PERSUASION AND COUNTER-PERSUASION OF VISUAL

METAPHOR IN CONSUMER ADVERTISING

Zouhair A. MAALEJ
(King Saud University, Saudi Arabia)

Rsum. Lobjectif de cet article est tudier le degr de persuasion de la mtaphore visuelle
(MV) dans la publicit sur la consommation. Lhypothse estla suivante: Comme la MV est essentiellement culturelle, son pouvoir persuasif sarticule souvent autour dassociations culturelles.
Cest ainsi que si une MV nest pas cohrente avec les modles culturels des cognisants, son degr
de persuasion est facilit de part le fait quelle nest pas en conflit avec leur systme de croyance.
Dun point de vue cognitif, le degr de persuasion peut tre facilite par linconscient cognitif de
la nature humaine et le degr de familiarit des cognisants avec les mtaphores conceptuelles. En
revanche, au cas o une MV prsente des donnes qui pourraient produire un conflit de cadre avec
les modles culturels disponibles en cognition, son degr de persuasion tend tre neutralis, entrav ou mme avort. Compte peut tre rendu de la rsistance la persuasion travers linconscient
cognitif qui se trouve maitris par le ct conscient de la conscience. Par contre, la rsistance la
persuasion peut tre durable ou temporaire en fonction de lvnement qui la provoque.

Introduction. Human communication has long been thought to be confined to the spoken mode. Recently, however, multimodal communication (or
multimodality) has emerged as an alternative to mono-modal communication
(Kress 2000; Rachovides, Swiderski, and Parkes 2001; Macken-Horarik 2004;
Constantinou 2005). As a result, visual, auditory, and tactile cognitive abilities
have acquired more importance in understanding our surroundings. If it wants to
be a comprehensive theory of metaphor, the contemporary theory of metaphor
(CTM) needs to take these modes of understanding into account by providing
the necessary flexibility and apparatus to accommodate visual metaphor (VM)
as an important mode in human communication. Such kind of research in the
cognitive paradigm has been championed by Forceville in several publications
(1991; 1996; 2000; 2006; 2007). However, the study of communication through
VM in intercultural contexts received a short shrift. Maalej (2001), for instance,
argued that persuasion through metaphor in advertising may be blocked owing to
culture-specific factors. The current paper continues this tradition of research
into the many facets of cultural counter-persuasion through visual metaphor in
advertising.
The current paper is structured as follows. In the first section, an overview of
persuasion in advertising is offered, focusing on competition between non-metaphoric and metaphoric persuasion in advertising. The second section discusses
the relation between cultural models and conceptual metaphors to account for the
reasons conceptual metaphors may be resisted as a persuasive tool. The last sec329

tion, which constitutes the bulk of the paper, shows, through a study of some VM
in advertising, the interaction between the various modalities in the responsibility
for persuasion in the VM in an inter- and cross-cultural perspectives.
Persuasion in advertising. Persuasion is about changing attitudes, beliefs,
and behaviors. Attitude is a general and enduring positive or negative feeling
about some person, object, or issue. Belief is the information that a person has
about other people, objects, and issues. Behavior may have positive, negative,
or no evaluative implications for the target of the behavior (Petty and Cacioppo 1981: 67). Although people hold beliefs that are fundamental to them but
for which they have no conclusive evidence (Petty and Cacioppo 1981: 139),
persuasive communication drives its point home best when it does not present
people with cultural models that they disagree with (Miller and Burgoon, 1979),
i.e. with knowledge that conflicts with their own.
Persuasion in advertising relies on a mixture of direct and indirect, nonmetaphoric and metaphoric, and hard-sell and soft-sell modes. However, Phillips and McQuarrie (2002) surveyed magazine advertisements between 1954 and
1999, and found that advertisers showed a transformation in rhetorical style from
non-metaphoric to metaphoric rhetoric. Non-metaphoric persuasion capitalizes
mainly on sex (Moog 1990; Boddewyn 1991; Messaris 1997; Reichert, Heckler, and Jackson 2001; Drumwright and Murphy 2004), desire (Belk, Gliz, and
Askegaard 2003), and code-switching in bilinguals (Luna and Peracchio 2005a,
2005b; Luna, Lerman, and Peracchio 2005).
Most of the studies of the persuasiveness of metaphor centered round verbal
metaphor (Bowers 1964; Bowers and Osborn 1966; Reinsch 1971; 1974; Siltanen 1981; Bosman 1987; Bosman and Hagendoorn 1991; Toncar and Munch
2001; Sopory and Dillard 2002a, 2002b). They were initiated as a measurement
of language intensity, which has been defined as the quality of language which
indicates the degree to which the speakers attitude toward a concept deviates
from neutrality (Bowers 1964: 420, emphasis in original), where the intensity
variable is significantly related to various other language variables, notably metaphorical quality (Bowers 1964: 420). Bowers (1964) and Bowers and Osborn
(1966), for instance, tested the intensity and power of metaphor in bringing about
attitude change in conclusions of political speeches, and found that metaphors
have more important effects than intense non-metaphors. Replicating Bowers and
Osborns (1966) study, Reinsch (1971: 145) confirmed through a comparative
study of simile and metaphor that metaphor should have a greater effect than
the simile. On the other hand, Siltanen (1981:79-80), replicating what Bowers
(1964) and Bowers and Osborn (1966) did, concluded that some metaphors are
more persuasive than some intense non-metaphoric language, and that not all
concluding metaphors will increase persuasive effects of a speech.
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Lakoff and Turner (1989: 63), besides acknowledging the conceptual dimension of metaphor, also agree to its pragmatic dimension as represented by its
persuasive nature:
For the same reasons that schemas and metaphors give us power to conceptualize and reason, so they have power over us. Anything that we rely on constantly, unconsciously, and automatically is so much part of us that it cannot
be easily resisted, in large measure because it is barely even noticed. To the
extent that we use a conceptual schema or a conceptual metaphor, we accept its
validity. Consequently, when someone else uses it, we are predisposed to accept its validity. For this reason, conventionalized schemas and metaphors have
persuasive power over us (emphasis in original).
Lakoff and Turner 1989:63

In concrete terms, metaphors evaluate by passing on a judgment through the

framing chosen through the mapping (e.g. General Michel Aoun was conceptualized on Al-Jazeera TV as a political Tsunami visiting Lebanon). Evaluation
is not the only persuasive dimension of metaphor; its highlighting and hiding
capacity can also have persuasive power. Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 10) argue
that in allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept (e.g., the battling aspects
of arguing), a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects
of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor.
Although on the whole I agree with Lakoff and Turners view of metaphor
as overpowering the self, I beg to disagree that this power is not absolute. Indeed,
it seems that there are times when the cognitive unconscious nature of metaphor,
which, according to Lakoff and Johnson (1999), is the default mode for metaphor production and processing, is overpowered by the conscious counterpart of
consciousness. As will be shown through the ads in this paper, the persuasive
effects of a message, literal or metaphorical, are not always directly and intelligibly related to the message but manifest themselves in beliefs contrasting or
rivaling the target domain (Bosman and Hagendoorn 1991: 290). This paper attempts to show how visual metaphor can create persuasion or counter-persuasion
in advertising.
Visual metaphor. The essence of the contemporary theory of metaphor
(henceforth, CTM) is its conceptual nature (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; 1999). Indeed, unlike other theories, there is nothing in the CTM that confines it to the verbal modality. Dent-Read and Szokolszky (1993: 23031), for instance, argue that
metaphor expressed in action and visual displays is more basic than metaphor
in language. For them, the study of linguistic metaphor must begin with the
study of metaphor in perception and action (Dent-Read and Szokolszky 1993:
233). They (1993: 239) also argue that a complete account of metaphor must
include an analysis of its real-world informational basis and of the perceptual331

cognitive processes that are involved in the detection and use of this information
in the comprehension and informational basis of metaphor, whether verbal or
nonverbal.
Visual metaphors are metaphors whose target and source are each represented exclusively or predominantly in different modes. The qualification exclusively or predominantly is necessary because non-verbal metaphors often
have targets and/or sources that are cued in more than one mode simultaneously
(Forceville 2006). Examples of visual metaphors conjoining written signs and
gestures and spoken signs and gestures are discussed by Cienki (1998) and Corts
and Pollio (1999), respectively. The criterion for the recognition of VM as presented by Forceville (2006) needs to be more relaxed in spite of the qualification
added to accommodate potential VM. Indeed, one can envisage cases where target and source may be given in the same mode while the way the relation between
them must be interpreted is given in a different mode as will be discussed in relation to the Toblerone ad in this paper.
Forceville (2006) distinguishes the following modes for VM: (1) pictorial
signs; (2) written signs; (3) spoken signs; (4) gestures; (5) sounds; (6) music
(7)smells; (8) tastes; (9) touch. VM offers several perceptual configurations
across still and moving media. Still visual metaphor, most frequent in magazines and newspapers, may combine pictorial, verbal/written, and gestural signs.
Forcevilles (1991; 1996; 2000) verbo-pictorial metaphor is a good example of
still visual metaphor, although most of them do not include gestures. Moving
visual metaphor, most frequent in film and TV, can combine, apart from modes
used by still VM, verbal/spoken signs, sounds, music, and even the tactile modality. Film metaphors as discussed by Carroll (1996; 2006) are examples of moving
VM. This paper will be restricted to the still mode of VM.
Visual metaphor in an inter- and cross-cultural perspective. This study
investigates two types of multimodal ads to show the degree of involvement or
disengagement of different modes in the persuasive operation. But before presenting a cultural view of VM, a look at cultural models and metaphors is quite
useful.
Cultural models and conceptual metaphor. There seems to be a wide
agreement that cultural models are cognitive models shared by a social group
(DAndrade 1987; Holland and Skinner 1987; Gibbs 1999; Shore 1996). For instance, Shore (1996:44) believes that viewing culture in terms of cultural models
has the merit of provid[ing] a bridge between the empiricist concept of culture
as objects and the cognitive concept of culture as forms of knowledge. Cultural models are different than cognitive models in the sense that while the latter
can be competed with by non-idealized cognitive models, cultural models are
often accompanied by widely shared but not highly cognized or publicly symbol332

ized alternative models (Shore 1996: 49), although conflicting cultural models
may co-exist in many domains of experience (Quinn and Holland 1987: 10). In
this sense, cultural models are more like practical resources to deal with reality
(Gibbs 1999: 154).
The relation between cultural models and conceptual metaphors is an issue
that attracted the attention of researchers in the cognitive paradigm. Kvecses
(1999: 167), for instance, addressed the following question: Do metaphors constitute abstract concepts (as structured by cultural models) or do they simply reflect them? His answer was that it is the basic experiences that select the fitting
conceptual metaphors and the metaphors constitute the cultural models (Kvecses 1999: 185). If it is true that cultural models frame experience, supplying
interpretations of that experience and inferences about it, and goals for action
(Quinn and Holland 1987: 6), and if metaphors have an experiential grounding as
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) claimed, therefore cultural models include metaphors
or metaphors constitute cultural models as Kvecses put it. Another view of the
relation between cultural models and metaphors comes from cognitive grammar.
Working on conversational dyads between Russian students, Cienki (1999: 199)
showed that in context conceptual metaphors and cultural models are interrelated, whereby metaphors function as profiles and cultural models as bases. In this
sense, cultural models seem to exert a constraining pressure on and to regulate the
flow of conceptual metaphors.
What seems to transpire from the relation between conceptual metaphors
and cultural models is that they are different but interrelated. First, the question
addressed by Kvecses yielded an answer to the effect that metaphors constitute
cultural models. In this respect, conceptual metaphors constitute cultural models
or a cultural model is made up of a number of conceptual metaphors. Second, the
question investigated by Cienki led him to interrelatedness between conceptual
metaphors and cultural models, where the latter have a regulatory function vis-vis the former. Clearly, Cienki assumes that conceptual metaphors constitute
cultural models, and it is the latter that constrain the former.
Based on Kvecses (1999) and Cienki (1999), it will be postulated that cognition is constituted as schematized in the following diagram:
COGNITION

Conceptual system

Cultural models

Conceptual metaphors

Linguistic metaphors

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Kvecses (1999) ideas are useful for assuming a hierarchical relation between conceptual metaphor and cultural models, where the latter are constituted
by the former. Cienki (1999) reinforces this hierarchy by postulating the control
of conceptual metaphor by cultural models. For that, I hypothesize that the different constituents of cognition function in a top-down fashion, whereby a higher
level may influence processing at a lower level.
How does this hierarchical structure work in practice? Forceville (1996:127)
argues that pictorial metaphors, like their verbal counterparts, are embedded in,
and dependent on, a cultural context. Owing to the assumed primacy of cultural
models over conceptual metaphors (Kvecses 1999; Cienki 1999), it seems that
cultural models have a filtering device for the lower conceptual metaphors that
they govern. If, for instance, the metaphor (verbal or otherwise) in the ad is in
harmony with the higher cultural model, the filter is not triggered since the new,
knowledge brought in by metaphor does not constitute a threat to the conceptual
system and the cultural models within cognition. However, if the higher structure
is threatened by a lower structure, creating a frame conflict, the filter will be triggered to counter knowledge irrelevant to or conflicting with the culture in the mind
(Maalej 2001). Eadie (1982:176), for instance, found that many people would
react in a defensive manner if a firmly held attitude or value were under attack.
I hypothesize that this filtering out takes place in collaboration with the cognitive
unconscious. That is, it is easier for familiar knowledge to pass unnoticed by the
cognitive unconscious, which does not trigger the filtering device. Unfamiliar
knowledge, however, brings the cognitive unconscious to a halt, awakening the
conscious level of consciousness to the threat posed to firmly held beliefs, which
triggers the filtering device, i.e. counter-persuasion. Even though cognition has
been postulated to be social, this state of counter-persuasion may not be available
to all members of society since social cognition is unequally distributed among
cogizers within the same culture (Sharifian 2003). This, of course, does not entail
that everything that does not exist in the conceptual system is rejected as a consequence; the rejection which results in counter-persuasion is motivated by highly
sensitive cultural contexts such as historical, religious, or political ones carrying
various associated issues.
Persuasiveness of VM. The relation between cultural models and conceptual metaphors having been established, and the cultural filter having been identified as co-existing with(in) cultural models, some VM will be dealt with in
this subsection as a way of applying the theoretical scheme defined. The first
type of ads includes more or less culturally neutral VM such as TOBLERONE
chocolate and GIVENCHY ORGANZA INDECENCE ads. Such metaphors will
be shown to have high persuasiveness because they do not challenge existing
cultural models.
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The TOBLERONE ad. How does the TOBLERONE ad count as a visual

metaphor? In Forcevilles terms (2006), the TOBLERONE ad may not count
as a visual metaphor, because target (chocolate) and source (pyramids) are represented strictly in the same visual mode. As mentioned earlier, what actually
guides meaning between the two is the physical display of the pyramids on top of
the Toblerone chocolate. This visual layout may suggest primacy in time of the
pyramids over the chocolate and similarity in shape between the two, which may
suggest the conceptual metaphor, TOBLERONE CHOCOLATE IS MADE AFTER THE EGYPTIAN PYRAMIDS. However, the visual representation of the
pyramids is accompanied by the verbal message, ANCIENT TOBLERONISM
and TOBLERONE INSPIRES THE WORLD. Clearly, the text conceptually contradicts the conceptual metaphor inferable from the visual display, which has to
be re-interpreted as THE PYRAMIDS ARE THE WORK OF ANCIENT TOBLERONISM. And since the ad is about chocolate not the pyramids, the conceptual metaphor is TOBLERONE CHOCOLATE IS MADE AFTER THE EGYPTIAN PYRAMIDS.
Although the ad may be slightly offensive to contemporary Egyptians in
the sense that it perverted their Pharaoh history, it can be taken as a joke with a
smile for attributing the merit of the pyramids to the TOBLERONE chocolate
company. Obviously, this ad is not meant to persuade Egyptians about buying
TOBLERONE chocolate. It may be aiming at a wider audience that it seeks to
seduce to buy the chocolate by appealing to their knowledge of the Egyptian pyramids, which it absurdly perverts
for the sake of persuasiveness.
As someone culturally closer to
Egyptians, I took the ad as a creatively insightful ad, and felt quite
complacent with the creator of
the ad and her intelligence, which
probably is the reason why I liked
the ads level of subtlety. So in
spite of this perversion of history,
the ad does not seem to trigger
the kind of situation where Egyptian or Arab audiences in general
would oppose resistance to a joke
that consists in thinking that the
contemporary
TOBLERONE
company is responsible for setting up the tradition of pyramidal
shapes (i.e. Tobleronism), which
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were then emulated by the Pharaohs, who obviously chronologically preceded

the TOBLERONE company.
GIVENCHY 1 ad. The second ad in this culturally neutral category is
GIVENCHY ORGANZA INDECENCE, a perfume ad (henceforth, GIVENCHY
1). This ad shows an Arabic transliteration of the English brand name. Since the
ad is meant for an Arab-Muslim audience, the source domain is pictorially present in the woman, who is decently dressed, with both arms crossing at the wrests
and each covering one breast. The collar of the dress is also so tightly wrapped
that no part of the bosom is displayed to sight. What is actually indecent in the ad
as mentioned in GIVENCHY ORGANZA INDECENCE is the shape of the perfume bottle, which is made on the shape of a woman, with the dress uncovering
the body of the bottle. This may evoke the conceptual metaphor, GIVENCHY
ORGANZA INDECENCE PERFUME IS FOR DECENTLY DRESSED WOMEN as is clear from the ad below:

I conducted an informal experiment with my final year undergraduate students, hypothesizing that most of them would line with GIVENCHY 1 owing
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to the fact that the respondents were females, most of whom were wearing the
Islamic veil, which is a sign that they were deeply religious and conservative. I
gave them two versions of GIVENCHY, and I asked them which ad appealed to
them more and persuaded them better. To anticipate, the second version, which
will be studied later, differs from the first simply in the dress showing most of the
bosom of the model. The total number of students was 36, with an overwhelming
majority of females (31). The results of the experiment were amazingly astounding to me since they contradicted my initial hypothesis: The respondents were
almost equally divided between the two ads, with two females indifferent to the
ads and five males almost divided between them. Only the females evaluations
will be addressed here for obvious reasons.
It is a fact that religiosity is a sensitive issue, especially when it comes to
defending yourself against persuasive attacks on your religious beliefs. Those
respondents who favored GIVENCHY 1 argued that the ad managed to persuade
them because of reasons having to do with religion, conception of beauty, cultural values, sense of discovery, but mostly as a reaction to GIVENCHY 2, as can
be captured in the following students protocols:
I think that this picture respects our religion and our culture. It is true that I will
throw the packet afterwards but in spite of this I feel ashamed to buy it.
I have selected GIVENCHY 1 because the lady is more attractive. I think the
more she is covered the more she is attractive.
I have selected GIVENCHY 1 because it is more conservative, culturally acceptable and moral.
It would be better to discover what is hidden. Thus, I think it will be a pleasure
to uncover hidden things by yourself. Apart from that, you will let people guess
and think about the product. It is something mysterious you want to reach it.
I wouldnt bring a picture of a naked woman to my house and show my mother
or my brother a bottle of perfume with that picture. That would be indecent.

So GIVENCHY 1 was not censored by the students precisely because the

details of the cultural model of how a woman should dress in the Tunisian society
have not been flouted. Such a way of dressing for women even in this ad is not
accepted by most Muslims in the Arab world. However, when details contradicting this model appear to perception, they may activate the more conscious part
of consciousness. In other words, cognition seems to stop functioning using the
cognitive unconscious and triggers the conscious part of consciousness

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Visual metaphor and counter-persuasion. So far, two culturally neutral

ads have been studied. The two ads do not seem to challenge the knowledge of
cognizers in a significant way because they do not constitute a threat to the cultural models in cognition. In this subsection, however, culturally challenging ads
will be studied.
When the cognitive unconscious was claimed to be the case for cognition
(Lakoff and Johnson 1999), the conscious part of cognition was forgotten even by
cognitive scientists. For instance, nothing was said about whether consciousness
can sometimes emerge to the surface, taking over the cognitive unconscious. If
it is the case that the cognitive unconscious can be switched off in favor of conscious awareness, therefore consciousness is not to be dethroned as Bargh (2002)
argued.
The second type of ads includes culturally disturbing/provocative VM that
activate a persuasion coping behavior (Friestad and Wright 1994). Such VM
include a different version of GIVENCHY ORGANZA, where the persuader appeals to sex/nakedness to bring about attitude change; an ad encouraging the
wearing of the Islamic Hijab (headdress or veil), but offensive to both males and
females; and a TOMMY HILFIGER FREEDOM perfume, where the freedom
associated with the Americans is thwarted by audiences of Arab-Muslim origin
owing to the recent Americans records of breaking human rights and freedoms in
Abu Graieb prison Iraq, and of supporting Israel against the Palestinians and the
Lebanese. These ads have low persuasiveness not because they are not persuasive
in themselves, but, as Bosman and Hagendoorn (1991:290) argue, because of
emotions and beliefs competing with the target domain of the conceptual metaphors.
Counter-persuasion as a function of religious beliefs. The GIVENCHY
ORGANZA INDECENCE ad (henceforth, GIVENCHY 2) capitalizes on sex appeal, where the source domain is pictorially present in the woman, who is indecently dressed, uncovering one breast and feigning to cover it with left hand, with
the dress opening down nearly to the solar plexus. This creates the conceptual
metaphor, GIVENCHY ORGANZA INDECENCE PERFUME IS FOR SEXY
WOMEN.
Those female students (16 out of 29) that stated that they were not persuaded
by GIVENCHY 2 actually chose GIVENCHY 1 for religious reasons. They argued that GIVENCHY 2 failed to persuade them because it contradicts the dictates of their Islamic religion and cultural values of decency. However, the results
of the survey of the 13 students who favored GIVENCHY 2 showed that these
students were persuaded owing to seduction, sensuality, attractiveness, sexiness,
and the match between the name of the perfume brand (INDECENCE) and the
way the actress is dressed as is clear in the following students comments:
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GIVENCHY 2 is more seducing and gives me the intention that if I use this
perfume Ill be seducing and everybody will notice my perfume.
I have selected GIVENCHY 2 because it shows extreme sensuality that a perfume can make and it expresses the femininity side that a woman has.
The aim of putting perfume is to be sexy. GIVENCHY 2 is sexually more attractive. So the perfume will be sexually attractive.
The name of the perfume INDECENCE matches the image of the woman. Every woman needs to feel attractive and can be so, thats what the perfume suggests.

Thus, although the majority of students sanctioned GIVENCHY 2, not all of

those that chose GIVENCHY 1 did so owing to religious motivations. Religious
and cultural motivations seem to have acquired more importance in the comparison students made between the two ads.
So far, the ads that constitute the basis of counter-persuasion are alien to the
Arab-Muslim culture. The following ad, however, comes from within the Arab339

Muslim and yet may receive the same resistance for reasons to be developed
soon:

The VM above exhorts Muslim women to stick to their Hijab (headdress or

veil) through text and picture. The text in Arabic script (in the Egyptian dialect)
translates as follows: You will not be able to prevent them/But you can protect
yourself/He who created you knows your interest best. There is no quarreling
about the text which reproduces the mandatory nature of the Hijab (the Islamic
veil) stated explicitly in the Koran, the Holy Book of Muslims. However, I argue
that the pictorial material is offensive to both females and males in the following
respects.
The pictorial part of the VM depicts two lollipops metaphorically mapped
onto the two head-shaped spherical forms. The rightmost one depicts an uncovered spherically shaped form, attracting flies, with a piece of cloth (i.e. the veil)
lying on the ground. The leftmost one shows a covered spherically shaped form,
with flies flying away from it. This pictorial display is offensive on many a level:
The head being a female head, the ad is reminiscent, shape-wise, of a kind
of sweet children suck at, which may evoke the conceptual metaphor, A FEMALES HEAD IS STICKY/A SWEET.
The flies landing on the females head stand for males as is clear from You will

340

not be able to prevent them from looking at you, which evokes the conceptual
metaphor, MEN ARE INSECTS.

In sum, the Hijab ad is degrading and dehumanizing to both females and

males. It made females metaphorically an object for consumption, which it
should have precisely battled against. It also made males less than human by
ranking them lower on the scale of being as insects. Copywriters should be aware
of self-defeating VM that are the product of bad taste and may do more harm than
good. There are certainly more intelligent ways of conceptualizing women, men,
and Hijab in Arabic, and it takes more thought and inventiveness to come up with
a persuasive VM about them. Compared to the GIVENCHY 2 VM, this kind of
VM is an example of counter-persuasion internal to the culture.
Counter-persuasion as a function of country of origin. So far, two types
of VM built on historical and religious themes have been addressed: mild VM
triggering a slight degree of conscious awareness (TOBLERONE and GIVENCHY 1), and acute VM (GIVENCHY 2 and Hijab VM), triggering wide open the
filtering device, thus opposing counter-persuasion.
The current sub-section deals with counter-persuasion as a function of politics. The TOMMY HILFIGER FREEDOM ad (henceforth, HILFIGER VM)
combines verbal, pictorial, and gestural signs. Verbally, the brand name is given
as FREEDOM, which is also reinforced gesturally through a man and a woman
holding hands and stretching them up in space in the way the Statue of Liberty
does, with the audience performing the same gesture. Pictorially, the HILFIGER
ad is symbolized through the presence of two bottles, one of which is shaped after
womans waist. In the background, the HILFIGER VM shows the American flag
as a way of signifying that this brand is made in America. The mapping creates
the conceptual metaphor, TOMMY HILFIGER FRAGRANCE IS FREEDOMGIVER.
In line with cognitive sciences cognitive unconscious (Lakoff and Johnson
1999: 3), consumer research adopts the loss of consciousness as a default mode
of persuasion. Bargh (2002: 281), for instance, talks about this as consciousness dethroned. However, discussing the use of the unconscious in consumer
research, Bargh (2002: 283) suggests that consumer research should begin to
balance studies of how to influence consumers choices and behavior with studies of how she can defend against and control such unwanted influences. As the
study of the following ad will show, patriotic/nationalistic considerations may be
demonstrated to be more galvanizing than religious ones, although this needs to
be empirically tested.

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Threatening knowledge can create counter-persuasion, and may come in the

form of knowledge conflicting with an existing frame or, as in this case, in the
form of irrational behaviors (such as repulsion) dictated by reactions to a given
political situation. For Arab and Arab Muslim (and other) audiences that have
witnessed the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq as part of Americas war on
terror, the American undertaking turned out to be a fake freedom operation and
a pre-planned operation to tailor a new Middle East map favorable to American
interests and Israels security.
For such audiences, the ad acquires a counter-productively negative dimension. The conceptual metaphor, TOMMY HILFIGER FRAGRANCE IS A
FREEDOM-GIVER, has two parts to it: its target domain is obviously the perfume brand, and the source domain is suggested through more than a modality:
the couple gesturing in the Statue of Libertys fashion, holding hands, and the
verbal sign FREEDOM. The American flag in the background, however, did a
lot of damage to persuasion. Freedom coming from the American side can be
very suspicious, which creates cultural resistance in the mind of the Arab Muslim
audience about its persuasiveness. I suspect that if knowledge of what Americans
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have been doing resides in cognizers permanent memory and something like the
American flag comes to wake it up, it may bring it to the surface of consciousness. Indeed, Kensinger, Garoff-Eaton, and Schacter (2006) have argued that information that is contextually surrounded by negative emotional content is better
remembered. The flag presented in the ad visually identifies the brands country
of origin (Maheswaran 1994; Chao 2001; Liu and Johnson 2005), which acts like
negative affect for the cognizing subject to deal with persuasion attempts (Friestad and Wright 1994), thus helping to create counter-persuasion (Pfau et al. 2001;
Pfau et al. 2004) against American products.
These factors are often generalized from country of origin of the ad, to
government, etc. through metonymic thinking. In the case of TOMMY HILFIGER FRAGRANCE, the brand is linked in a PART-WHOLE relation with
the country of origin. And even if this brand is internationalized and may not be
American-made, it constitutes a part that triggers the whole, applying the effect
from AMERICAN PERFUME BRAND FOR AMERICAN GOVERNMENT to
AMERICAN PEOPLE. The targeting of Americans in Iraq followed the same
pattern of metonymization of behavior. This irrational behavior is similar to the
reaction to Danish goods after the offensive cartoons to Prophet Mohamed created by a couple of Danish journalists, which triggered the metonymy DANISH
JOURNALISTS FOR DENMARK AND DANISH GOODS, thus accounting for
the boycott of Danish goods in the Arab-Muslim world.
Pfau and co-workers argued for the role of emotion in resistance to persuasive attacks (Pfau et al. 2001). To explain how resistance to attitude change takes
place, Pfau et al. (2004: 334) demonstrated that this resistance may be a function
of attitude accessibility in memory, which consists in thinking that attitudes
are organized in a network fashion in memory rendering them more accessible
for resistance. In a more recent publication, Pfau et al. (2005) elaborated further
the role of associative networks in memory in enhancing resistance to persuasive
attacks.
Conclusion. Drawing on a cognitive-cum-psychological model of persuasion, the paper has aimed to show how VM functions as a counter-persuasive device. The ads that have low resistance to persuasiveness have been shown to be so
not because they present universal (perfume brands) or culture-specific artifacts
(such as pyramids), but because they do not challenge existing cultural models.
However, those VM that failed to be persuasive interfered with cognitions cultural models, corroborating Bosman and Hagendoorn (1991: 290) finding that
persuasion can obtain as a result of non-target effect, i.e. the persuasive effects
of a message, literal or metaphorical, are not always directly and intelligibly related to the message but manifest themselves in beliefs contrasting or rivaling the
target domain.
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The theoretical implications of VM for the conceptual theory of metaphor

have to do with the role of the linguistic in the conceptual and in persuasion. First,
according to this theory the correlation between the linguistic and/or visual and
conceptual dimensions leans towards the latter. The Hijab VM is a good example
which takes the visual material to the conceptual level of inferencing. However,
in the TOBLERONE chocolate ad, it was shown that it is the linguistic dimension
that cues the conceptual rather than the other way round. Thus, it seems that the
primacy for the conceptual over the linguistic works better for conventional conceptual metaphors of the sort discussed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) for verbal
metaphors but not with less conventional or even non-conventional metaphors
like the TOBLERONE VM.
Second, the participation of the multimodal components in the persuasiveness
of VM does not seem to be restricted to the verbal mode. In the Toblerone VM, it
is the verbal that brings a corrective to the pictorial. As attested by students introspections in the GIVENCHY VM 2, the linguistic and the pictorial work hand in
hand. In the HILFIGER ad, however, it is the pictorial sign, which consists in the
American flag lurking in the background of the VM, which seems to play a bigger role in determining the cross-cultural rejection of the VM. Indeed, in this ad
the linguistic and the gestural signs have been overpowered by the pictorial sign,
which constitutes a cross-cultural vote by an Arab-Muslim audience through an
American product against Americas hegemony in the Middle East.
Third, if it is correct that the VM dealt with in this paper are actually multimodal in nature, therefore the criteria of metaphor recognition need to be revised
so that no potential metaphor would be rejected as not satisfying one of these criteria. Indeed, all of Carrolls (1990) fusion, Kennedy, Green, and Varvaekes
(1993) juxtaposition, and Forcevilles (1996) replacement should to be taken
into consideration in searching for VM.
Last, there is need to corroborate or disconfirm all the foregoing implications through empirical research and larger corpora. The corpus used in this paper, which consists in a set of five VM, is very restricted in scope to claim any
absolute truth about VM. The method of analysis is qualitative, relying on the
researchers own intuitions aided by genuine students protocols. What is needed
for more dependable conclusions is a large corpus of ads in an empirical crosscultural perspective.
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