**2. Visual metaphor and advertising**

Advertising, one of the application areas of communication design, is a way of communication that aims to attract people's attention to a product, service, or organization and change their views and attitudes about it in the desired direction. In today's communication society, it is possible to state that advertisements have evolved into an indicator system. Advertising, which can also be considered a process of creating meaning, is a process in which symbolic changes are experienced at any time, changing according to culture, context, and consumer experiences, and symbols reproduce themselves by including social and cultural codes ([6], pp. 7–8). The meaning of the advertisement is rebuilt during the reproduction process by replacing another 'thing' for the person, object, image, or symbol in the advertisement, and it, of course, obtains representational force. The representation in question is usually created with an image taken from outside the advertising world ([7], pp. 23–24). This image, according to Berger, is "a reproduced or recreated view" ([8], pp. 7–10). Therefore, instead of transmitting messages directly with signs, communication is provided with sensory-intensive tools such as visualization. It is possible to say that the most widely used of these tools are metaphors.

When compared to other contemporary forms of human communication, advertising is notable for its frequent use of the imaginative expression to persuade. Studies reveal that the emphasis on images rather than words has progressively increased in advertisements over the last century [9–12]. A metaphor is a linguistic tool that transfers the attributes of one object to another. Lakoff and Johnson note that "the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another" ([1], p. 5). Although a metaphor can be conventionally described as a figurative language, it is more than an "artful deviation" in language, as it is primarily understood in its rhetorical context. It is the foundation of human thought, metaphor as it is first understood in the context of rhetoric, is more than an "*artful deviation*" in language. Metaphor is the foundation of human thought [1, 2]. Rather than simply summarizing the similarities between two objects, metaphors highlight the difficulty of thinking about a specific object by conceptualizing another object. Metaphors are about combining numerous concepts into a single form, and our minds tend to need a new association or a new similarity beyond the already existing similarities or associations when such a form is formed [1].

Visual images used in advertisements may show similarities in terms of form and content. It is possible to make meaning based on the object in two physically similar images. When it comes to the independence of two images from their formal resemblance, however, the relational system that works for one image may not work for another. According to Phillips and McQuarrie, people assume that similar things also share deeper characteristics. Similarity figures enable advertisers to use these assumptions for persuasive purposes ([11], p. 119). According to the authors, the use of metaphors in advertisements causes the consumer to evaluate an advertisement more cognitively. Further, advertisements using metaphors are more liked by consumers, and metaphorical figures in the advertisement are the forms of communication that are more likely to be remembered at the following exposure to the advertisement. It is assumed that metaphors offer many possibilities to advertisers and expand the limits of creativity. Advertisements take influencing values and characteristics from certain relatively structured areas of people's experience and transfer them to the product being advertised ([13], p. 69).

Figurative forms of communication are often used to aid in the formation of mental associations in the direction implied by advertising messages. Metaphor is one of those styles, as it seems. Images used in metaphorical communication give rise to implicit patterns of meaning, and as a result, perceivers need to generate mental associations and semantic associations to reconstruct the intended messages appropriately. With visual argumentation and conceptual metaphor, which can be described as tacit expression, the audience is likely to engage and detail the cognitive perception process while receiving the message, which is also a process that increases the persuasion skill of the advertisement. Sopory and Dillard refer to metaphor as a rhetorical form of expression as cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes. For example, mobilization of cognitive process, positive attitude towards the advertisement, increased source credibility [14]. Cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes are three broad categories of explanations offered to explain the relative effectiveness of figurative rhetoric compared to actual arguments. Cognitive explanations include the superior organization of information, the elaboration of thoughts, and the mobilization of cognitive resources. Message using metaphors helps receivers structure and organize their message information better than actual language [15]. This is because metaphors are built on the relational structure between two concepts (A is B) and can evoke a more sophisticated set of associations in people's semantic memory [16]. Metaphorical messages can influence audiences through emotional processes such as a positive attitude towards advertising and/or motivational processes such as increased source credibility. Regarding emotional processes, metaphors can result in greater persuasion mediated by a positive attitude towards the advertisement. Research on metaphors suggests that metaphorical messages can positively affect the message, such as getting pleasure due to tension and relaxation processes [17]. The motivational explanation for the effects of the metaphor includes the message recipients' perception of source credibility. Communicators using metaphors can be considered more reliable because they are considered to be highly creative [17, 18]. Perceptions of communicator credibility lead to greater acceptance of the message argument. In this way, metaphors can lead to greater persuasion mediated by message recipients' positive evaluations of the message source.

Charles Forceville attempts to review previous metaphor literature, hoping to develop a theory of visual metaphor in advertising, but he notes that much of the literature on metaphor is primarily verbal metaphors [19]. Forceville draws on the cognitive perspective from Black's interaction theory of metaphor and goes to what he calls a pictorial theory of metaphor in advertising. Metaphor takes place first and foremost at the cognitive level and can manifest itself at the pictorial level as well as the verbal level, and possibly in other ways. Forceville defined visual metaphors as follows by conducting an advertisement content analysis to find four different types of pictorial metaphors in advertising: (i) pictorial metaphors with the pictorially present term, (ii) pictorial metaphors with the two pictorially available terms, (iii) pictorial metaphors, and (iv) verbal-pictorial metaphors ([19], pp. 108–164).

#### *Metaphoric Representation and Aesthetic in Advertising DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101202*

For example, Forceville [13] stated that cognitive levels emerge as constructs that shape metaphorical perception, and then this perception leads to conceptualizations for both verbal and visual representations. Thus, a visual metaphor can create a conceptual comparison and similarity between two things on a semantic level, even though the two are entirely different. The semantics of visual metaphors are derived from the perception of the audience. Gkiouzepas and Hogg [20] argue that conceptual similarity is related to the semantic relationship between metaphorical objects in the audience's minds. Therefore, while images tell their stories indirectly, they have to rely on the interpretations of individuals. The requirements of reasoning and perception are based on this reason.

The function of the content of the visual image depends on how much the thematic structure is related to the content of the advertisement. This is related to what the image is representing. An advertiser creates the language of the advertisement in a way that triggers subjective associations of the recipients, that is why aesthetic looked out for.
