hearing and visual areas. That is, it seems to be a chiefly perceptual phenomenon.

Soon after its coinage in medicine, the term synaesthesia was adopted by scholars in the fields of literature and linguistics. Here, as in medicine, the term signals the involvement of multiple sensory modalities; however, sensory associations are in this case linguistic and conceptual, rather that perceptual.¹ Linguistic synaesthesia can be defined as a type of metaphor combining sensory concepts that pertain to different sensory modalities (Strik Lievers, 2017). Linguistic synaesthesia is found in common expressions such as sweet voice (taste and hearing), cool colour (touch/temperature and sight), as well as in more creative ones like golden melody (Keats, Hyperion; sight and hearing). This is the use of the term synaesthesia that is relevant for our research. In other words, we explore combinations of sensory concepts; in print advertising, such combinations are obtained not only through linguistic means, but also through visual ones.

In linguistics, many studies have shown that certain sensory modalities are more likely than others to be combined in synaesthetic metaphors. Additionally, certain sensory modalities are more likely to be sources and others are more likely to be targets of synaesthetic transfers (Caballero and Paradis, 2015; Dombi, 1974; Shen and Gil, 2008; Tsur, 2007; Ullmann, 1957). Sources typically are concepts of touch, smell, or taste (i.e. the so-called ‘lower senses’), while targets tend to be concepts of hearing or sight (i.e. the so-called ‘higher senses’). This is the case, for instance, in sweet voice, where taste (sweet) is the source and hearing (voice) is the target of the synaesthetic transfer. Other types of combination are not impossible (and can relatively often be found in poetic texts), but synaesthetic transfers having one of the ‘lower senses’ as a source and one of the ‘higher senses’ as a target are decidedly more frequent,² as confirmed by the analysis of data from many languages (among others, Shen and Gil, 2008; Strik Lievers, 2015; Yu, 2003; Zhao et al., forthcoming). In section 6 we will discuss whether considerations about preferences in sensory combinations may also apply to synaesthesia in visuals.

3. Visual Metaphors and The Senses in Advertising

3.1 Visual metaphors

Visual metaphors are highly structured images in which the viewer is pushed to construct metaphorical transfers from a source to a target domain, cued by the image itself. In advertising, such images are typically used to help sell products or services by representing them through properties and features of other entities, used as source domains (see, for example, Forceville, 1996). The use of rhetorical features in print advertisements, and in particular of visual metaphors, is illustrated by Phillips and McQuarrie (2002) in a retrospective study based on US magazine advertisements from 1954 to 1999. Here the authors show an increasing use of rhetorical images through the decades. This phenomenon prompted a wave of interest in various academic fields. In the past decade, scholars working on figurative language in multimodal communication (e.g. Forceville and Urios-Aparisi, 2009; Hidalgo Downing and Kralievic, 2011; Pérez-Sobrino, 2016) have addressed the advantages of using metaphor in advertising. In the field of marketing, scholars have shown that metaphorical advertisements are more effective, i.e. more easily recognized and recalled, and trigger more positive responses and interpretations than non-metaphorical ones, especially within the visual mode (Kitchen, 2008; McQuarrie and Mick, 2003; McQuarrie and Phillips, 2005; Tynan et al., 2006; for neuroimaging evidence of the major emotional engagement triggered by metaphorical texts, compared to non-metaphorical ones, see Citron and Goldberg, 2014; Citron et al., 2016). Other aspects that have been addressed by recent research on visual metaphors in print advertising relate to the cross-cultural variation in the understanding of these images and the degree of complexity involved in the construction of the visual metaphor (e.g. Pérez-Sobrino and Littlemore, forthcoming; Van Hooft et al., 2013; Van Mulken et al., 2010).

The typical structure of visual metaphors in advertising sees the product as the metaphor target. For example, in an advertisement for an off-road vehicle, the car engine may be depicted as a rhino. This triggers properties such as power, strength and robustness, which originally belong to the animal. Such properties are then mapped onto the car engine and eventually onto the car brand.

Both visual and linguistic elements are used within the genre of print advertising to construct a metaphorical message (e.g. Forceville, 2008a). The terminology used to differentiate the various types of interactions between image and linguistic elements is often problematic, but in principle it should be possible to suggest a theoretical distinction between: (i) visual (monomodal) metaphors, i.e. images where both source and target domains are conveyed by visual means (rather rare in advertising); (ii) verbo-pictorial metaphors, such as print advertisements and billboards in which typically the visually conveyed target is the product to be sold, and the source is conveyed (also) through linguistic cues; (iii) (other types of) multimodal metaphors, which make use of other modalities, such as audio (this category usually applies to commercials in moving images, rather than print advertisements and billboards). Linguistic anchors are typically used in advertising to express concepts that are not easily and unambiguously conveyed by visual means. Because advertisements have to be as unambiguous as possible, linguistic anchors help to constrain the multiple available interpretations of a message. For the sake of simplicity, in what follows we will refer to both monomodal visual metaphors and verbo-pictorial metaphors as visual metaphors. Moreover, we will use the label synaesthetic metaphors to refer to synaesthetic metaphors conveyed not only by language, but also by visual means.

3.2 Sensory and multisensory marketing

Starting from the 1970s, marketing research and theory has seen the emergence of a new field: sensory marketing (see Krishna, 2013, for a review). While classic marketing mainly addressed the rationality of consumers, sensory marketing also aims to engage their feelings and emotions, thus increasing the memorability of the branded product (Krishna, 2012; Krishna and Schwarz, 2014; Lindstrom, 2005; Lund, 2015). According to the literature review in Peck and Childers (2008), in the past few years the amount of sensory studies in consumer behaviour has dramatically increased. Among the aspects tackled in these studies, the authors address how sensory branding triggers consumers’ emotional involvement by appealing to their senses. For instance, it is now common to find perfumes advertised in magazines on samples provided directly on a cardboard placed inside the magazine, or to find background music in supermarkets, which has been shown to increase sales.

A more recent development of sensory marketing is multisensory marketing: if appealing to one sense has positive marketing effects, appealing to multiple senses and combining them produces even stronger and better consumer response (Hultén, 2011; Knoeferle et al., 2016; Schifferstein and Desmet, 2008; Von Wallpach and Kreuzer, 2013). For instance, Spangenberg et al. (2005) showed how at Christmas time the combination of ambient Christmas music and Christmas-related scent in shops influences consumers’ behaviour (see also Spence et al., 2014, for a review of research in multisensory store atmospherics). Another example is that of audio-logos (see, for instance, Forceville, 2008b), through which a tune or song is used, in combination with a visual logo, to evoke a brand (e.g. the Nokia tune).

The ‘multisensory revolution in contemporary marketing’, as it has been defined by Howes (2007), is considered today one of the ultimate frontiers of marketing, which enables brands to trigger superior experiences in consumers by touching upon more than one sense simultaneously, as well as by tapping into their emotions. It has been suggested that the large number of commercial messages to which consumers are exposed on a daily basis, and the limited time exposure to such stimuli, cause the commercial messages to easily fade from memory. Multisensory branding, by tapping into multiple sensory responses, allows brands to cue associations between sensory stimuli and advertised products or whole brands. Such associations are immediate and subconscious. Moreover, they can bypass the time and energy requirements of a traditional explicit advertising message (Binet et al., 2015).

The recent body of scientific research in multisensory branding makes the analysis of synaesthesia in advertisements an extremely relevant topic. Some studies on the use of linguistic synaesthetic metaphors in advertisements are available in marketing (Akpinar and Berger, 2015; Nelson and Hitchon, 1995, 1999) and linguistics literature (Holz, 2007). However, to the best of our knowledge the visual construction of synaesthetic sensory associations has not been explored yet. As stated above, this is precisely the topic of our research: the use and combination of concepts from different sensory modalities, as conveyed by visual (and linguistic) means in print advertising (still images).

4. Synaesthetic Metaphors in Print Advertising

To find data for our study, we used popular open-source comprehensive repositories of advertisements (AdsOfTheWorld and Coloribus).³ In a first exploratory investigation we browsed hundreds of images through the categories provided by the platforms. We selected the categories that brand products for which the most salient properties are their sensory qualities (e.g. ‘food’, ‘music’, ‘confectionery, snacks’). Additionally we searched the databases through keywords linked to the individual senses (e.g. ‘hearing’, ‘sight’, ‘smooth’). We also searched for additional advertisements on the Web (accessed through Google Image Search). Our queries featured the words ‘advertising’ or ‘advertisement’, together with the keywords and category labels used in the repositories described above. Among all the advertisements that we browsed, we then had to identify those actually featuring visual metaphors that involve different sensory modalities, and those that are therefore likely to be instances of synaesthesia. This is not an easy task because it has to be accomplished manually, by carefully examining each advertisement. While we did not aim to compile a corpus of instances, we still needed a strategy to recognize good examples for analysis and discussion.

Our method for identifying relevant instances of synaesthesia in print advertising may be summarized as follows:

Identify the advertised products.

Select the advertisements for products that clearly relate to a sensory modality x (e.g. advertisement for chocolate; related sensory modality: taste), by taking into account all the visual and the linguistic information encoded in the advertisement.

Search for linguistically and/or visually conveyed properties that are used to advertise the product and that point to a sensory modality y (e.g. slogan used for chocolate advertisement: music to your mouth; sensory modality: hearing). If such properties are found, the advertisement is a good candidate for classification as a synaesthetic metaphor.

Given this identification method, we were able to select about 30 images out of hundreds that were screened. The examples in Figures 1, 2 and 3, which nonetheless encompass visual metaphors and seem to be related to sensory modalities, were not classified as instances of synaesthesia in print advertising for different reasons hereby illustrated. We describe here these negative cases, which help further clarify, by contrast, what we consider to be good instances of synaesthesia (which are analysed in section 5).

Figure 1.

Advertisement for potato chips. © Grey Toronto advertising agency (2008). Available at: https://www.coloribus.com/adsarchive/prints/pringles-tongue-11484605/

Figure 2.

Advertisement for a musical and gastronomic event. © Gitanos consulting and Daniel Montiel (2016). Available at: https://www.behance.net/gallery/29592019/Furca-Music-and-Gastronomy-print-ads

Figure 3.

Advertisement for a portable stereo. © Marcel creative agency, Paris, France (2011). Available at: https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/print/lasonic_big_fat_sound_piano

In Figure 1, the product to be sold is a potato chip, which in its representation resembles a tongue. We can deduce this analogy from the shape of the potato chip and its position within the container, which in turn resembles an open mouth. In this case, both ‘chip’ and ‘tongue’ point to the same sensory modality, that of taste. Thus, according to our identification strategy, we cannot classify this advertisement as an example of synaesthesia, because in synaesthesia the product and/or the properties used to advertise it must point to different sensory modalities, while here only one sensory modality is evoked.

Figure 2 advertises an event that combines food and music. The image displays a hybrid item in which a whisk and a violin are fused together. Within this advertisement, these elements metonymically cue respectively to the taste and hearing sensory modalities (metonymic mechanisms are often used in images to convey concepts that cannot be directly represented visually; see, among others, Bolognesi, 2017; Forceville, 2009; Littlemore and Pérez-Sobrino, 2017). From this perspective, the advertisement may be classified as an instance of multisensory branding. However, it is not an instance of synaesthesia because, although two different sensory modalities are evoked, there is no cross-mapping between them: both food (taste) and music (hearing) are advertised simultaneously.

Figure 3 advertises a modern-looking portable stereo. In the image, the viewer sees a piano made of bacon. Because the most salient properties of bacon are arguably related to its taste and the most salient properties of a piano relate to its sound, the viewer might think that this image is indeed an instance of synaesthesia, in which the two sensory domains of hearing and taste are involved. However, the slogan suggests that the product, despite its portable size, is powerful enough to be able to deliver a ‘big fat sound’, which arguably indicates the ability of this device to reproduce sounds in high volume and with deep, bass frequencies. The modifiers big and fat, in this slogan, do not point to the sensory modality of taste. Once the viewer understands that the bacon is not meant to cue to the sensory domain of taste, but rather to the fact that bacon contains a lot of fat and can make someone ‘fat’, then the potential synaesthesia is disentangled. The advertisement shows a visual metaphor (showing that the piano is a piece of bacon and therefore emits a fat sound). However, it is not an instance of synaesthesia because, as in Figure 1, only one sensory modality is evoked (in this case, hearing, which characterizes the advertised product).

5. Analysis

The print advertisements that we collected on the basis of the procedure described in Section 4 fall into three main classes: (i) linguistically-conveyed synaesthesia; (ii) visually and linguistically conveyed synaesthesia; and (iii) visually-conveyed synaesthesia. Each of these classes is presented and illustrated by relevant examples in this section.

Before discussing the images, however, it is worth reminding the reader that the interpretations that we provide in the next sections do not – at least, not always – constitute the unique possible interpretations of such advertisements, as observed in various studies on visual metaphors (e.g. Forceville, 2006; Poppi et al., under review). The variability of these interpretations may depend on viewers’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds, their personal experiences, as well as their personal preferences for specific words, which are then used to convey the visual metaphor in linguistic terms. The different verbalizations can differ from one another minimally (for example, when two analysts express the same metaphor term using two synonymic expressions), but can also differ substantially and lead two analysts to provide different interpretations, based on the same image. While this is particularly relevant for visual metaphors within the genre of artistic paintings (Poppi et al., under review), it can be also applicable to the identification and formalization of visual metaphors in print advertising. We therefore decided to analyse the images selected for this study in a discursive way in order to include as much detail as possible, avoiding the ‘rigid’ formalization of ‘A-IS-B’ statements.

5.1 Linguistic synaesthesia

The advertisements included in this class can be defined as synaesthetic because they feature a linguistic synaesthesia; the image, we argue, does not participate in the construction of this synaesthesia.

Figure 4 advertises a brand of potato chips. The image displays a bag of chips, and the slogan says: ‘Like Sweet Banjo Music to your tongue’. In this case, we have a linguistic synaesthesia, sweet music, embedded in a simile signalled by like. The target sensory modality of the synaesthesia sweet music is hearing (music), while the source is taste (sweet). The simile Like sweet banjo music to your tongue, however, reverses this directionality by suggesting that taste (tongue) has to be compared to hearing (music). Only by correctly interpreting the simile can the consumer understand the message of the advertisement, which aims to sell chips. The interpretation is achieved once the positive qualities related to the product’s taste are evoked through the hearing sensory domain. Moreover, the slogan ‘Like Sweet Banjo Music to your tongue’ is also a variation of the expression Like music to your ears. This intertextual reference, if detected by the viewer, can arguably contribute to the interpretative process by adding a sense of familiarity, given by the (conscious or subconscious) recognition of an existing idiomatic expression.

Figure 4.

Advertisement for potato chips. © Sick, Los Angeles, USA (2010). Available at: https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/print/hogwine_potato_chips_banjo_music

A second catchphrase on the left side of the bag says: The chips with a thick Southern accent. Thick is a synaesthetically polysemous adjective as it can consistently describe visual and tactile properties of an object, as well as the auditory characteristics of a linguistic ‘accent’. Moreover, the phrase presents the chips as having an accent. It can therefore be interpreted as another instance of linguistic synaesthesia, evoking at the same time the visual aspect/texture of the chips and the accent of the Southern area of the US, and associating the latter (at least in part) auditory property to the (at least in part) gustatory experience of eating chips. The imagery on the bag and the name of the chips (Hogwine) also evoke that specific geographical area of the US, in which banjo music is particularly popular. However, in our opinion, such visual elements do not actively contribute to construct the synaesthetic metaphors, which are expressed linguistically in the main slogan and in the secondary catchphrase. The image rather contributes to evoke a complex series of references related to the Southern style music, which typically uses banjos, and to Southern culture in general. In other words, the visual setting that completes the print advertisement does not contain strictly sensory or synaesthetic components. We therefore classify this advertisement as an instance of linguistically-cued synaesthesia. In other words, the advertisement, which displays a complex rhetorical structure and evokes culture-specific references, includes two instances of synaesthetic metaphor that are constructed through linguistic means only, whereas the visual cues somehow support and reinforce the linguistically conveyed synaesthetic associations. This advertisement differs substantially from Figure 1, even though they both advertise a brand of potato chips. Figure 1, the first negative example that we analysed, displays a visual metaphor, in which the advertised product is depicted as a tongue. However, there are no synaesthetic transfers in Figure 1, while in Figure 4 there are (linguistically conveyed) synaesthetic metaphors, which suggest that the advertised product is attributed (arguably positive) properties of banjo music and Southern accent.

5.2 Visually and linguistically conveyed synaesthesia

The advertisements included in this class feature a synaesthesia that is constructed by both linguistic and visual means. Depending on the way language and image interact in the construction of the synaesthetic metaphor, two sub-classes can be identified: (i) advertisements in which synaesthesia is co-constructed by linguistic and visual elements; and (ii) advertisements in which the image can be seen as the visual representation of a linguistic synaesthesia.

5.2.1 Co-construction

Figure 5 advertises a brand of headphones. The image displays, on a pinkish background, the advertised headphones, whose wires outline the silhouette of a female body.

Figure 5.

Advertisement for headphones. © AIAIAI, Copenhagen, Denmark (2013). Available at: http://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/print/aiaiai_sexy

We can observe here a complex interaction between the image and the linguistic anchors. The slogan says: ‘MAKING SOUND SEXY SINCE 2006’. The slogan contains two keywords that we hereby analyse in their interaction with the image: sound and sexy. The word sound is clearly related to hearing and therefore points directly to the sensory modality that has to be considered as the target sensory domain of the synaesthesia. On the other hand, the reader may argue that sexy is not strictly related to a single sensory modality, but rather to a combination of various senses involved in the complex perception of a body. However, we argue, this specific image, by displaying the simple, two-dimensional silhouette of a woman’s body, seems to select primarily the sight-related meaning of sexy, i.e. ‘visually attractive’, rather than, for example, the softness of the skin, which would in turn be related to the sense of touch. The artist’s choice of expressing the idea of sexiness by means of a female silhouette can be debatable and this topic is indeed quite sensitive at the current time. As analysts, we hereby focus on the intended message, which probably aims to suggest that the positive (visual) property of the silhouette is to be transferred to the hearing experience one can get thanks to the advertised headphones. This commonly happens in linguistic synaesthesia: the properties of the source concept that are transferred to the target are often not only strictly sensory, but also convey the positive or negative evaluations typically associated with the perceptual experience of the source concept (Bolognesi, 2015; Winter, 2016a; see note 2). For instance, in sweet voice the adjective sweet attributes to the noun voice the positive evaluation that is typically attached to sweet tastes.

To sum up, in the advertisement in Figure 5 there is a visual metaphor displaying the advertised product as if it was the silhouette of a female body. The slogan contributes to forging the synaesthetic structure by suggesting that the actual target domain is the sound produced by the headset (and therefore the sensory domain of audition), which is defined as sexy, based on the visually attractive properties of the female silhouette, which belong to the sensory domain of vision. In this complex structure, the viewer may appreciate a strong interaction between visual and linguistic elements. The visual representation, by selecting the sight-related sense of the word sexy, helps the consumer to identify the source domain of the synaesthesia. Once sight is identified as the source sensory domain, the viewer is stimulated to map the positive evaluation triggered by sight onto the target (hearing). In other words, the advertisement suggests that the headphones produce beautiful sounds, where beauty is a property that we typically experience through sight.

Figure 6 advertises Toblerone, the popular chocolate bar with a triangular shape. The image represents a triangle (musical instrument), which recalls the shape of the chocolate bar. The slogan (‘Music to your mouth’) suggests a cross-domain mapping between the hearing and the taste sensory modalities, which are metonymically cued in the image by exploiting the similarity in shape between the chocolate bar and the musical instrument. As already indicated in the analysis of Figure 4, this slogan can also be seen as a variation of the existing expression Music to your ears. In this case, the variation is even simpler than in Figure 4; here, the word ear is simply substituted with mouth. Both words designate body parts, which are tightly related to the sensory modalities of hearing and taste respectively, by means of metonymy. Therefore, the sensory target of the linguistic synaesthesia in Figure 6 is taste (mouth) and the source is hearing (music). We argue that in this case the synaesthesia is co-constructed by graphic and linguistic means. In fact, without the support of the linguistic element it would be rather difficult (though not impossible) to establish the cross-domain association and thus to interpret the advertisement.

Figure 6.

Advertisement for a chocolate bar. © H&C Leo Burnett Beirut advertising agency, Lebanon (2003). Available at: https://www.coloribus.com/adsarchive/prints/toblerone-chocolate-music-5234155/

The similarities between Figures 6 and 4 may lead the reader to think that the type of synaesthetic metaphor featured by the two images is the same. However, we classified Figure 4 as an instance of linguistically conveyed synaesthetic metaphor and Figure 6 as an instance of visually and linguistically conveyed synaesthetic metaphor. The motivation is the following. In Figure 4, the advertised product (the chips) is fully represented. The visual elements evoke a Southern environment and atmosphere, without embedding any synaesthetic transfer per se. If the slogan was removed, the image would be perfectly plausible and the message understandable, and it would not contain synaesthetic transfers. In other words, the synaesthetic elements are only conveyed linguistically. Conversely, in Figure 6, the product is not represented; the background does not contribute to provide visual contextual clues for interpreting the message. Only the logo in the right corner (which metonymically stands for the advertised product) helps the viewer to identify the target of the visual metaphor: the Toblerone chocolate bar. The linguistic slogan, in this figure, interacts with the visual elements in a different way compared to Figure 4. While in Figure 4, if the slogan was removed, the image would still work, even though without synaesthetic transfers, if the slogan was removed in Figure 6, the image would arguably become more difficult to understand and be open to different possible interpretations (which may possibly encompass some sort of synaesthetic transfer, but not necessarily). The slogan in Figure 6, therefore, contributes to constructing a synaesthetic metaphor, together with the visual clues.

5.2.2 Visual representation of a linguistic synaesthesia

Figure 7 presents a different type of interaction between the two modes used to convey the commercial message. The advertised product is a hamburger produced by the fast-food restaurant chain Burger King. In the image, the hamburger is depicted on the eyelid of a woman. The slogan that accompanies the image is: ‘GET A TASTY NEW LOOK’.

Figure 7.

Advertisement for a hamburger. © Burger King Netherlands (2012). Available at: http://creativity-online.com/work/burger-king-netherlands-tasty-new-look/26980.

The image by itself appears to be quite ambiguous: the viewer sees an eye (which may point to sight) and a hamburger (which may point to taste) graphically combined but cannot easily make sense of this association. In other words, while it may be easy to understand that there is an intended (metaphorical) connection between the eye and the hamburger, the precise meaning of such a connection remains quite obscure, if we only consider the visual elements. By taking into account the logo of the company, however, the viewer will probably realize that the advertised product is the hamburger. Since the most salient properties advertised for food usually relate to taste, in this interpretation, taste would be the target sensory modality, leaving sight in the role of source. However, the slogan reverses this expectation because in the (creative) linguistic synaesthesia tasty new look, taste is the source sensory modality and sight is the target sensory modality; the positive evaluation attached to the word tasty is mapped from taste to sight. In Figure 7, therefore, the image can arguably be interpreted as a visual ‘translation’ of the linguistic synaesthesia of the slogan. The latter helps the consumer to disambiguate the image by suggesting the correct identification of source and target modalities: although the advertised product is a hamburger, the sensory target is not its taste, but its (new) visual appearance.

Figure 8 advertises a soft drink that has lemon as its main ingredient. The image displays a lemon wearing a pointy studded mask, also called an S&M mask (i.e. sado-masochistic). The slogan reads: ‘L&P SOUR LEMON. SHARP AS. BIT DIFFERENT AYE’.

Figure 8.

Advertisement for a soft drink. © Saatchi & Saatchi, New Zealand (2013). Available at: https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/print/lp_sour_mask

As in Figure 7, the image by itself is ambiguous and the intended message obscure, but the slogan contains keywords that help to interpret it. The image could lead the viewer to think about the sharpness of citric acidity, while the S&M mask may evoke, in the experienced viewer, quirky and transgressive practices. However, synaesthesia lies in the language. In particular, the word sharp triggers the sensory domain of touch, and the word sour points to the sensory domain of taste. In language, sharp taste is a conventional synaesthesia, which is plausibly processed as lexical disambiguation, where sharp is a polysemous word that can define both tactile and gustatory experiences.⁴ Although the linguistic synaesthesia sharp taste is not explicitly present in the advertisement, it is arguably evoked in the viewer’s mind by the words in the slogan. If our interpretation is correct, the image is then to be viewed as a visual representation of sharp taste, with the concept of ‘sharpness’ conveyed by the pointy studded mask and that of ‘taste’ represented by the lemon. It may be interesting to observe that, in this case, the image deliberately ‘revitalizes’ the conventional sharp taste metaphor. Finally, it is possible that the brand, L&P, depicted in the same colour and style as the mask on the lemon, recalls the name of this type of mask (S&M), thus suggesting that the advertised drink is in some (arguably positive) way transgressive.

5.3 Visual synaesthesia

The advertisements included in this class are synaesthetic because they feature a synaesthesia conveyed by elements of the image; if present, linguistic information is not relevant to construct or understand the instance of synaesthesia.

Figure 9 displays an advertisement for a brand of headphones. The slogan under the logo says: ‘KEEP THE REAL WORLD OUTSIDE’. While none of the words included in the slogan evoke a specific sense, the image clearly points to two different sensory modalities. On the one hand, the advertised product, that is the headphones, points to hearing. On the other hand, what immediately strikes the viewer is the contrast between what is inside the space delimited by the headphones and what is outside it. This contrast is mainly based on the presence (inside) vs absence (outside) of colour. Colour is, par excellence, a visual property: sight can therefore be considered as the second sensory modality that is evoked by the image. We propose that Figure 9 features what may be called a visual synaesthesia, in which visual beauty (illustrated by colourfulness, as opposed to colour absence) is used to qualify a hearing-related product, suggesting that it produces pleasant sounds: the positive valence that is usually associated with colour, as opposed to black and white, is transferred to the advertised product. To sum up, Figure 9 features a visual synaesthesia with sight as the source sensory modality and hearing as the target sensory modality. According to our interpretation, the words that are integrated in the black-and-white background do not have an impact on the construal of the visual synaesthesia.

Figure 9.

Advertisement for headphones. © Y&R/Bravo, Miami, USA (2014). Available at: http://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/print/popclik_headphones_beatles

Figure 10 is an advertisement for an ice-cream company. The ice-cream is broken down into its basic ingredients and visually aligned to a violin, which is also broken down into its constituent parts. The logo of the company is represented on the ice-cream stick; there is no slogan. A first inference may suggest that the product tastes good because it is genuine and only contains simple and natural ingredients. Moreover, the viewer may infer that this ice-cream, like the violin, is a sophisticated handcrafted object. At the same time, the violin metonymically evokes (arguably pleasant) music, and thus the sensory domain of hearing. The domains of taste and hearing seem to be often synaesthetically associated in advertisements, as we have previously seen in Figure 4 and Figure 6. However, while in Figures 4 and 6 this synaesthesia was also expressed linguistically, in Figure 10 the transfer from hearing to taste is not linguistically cued by a slogan: it is left to the consumer’s interpretation of the image. That is, Figure 10 can be interpreted as featuring a hearing-to-taste visual synaesthesia.

Figure 10.

Advertisement for an ice-cream. © MINK MGMT and Carl Kleiner. Available at: http://minkmgmt.com/carl-kleiner-for-haagen-dazs/.

6. Discussion and Conclusions

With this contribution, we aimed at exploring the role of linguistic and visual elements in the construction of synaesthetic metaphors in print advertising by means of in-depth qualitative analyses of relevant examples. In our exploratory analysis, we proposed that, depending on the role played by language and image, advertisements featuring synaesthesia can be classified into: (i) linguistically conveyed synaesthesia (Figure 4); (ii) visually and linguistically conveyed synaesthesia, where image and language interact in various ways (Figures 5 to 8); and (iii) visually conveyed synaesthesia (Figures 9 and 10).

Our main contribution, which is relevant to the scientific communities interested in visual communication, is to carve out the field of synaesthetic metaphor within the visual metaphor domain. Given the qualitative nature of our analysis, it is not possible to provide general observations about the frequencies with which different senses are paired in visual synaesthesia. The issue concerning the preferences in sensory associations observed for linguistic synaesthetic transfers (see section 2) has therefore not been directly tackled by the present investigation. In fact, even if we had sufficient quantitative data available, we believe that the issue would not be relevant for the investigation of synaesthetic transfers in the visual mode due to the nature of visual synaesthesia itself. While sight is a frequent target of linguistic synaesthetic transfers (as in warm colour), in the visual mode understandably this is rarely the case. In fact, if the relevant sensory properties of the advertised product relate to sight, it is arguably not necessary to convey them through other sensory modalities as the visually represented product can directly evoke them. For example, to highlight the aesthetic beauty of a dress, the advertiser may directly use visual means, showing a picture of the dress itself. That is, images directly represent visual concepts, such as ‘aesthetic beauty’, ‘brightness of colours’, ‘whiteness’, etc. On the contrary, when images are used to refer to sensory concepts pertaining to other modalities, such as ‘good taste’, or ‘pleasant sound’, the images are used as pointers towards these concepts, they do not represent them directly. This gives sight a different status, compared to the other sensory modalities in visual communication. Conversely, in verbal communication, words that describe sensory properties hold the same status independently of the sensory modality to which they relate (possibly with the exception of onomatopoeic words, which have a privileged connection with hearing).

Although our study does not contain claims related to the cognitive processing of visual synaesthesia in print advertising, the classification that we proposed might serve to select different types of stimuli, to perform psychological experiments aimed at testing the effective activation of different sensory domains. Moreover, based on our classification, future psycholinguistic experiments may investigate how, specifically, words and images exploit the different affordances of each mode in the construction of synaesthesia. On this point, as we already observed in the analysis of Figure 8, the image can provide a creative manifestation of an expression that is conventional in language. While sharp taste is a conventional synaesthetic expression in language, a lemon with an S&M mask is a rather original and creative instance. A psycholinguistic study could further investigate to what extent images are used to ‘revitalize’ synaesthetic expressions that are conventional in language, therefore constructing deliberate synaesthetic metaphors, where deliberateness is operationalized as the ability to change the standpoint of the viewer on a given topic (see Steen, 2013).

Some tentative theoretical considerations that tackle the cognitive processing of synaesthetic constructions can already be formulated, especially in relation to the genre analysed here, i.e. print advertising.

The genre of advertising has the following peculiarity: advertisements have to be remembered so that consumers are persuaded to buy more of a specific product. In this sense, an advertisement is successful if it is ‘stuck’ in the consumers’ memory system and associated with positive evaluations, so that consumers will activate that knowledge when they are shopping. In the fields of cognitive linguistics, psychology and cognitive science, scholars have been arguing for the past 30 years that cognition is embodied and distributed, i.e. that it shares neural substrates with perception and action, and that such substrates are distributed across brain areas rather than being locked in an individual brain module (see, for example, Barsalou, 2008; Pecher and Zwaan, 2005). This implies that when we think, and we process and understand external input (which can be expressed by words, images, or other modalities), we activate in our mind a network of connections that link the stimulus to other knowledge that we had previously stored in mind. This includes previous linguistic and perceptual experiences. Within the grounded and embodied cognition framework, the set of knowledge that we activate in relation to a given stimulus constitutes a conceptual representation of the stimulus. For example, when hearing the word apple, we may activate a complex network of knowledge that relates to apples. Such a complex network constitutes our conceptual representation of apple. Within this structure, according to the grounded cognition framework, it is possible to distinguish properties that relate to the various sensory modalities: gustatory properties, visual properties, etc. In other words, a concept may be encoded in our mind through different types of modality-specific representations, each featuring properties that relate to a specific sensory modality. These modality-specific representations are then integrated into a multimodal conceptual representation (e.g. Barsalou, 1999; Pecher et al., 2003). Empirical work in support of the multimodal nature of conceptual representations and the role that sensory-based perceptual simulations play in language comprehension have been provided by means of behavioural and neuroscientific studies. For example, Pecher et al. (2003) showed through property verification tasks the cost effect of switching modalities. That is, participants are faster to judge that white is a property of snow after they judged yellow as a property of lemon (both stimuli relate to the visual modality) rather than after judging loud as a property of blender (auditory modality). Similarly, Paivio (1971, 2010) has suggested that conceptual representations are organized in a way that matches the organization of perception, i.e. they are multimodal and distributed across specialized neural regions. Studies of patients with category-specific semantic deficits have been used as a basis for arguing for multimodal representations. In addition to the behavioural evidence, neuroimaging techniques have recently produced converging evidence supporting the idea of a distributed multimodal semantic system (for reviews, see Binder et al., 2009; Martin, 2007; McRae and Jones, 2013). For example, Simmons et al. (2007) showed that when people process colour words (e.g. white), neural areas within the visual cortex become active. Conversely, when participants process words for which the auditory modality is important (e.g. telephone), then auditory areas are activated (Kiefer et al., 2008).

If the idea of multiple perception-based conceptual representations is plausible, then it would mean that an advertisement that can trigger multiple representations, by connecting distant sensory domains, has a higher chance of being remembered. Our preliminary study of synaesthesia in print advertising relates to these findings, as well as to the recent studies in multisensory branding outlined in section 3. In other words, the product to be sold is advertised in a way that triggers different modality-specific representations of the underlying concept. We suggest that, by anchoring the product in our memory through different modality-specific representations of the underlying concept, the product may have a better chance of being retained. Empirical studies in this direction are still missing, but we hope to have raised readers’ interest about these types of multimodal constructions and we hope that our classification can be used to select materials to be used as stimuli in empirical studies aimed at testing (among other variables) the effectiveness of multisensory vs monosensory advertisements. To conclude, we believe that the present investigation opens the way to the formulation of research questions that can be tested in empirical studies and that may be of interest not only to metaphor scientists, but also to cognitive scientists and marketing researchers.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Charles Forceville for the inspiring conversations on this topic and to Gerard Steen for hosting at the University of Amsterdam Metaphor Lab the collaboration that led to this research. We thank Bodo Winter, Elisabetta Adami and two anonymous reviewers for the many helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. This article is the result of the close collaboration of both authors, who equally contributed to it. For the specific concerns of the Italian academic attribution system, Marianna Bolognesi is responsible for writing sections 3.1, 5.2, 5.3 and 6, and Francesca Strik Lievers is responsible for writing sections 1, 2, 3.2, 4 and 5.1.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Funding

This study is in part sponsored by an EU Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship, awarded to Marianna Bolognesi (n° 629076 – Project Acronym: COGVIM; Call identifier FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF).

Notes

Biographical Notes

MARIANNA BOLOGNESI is a postdoctoral researcher in linguistics at the University of Oxford. She works within the UK-AHRC funded research programme Creative Multilingualism, focusing on metaphors and creativity (). She also coordinates the research area in Metaphor and Multimodality at the Metaphor Lab, Amsterdam, where she spent 2 years as an EU Marie Curie awarded postdoctoral researcher. Her interests focus on how images vs language construct metaphor and how abstract concepts emerge from images. Marianna Bolognesi’s research combines multimodality with semi-supervised computational modelling and behavioural data collected in experimental settings.

Address: University of Oxford, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, 47 Wellington square, Oxford OX12JF, UK. [email: marianna.bolognesi@modlangs.ox.ac.uk]

FRANCESCA STRIK LIEVERS is a postdoctoral researcher in linguistics at the University of Genoa. Her main research interests are in lexical semantics and figurative language. She has worked on the linguistic encoding of perceptual experience, from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. Her current work focuses on synaesthetic metaphors, which offer a unique perspective from which to explore the interplay between the senses, and between language and the senses.

Address: Università degli Studi di Genova, Piazza S. Sabina 2, Genova, Italy. [email: francesca.striklievers@edu.unige.it]

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