Impact of Product Pictures and Brand Names on Memory of Chinese Metaphorical Advertisements

Pin-Chang Lin, Chao-Ming Yang

This study’s hypotheses are based on the associative network model of memory proposed by Anderson (1984, 1985), and Anderson and Bower (1972). Three kinds of metaphors (symbol-resembling metaphors, appearance-resembling metaphors, and relation-resembling metaphors) and two types of message cues (product pictures and brand names) were used as the independent variables, while a 3 × 2 within-subjects design with six experimental situations was used to test the effects of various advertisements on memory. The results of the study indicate that the type of metaphorical rhetoric in Chinese-language print advertisements, as well as the differences in message cues, will influence a customer’s memory of those advertisements. In particular, advertisements utilizing symbol-resembling metaphors and appearance-resembling metaphors, along with message cues consisting primarily of product pictures, yield relatively good advertisement memory. In addition to these findings, this study also shows that advertisements containing both relation-resembling metaphors and message cues consisting primarily of brand names yield relatively good advertisement memory.