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This paper aims to investigate how and when visual referents in brand visual aesthetics (i.e. colours, shapes, patterns and materials) serve as design applications that enable consumer diasporic identity.

This paper uses an innovative methodology that triangulates 58 in-depth interviews with diasporic consumers, 9 interviews with brand managers and designers and a visual analysis of brands (food retailer, spices and nuts, skincare, hair and cosmetics, ice cream and wine) to provide a view of the phenomenon from multiple perspectives.

This study illustrates how and when particular applications and compositions of product and design referents support diasporic identity for Middle Eastern consumers living outside the Middle East. Specifically, it illustrates how the design applications of harmonising (applying separate ancestral homeland and culture of living product and design referents simultaneously), homaging (departing from the culture of living product and design referents with a subtle tribute to ancestral homeland culture) and heritaging (departing from the ancestral homeland culture product and design referents with slight updates to a culture of living style) can enable diasporic identity in particular social situations.

Although applied to the Middle Eastern diaspora, this research opens up interesting avenues for future research that assesses diasporic consumers’ responses to brands seeking to use visual design to engage with this market. Moreover, future research should explore these design applications in relation to issues of cultural appreciation and appropriation.

The hybrid design compositions identified in this study can provide brand managers with practical tools for navigating the design process when targeting a diasporic segment. The design applications and their consequences are discussed while visually demonstrating how they can be crafted.

While previous research mainly focused on how consumption from the ancestral homeland occurred, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine how hybrid design compositions that combine a diaspora’s ancestral homeland culture and their culture of living simultaneously and to varying degrees resonate with diasporic consumers.

A company's corporate image is very important and it can be conveyed through visual images. In order to provoke interest and grasp attention, visual application is an important communication process. The purpose of this paper is to explore the cultural aspects that affect consumers' interpretation of visual communication in terms of corporate imaging/branding through electronic images on the internet. Specifically two different countries' cultures are being compared: the United States and India.

Web images of 30 brands, selected from a list of top 100 brands have been chosen and compared in both scenes.

The results show that some differences really do exist, especially regarding illustrations, groups of people and information in the visual image.

There are additional sub‐cultures in both countries. Future research could take these sub‐cultures into consideration.

Marketing managers should take cultural aspects into consideration when developing virtual marketing campaigns because culture does matter when it comes to visual images as not every culture prefers the same types of visual appeals. Additionally, by adapting visual images to cultures a company will be able to clearly identify its target group and can be assured that the right audience is being reached.

Much research has been done on examining Western countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom with Asian countries such as China and Japan, but not with India.

This chapter fosters understanding of core U.S. gun culture and how it promotes its political ideology through visual means.

The research applies key visual theory concepts to investigate a selection of political representations made by gun rights advocates. The images analyzed include photographs, posters, and other ephemera posted on blogs and commercial websites located through informed keyword searches of Google Images.

Core gun culture in the U.S. aggressively promotes its libertarian and right-wing ideology through tactics of interpellation, intertextuality, and exhibitionism, often in tandem with humor, sarcasm, paranoia, and sex appeals.

Although the findings are preliminary, visual theories and methodologies present a promising direction for further consumer research on American gun culture.

U.S. gun culture produces levels of gun violence that far exceed those in other developed countries. Knowledge of how the core gun culture represents itself visually may deliver insights for mitigating this social problem.

Relatively little consumer culture research has addressed U.S. gun culture and visual theories have not been fully deployed.

Purpose – The purpose of the chapter is to introduce visual methods and, more specifically, arts-based forms of visual methods, as an innovative and emerging research approach within the study of sport and physical culture. The chapter examines the use of art and aesthetics as research data and as a representation issue. It draws upon the case of a research-based arts exhibition to represent and communicate research on bodies.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter details an international collaborative research project exploring the impact of health policies and their imperatives on schools in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. The research formed the focus of an arts-based exhibition involving artists’ interpretations of the authors’ research findings. The chapter addresses salient epistemological and ontological issues of ‘representation’ and ‘interpretation’ in visual methods.

Findings – The chapter reveals how the use of arts-based approaches to research do not simply ‘represent’ research, but are constructive in the generation of new insights and forms of knowledge.

Research limitations/implications – The challenges of using arts-based and visual approaches to research are highlighted, particularly in terms of issues of knowledge interpretation. The ways in which these methods allow for lines of sight into life that written texts do not are highlighted.

Originality/value – The chapter provides an introduction to the use of arts-based visual methods in sport and physical culture research. Rather than focusing on visual methods solely as an approach to the collection of data, the chapter extends the discussion around visual methodology to include its use as a form of interpretation that generates and translates knowledge from a new perspective.

Social studies is the combined study of several disciplines including cultural anthropology where expressive culture is defined and described. Expressive culture is the processes, emotions, and ideas bound within the social production of aesthetic forms and performances in everyday life. It is a way to embody culture and to express culture through sensory experiences such as dance, music, literature, visual media, and theater. By integrating the arts into social studies, students are introduced to cultural ideals, traditions, and norms inherent in their own lives. This article describes the use of cultural anthropology as a vehicle to teach social studies concepts with visual and performing arts. Two examples of coequal social studies and arts units are examined in second and sixth grades.

Globalization, the ever-increasing worldwide flow of ideas, practices, and material objects resulting in increasing interdependency between people and nations across the globe, has numerous interrelated economic, political, cultural, ideological, environmental, and technological facets.

In an effort to make the elusive and multifaceted concept of globalization more tangible and measurable, different instruments have been developed, usually in the form of “indexes” based on quantitative data. These indexes mainly result in rankings of individual cities as well as whole countries with respect to their supposed level of globalization. Some items of the existing indexes to measure the level of globalization of nation states or cities refer to phenomena that are to some extent visually observable, but many aspects and manifestations of globalization escape these rather crude operationalizations.

Visual approaches to globalization help to enrich and complement the more abstract and mainly quantitatively supported discourses around this multifaceted phenomenon. They may provide valid and unobtrusive ways to assess and understand the impact of culture and cultural exchange in the daily lives of inhabitants of cities around the world and add a unique “localized,” cross-cultural empirical perspective to the many divergent views and discussions about the presumed beneficial or detrimental nature of these processes. An ‘in situ’ visual approach to globalization may help to uncover the “real life” impact and the specific contexts of these processes at different locations. This chapter discusses different options for researching globalization and cultural change in cities.

The purpose of the paper is to explore the potential of visual cultural studies (VCS) to inform and extend research on “accounting and the visual”.

A VCS framework is utilized: to draw together and organize work on “accounting and the visual”; and to illustrate how concepts and empirical studies from VCS can develop and extend accounting research.

The “visual culture turn” in the social sciences has generated considerable theorizing and empirical research pertinent to accounting research. In particular, it can deepen studies of accounting visuality – accounting's visibilities, invisibilities and ways of seeing – and stimulate new imag(in)ings.

The paper introduces accounting researchers to questions, topics, concepts and debates in the VCS field and illustrates how accounting and VCS research can mutually inform each other and foster interpretive/critical accounting projects.

VCS can frame studies of “accounting and the visual” (i.e. affirm it as a distinct field, with rich interdisciplinary connections) with implications for developing and extending accounting research.

The cultural tourism industry, which has subtly met the needs and solved the major problem of the current age, is a new growth point for the current city economic growth. Therefore, its position in the industrial structure system will be increasingly improved. The development of the cultural tourism industry also provides an important opportunity for the renewal and re-engineering of urban space. For the current urban space construction crisis needs the integration of historical and cultural elements urgently while the development of the cultural tourism industry itself happened to need the city to provide the necessary carrying space and incubation carrier urgently as well. Thus this research discusses the construction of urban visual planning system and the specific implementation path from the perspective of the development of cultural tourism industry.

This paper aims to consider the visual literacy mobilized by consumers in their use of brand aesthetics to construct and communicate a curated self.

The research surveyed a range of visual material from Instagram. Specifically, the goal was to use “compositional interpretation”, an approach to visual analysis that is not methodologically explicit but which, in itself, draws upon the visual literacy of the researcher to provide a descriptive analysis of the formal visual quality of images as distinct from their symbolic resonances. The research also incorporates 10 phenomenological-type interviews with consumers. Consistent with a phenomenological approach, informants were selected because they have “lived” the experience under investigation, in this case requiring them to be keen consumers of the Orla Kiely brand.

Findings indicate that consumers deploy their visual literacy in strategic visualization (imaginatively planning and coordinating artifacts with other objects in their collection, positioning and using them as part of an overall visual repertoire), composition (becoming active producers of images) and emergent design (turning design objects into display pieces, repurposing design objects or simply borrowing brand aesthetics to create designed objects of their own).

This research has implications for the understanding of visual literacy within consumer culture. Engaging comprehensively with the visual compositions of consumers, this research moves beyond brand symbolism, semiotics or concepts of social status to examine the self-conscious creation of a curated self. The achievement of such a curated self depends on visual literacy and the deployment of abstract design language by consumers in the pursuit of both aesthetic satisfaction and social communication.

This research has implications for brand designers and managers in terms of how they might control or manage the use of brand aesthetics by consumers.

To date, there has been very little consumer research that explores the nature of visual literacy and even less that offers an empirical investigation of this concept within the context of brand aesthetics. The research moves beyond brand symbolism, semiotics and social status to consider the deployment of abstract visual language in communicating the curated self.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how a visual perspective can be applied to strategic communication research. First, the term visual communication will be examined from various perspectives with an attempt to develop a foundation for this new academic territory. Second, this study summarises how visual approaches are applied in strategic communication research during 2005-2015, this is done by a literature review including an overall content analysis.

In order to explore how visual approaches can be applied to strategic communication research, the study started with a literature review by examining the term visual communication from various perspectives. The second step was to do a brief content analysis in order to provide a detailed pattern of theoretical visual approaches in strategic communication research published in scientific journals in the field of strategic communication 2005-2015. A qualitative coding scheme was developed based on the classification of visual approaches in communication research by Barnhurst et al. (2004) and Martin (2011).

The findings of this study not only support previous research indicating that visual approaches in communication research are increasing; the study also points in the direction of that visual approaches in the research field of strategic communication has slightly emerged during 2005-2015.

This study summarises how visual approaches are applied in strategic communication research during 2005-2015.

This study can provide important knowledge about an innovative visual perspective in strategic communication research.