STIMULUS MATERIAL

Three Dutch IBM billboards were selected as stimulus material (see Figures 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3). The billboards are here reproduced in black and white, but they were presented to the test groups in their original colours. In each of

them, one object is depicted in the same blue-and-white striped pattern as the IBM logo underneath the picture. The choice of these billboards was motivated by the following considerations. In the first place they all contain a verbo-pictorial metaphor, i.e., a metaphor in which one of the terms is rendered pictorially, whereas the other is rendered verbally.² Secondly, the textual component in each is minimal. In two of the billboards it is restricted to the IBM logo below the picture; in the third, in addition to the logo, a piano in the picture features the letters ‘STEIN…’ suggesting the famous brand name

‘Steinway’. In terms of the anchoring function of text (see the discussion on Barthes in Chapter 4), this means that the anchoring is (virtually) restricted to the logo—although the information transmitted by this logo is of course essential, since it contains the name of the product advertised. Put differently, whatever it is that is conveyed by the billboards, this is triggered to an unusual extent by pictorial elements or (non-verbal) contextual factors. Since we saw in Chapter 4 that verbal (con)text plays a considerable role in guiding and restricting interpretations, it is interesting to see how a metaphor with minimal textual anchoring is interpreted. Thirdly, since the three billboards were part of one campaign, responses lent themselves to easy comparison. Fourthly, there was no need to manipulate the three billboards in any important sense; they could be presented in their original form. The importance of this circumstance can be gauged from criticisms by Kreuz and Roberts. In a review article, the authors mention as one of the weaknesses of many recent empirical studies of the comprehension of metaphor and other forms of figurative language that

‘for the most part…these studies have utilized artificial texts as stimulus materials’ (Kreuz and Roberts 1993:152). With respect to ‘metaphor’, which Kreuz and Roberts identify as the most frequently occurring variant of figurative language in their corpus of literary texts, the authors describe the stimulus materials used in most experiments as having been ‘typically …produced by the experimenters themselves rather than selected from a naturalistic sample, and the dependent measure of choice is typically reac-tion time, rather than qualitative verbal protocols that tap the comprehend-ers’ interpretations’ (ibid.:

155). While experimenters’ texts have the advan-tage of allowing fairly tight control of theoretically relevant variables, there is one great drawback: The results may have very little to do with how people actually process real texts’

(ibid.: 152). Although the stimulus material in the present experiment is of a pictorial-cum-verbal rather than a purely verbal nature, Kreuz and Roberts’

observations are no less pertinent. It is one of the strengths of the experiment, I believe, that the stimulus material used comes very close to what Kreuz and Roberts call ‘real-world texts’ (ibid.).³

A final bonus of the absence of text (apart from the internationally known acronym ‘IBM’ and the brand name ‘Steinway’) was that it was possible to present the billboards to non-Dutch participants without any translation being necessary.

The selection of these three particular billboards from the campaign rather than others was partly motivated by the fact that two of them had already been reflected upon in Forceville (1992), in the same vein as in Chapter 6 of the present study. Another consideration that played a role in making the selection was that one billboard (Figure 7.1) supposedly contained a fairly conventional metaphor, while another (Figure 7.3) was expected to be more challenging and to evoke a wider range of responses, while the third (Figure 7.2) was presumed to be of medium conventionality.

METHOD

The method followed in my experiment is based on Mick and Politi’s (1989).⁴ A difference between the experiment presented here and that carried out by Mick and Politi is that individuals were not assessed individually and orally, but collectively and in writing, so that relatively many participants could be processed in a brief time span. A second difference is that while Mick and Politi presented an ad and then asked all four questions about it, then presented a second ad and asked the same four questions, and so on, in the experiment reported here participants were asked to answer question 1 for each of the three billboards; subsequently they were asked to answer question 2 for the same three billboards, etc. The reason was that participants should give their responses to each question without knowing what the next question would be, since otherwise their responses to the second and third billboard might have been affected by what they knew would be the next questions. A price was paid for this: since all three billboards were from the same campaign and designed on the same basic pattern, a learning effect very probably took place within the time span of answering the first question. This was not considered problematic.

All participants were given a ten-page questionnaire. The cover page contained instructions explaining to the participants that the aim of the experiment was to gain information about the way advertising billboards were interpreted. They were informed that they would be presented with three billboards four times, and that each time they would be asked a different question about them, each billboard being on display during two minutes each time. At the end of the experiment the participants were requested to fill in an information sheet attached to the questionnaire. The four questions asked were adapted from those asked in Mick and Politi’s experiment, and ran as follows:

Question 1: ‘Describe in your own words billboards A, B, and C.’

Question 2: ‘Ignore what the advertiser may have meant by billboards A, B, and C, and describe point by point the personal feelings and associations each of the billboards’ pictures evokes in you. Could you please indicate how important you find each of these feelings and associations by preceding the most important one by the number 1, the second-most important by the number 2, etc.? If you consider several feelings/associations equally important,

Figure 7.2 Source: Advertising agency: GGK Amsterdam

Figure 7.1 Source: Advertising agency: GGK Amsterdam

you can indicate this by marking each of these with the same number.’

Question 3: ‘What do you think the advertiser has wanted to communicate with each of the billboards A, B, and C? If the message in your view has several aspects, could you then please indicate the relative importance of each aspect by marking the most important aspect with the number 1, the second-most important by the number 2, etc.? If you consider several aspects equally important, you can indicate this by marking each of these with the same number.’⁵

Question 4: ‘What proof or evidence do you find in each of the billboards A, B, and C to support your ideas about what the advertiser has wanted to communicate?’

Each question was printed on a different page which further contained the phrases

‘Billboard A’, ‘Billboard B’, ‘Billboard C’, equally spaced out, leaving room to write down responses under each of them. The pages with questions were separated by a page containing the text ‘PLEASE DO NOT TURN THIS PAGE UNTIL THE PROJECT LEADER ASKS YOU TO DO SO’. Participants were allowed to turn back to previous questions and expand on their answers, provided they indicated later additions with an asterisk (*).

The last page contained a number of questions relating to personal information concerning the participants. Participants were invited to write down their name (not compulsory), give an approximation of their age, as well as

Figure 7.3 Source: Advertising agency: GGK Amsterdam

indicate their gender, nationality (in the group in Ghent), and current type of work/research. Furthermore participants were asked (1) whether they had seen one or more of the billboards before; (2) what product or service they thought was advertised in the billboards shown; (3) whether the product or service advertised was relevant to them; and (4) what, if anything, they knew about the experimenter’s research project. Finally, they were given an opportunity to write down any additional comments they wished to make.