Visual marketing

Representing a disciplinary link between economy, visual perception laws and cognitive psychology,[1] the subject mainly applies to businesses such as fashion and design.

The intent is that the product and its visual communication therefore become strategically linked and inseparable and their fusion is what reaches out to people, engages them and defines their choices (a marketing mechanism known as persuasion[2]).

Growing trends in the usage of picture based websites and social networking platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and Timeline feature of Facebook justifies the fact that people want to believe what they see, and therefore, need for Visual Marketing.

[5] According to Paolo Schianchi, architect and designer, an Italian visual marketing academic:[6] “(...) Objects are: real, as what we see; visible - what they are made from; perfect - their classic identity; communication - their bond with taste; form and function - container and content; emotion - the story they can evoke; critical operation - the language that consecrates and exposes it; industrial operation - making them active and productive; image - the what and the how; anonymous - merely because it exits (...)“ All of these components – that belong to and define an objects from the viewpoint of the market and of the consumer – are the research and planning nuances that encompass the scope of visual marketing.

This concept is taken up again by Gillo Dorfles in his book "Il feticcio quotidiano" (The daily fetish): "(...) This is why I believe I can say that it is now possible to talk about a new ergonomic standard, not connected to the height of a desk or to the pneumatic quality of padding but to the creation of that “mythical image” that a design object must present if it is really right for the purpose it was designed for (...)"..[9] The mythology that covers objects to the point of becoming one with them, is decoded, in this branch through the study of various visual and verbal languages belonging to the groups of interest.

So visual marketing draws the attention away from traditional targets to focus on “...interest groups that are no longer broken down by age, gender, education or any other personal records and social contexts but by type of involvement, whether it be sports (golf or football fans), personal (wine connoisseurs or collectors), cultural (art and classical music lovers), etc.

If correctly decoded, these expressive elements become the means to get in touch with a group and direct a message inside it[13] This aspect of visual marketing helps to create targeted marketing campaigns that go straight to the users’ emotions and representations of reality, using their own expressive language The roots of this principle lie in Vilém Flusser's “Into the universe of technical images” (originally published as Ins Universum der technischen Bilder), where he claims: “ ... all ethics, all ontology, all epistemology will be excluded from the pictures, and it will become meaningless to ask whether something good or bad, real or artificial, true or false, or even what it means.

[14] This is how the author introduced the concept of the expressive emotion at the origin of visual and verbal sub-alphabets, which belong to each individual at the moment they become part of an interest group.