The creativity of figurative messaging in advertising: a collaborative investigation into its application and measurement of success in real-world adv

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Metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, and irony convey figurative messages that can vary in creativity. According to the Optimal Innovation Hypothesis (Giora et al., 2004), optimally creative figurative messaging can elicit more favourable consumer responses than literal, conventional, or highly creative messages. However, some researchers argue that creativity is not crucial to success, and suggest that different types of figurative messages induce different consumer responses (e.g. Callister & Stern, 2007; Burgers et al., 2015; Pérez-Sobrino & Littlemore, in press). Making connections between the Optimal Innovation Hypothesis, Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), and the creativity debate, I ask: how do figurative messages vary in their levels of creativity, and how do these messages resonate effectively with consumers?Collaborating with Big Cat Marketing and Communications Agency, I propose to address the project's research questions in three stages. First, analysing advertisements from Big Cat's archives for specific products will identify genre-specific patterns of figurative messaging. Second, conducting a series of experiments in which I present participants with advertisements containing figurative messages that vary in terms of meaning, form, and level of creativity, and ask participants to interpret, rate, and recall them, will measure how figurative messaging can impact the effectiveness of communication, consumer attitude, and campaign memorability. Third, distributing advertisements that favourably impactconsumers, and measuring engagement and sales, will identify the most effective uses of creative figurative messaging in advertising. A mixed-methods approach will: (a) qualitatively explore conventional versus creative meanings of figurative messaging, and (b) quantitatively measure their effectiveness, memorability, and resonance with consumers to advance our understanding of creativity and help define Big Cat's creative clarity model.My work on the EMMA (Exploring Multimodal Metaphor (and Metonymy) in Advertising) project with Big Cat received the Birmingham Post's Partnership of the Year award (2018). For the project, I designed and conducted experiments using eye-tracking, electro-dermal measurements, interviews, and surveys to analyse consumer responses to metaphor and metonymy in advertising with R statistical programming and corpus software. I have received training through working at the University of Birmingham's Linguistics Laboratory, Corpus Linguistics Summer School (2017), and Statistics Summer School for Linguists (2018). My Bachelor's dissertation on multimodal metaphor and metonymy in mobile phoneadvertising, which received the English Language Research Project Prize (2017), and MA by Research thesis on the visual language of colour and shape in smartphone app icons, has laid my theoretical grounding for the Collaborative Doctoral Award.