Visual Appeal Of Stock Photographs Affecting The Consumers’ Attitude Towards Advertising

Abstract

Consumers get distracted due to the lacking visual appeal in the advertisements in which stock photographs has been used. The usage of stock photography in advertisements affect consumers’ attitude on the basis of visual appeal, credibility, entertainment, and information. Marketing Managers prefer to buy stock photography in their advertisements because these photographs are economical, editable and convenient to buy an image online from e-marketplace. It has been observed that if a marketer selects an irrelevant image for their advertisement, this will not only affect the consumers’ attitude but also cause the financial loss to a brand in terms of advertising expense, media planning, and media buying. Stock photography has been largely ignored in academic research. Such kind of images conclude ineffective or irrelevant content that might be visually appealing but will not help viewers to understand the advertising message completely, and this will result in a negative attitude towards the brand. The stock images being used in advertisements are generic, outdated, corny, irrelevant, or downright confusing for example companies use stock images in their advertisements showing over-enthusiastic employees/customers or images depicting the smiley faces during a professional meeting, may communicate a wrong message to the viewers, such images are unconvincing and cannot be related to the theme of advertisement. Marketers should consider the results of this study important for their advertisements. The results suggest that there is a positive significant effect of visual appeal, credibility, information, and entertainment on attitude towards advertising. When marketers develop a marketing strategy for their brand they must understand which factor is their strength, and they should select an appropriate stock photograph on the basis of that factor. Considering multiple factors in an advertisement may confuse the consumers. This study considered the customers of a leading bank from Karachi, different sectors can also be considered in the future research. Five variables have been used in this study, four of them are independent and one is dependent, in future research other variables can be used such as irritation, misleading/falsity, creativity etc.