The Analysis of Images in Consumer Research

Abstract

The world in which we live is full of visual stimulation. Everywhere we go and every task we do implies seeing or using an image. Moreover, the rise of social media in the past few years has bombarded us with millions of images where every person seems to have the desire to communicate and share images. However, the academic publications that study social media rely more on text than images. Text has received a lot of attention and different automatic techniques have been used to study social media content. To give a different view of social media content analysis, this chapter focuses on the analysis of images from social media. And as the academic publications dealing with images in consumer research are scarce, the authors have decided to search for the information in the domain of visual arts. The first section of the chapter is an introduction to what images are, how images have become hegemonic in our society, and the ability of images to communicate. A specific point is made about how images are a reconstruction (in the eyes of the creator of the image), and how an image contains meaning for the eyes of those who look at it. The second section of the chapter focuses on some methodology of semiotics, semantics, and specifically of rhetoric. A comparison is made between verbal and visual rhetoric to exemplify how visual rhetoric functions in social media images. And finally, the third section deals with a draft step-by-step analysis of social media images, and while thought as a method, it is just a first proposal. In the fourth section, the methodology is illustrated with some case studies from Instagram images.