The effect of visual communication on consumer attitudes towards brands : A comparative study on selected advertisements before and during pandemic /

Abstract

A brand’s visual communication is the identity that differentiates one brand from another. Using visual communication effectively is the key to brand survival in normal conditions and most importantly during pandemics. People around the world faced multiple pandemics throughout the past years such as Swine Flu in 2009, and the latest pandemic that hit the whole world intensively was the Covid-19 virus in 2019. Accordingly, Covid-19 will be the case study examined in this thesis paper as the main core is how brands communicate visually in pandemics. During Covid-19 pandemic, people were in quarantine for a couple of months. Some of the global brands have been forced to adapt to the new circumstances and figure out how to achieve continuity & survival of their brands during the pandemic and encourage their consumers to get over it too. As a result, some brands have broken the rules and made temporary changes in their visual communication tools (including logos, slogans, colors, advertising messages, visuals and hashtags) to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic. Hence, this study aims to detect and analyze the effect of the change in brands visual communication that took place during the Covid-19 pandemic on consumer attitude. This study adopts the Semiotics Theory as its assumptions and developments serve and suit the topic. Additionally, a mixed-methods research approach is employed in this study, which combines both a quantitative online survey with 403 respondents, a qualitative content analysis on 6 advertisements 9 months before and 9 months during the pandemic on 6 categorical variables and qualitative in-depth interviews with 3 experts in the advertising field. The results show a statistically strong correlation between noticing visual communication changes and the consumers’ attitudes. The study also sheds light on the importance of changing the visual communication strategies of brands which should be examined, further in future studies.