The megaphone effect refers to the fact that the web makes a mass audience potentially available to ordinary consumers. The article focuses on fashion bloggers who acquire an audience by iterated displays of aesthetic discrimination applied to the selection and combination of clothing. The authors offer a theoretical account of bloggers' success in terms of the accumulation of cultural capital via public displays of taste and describe how the exercise of taste produces economic rewards and social capital for these bloggers. The article situates fashion blogging as one instance of a larger phenomenon that includes online reviews and usergenerated content and extends to the consumption of food and home decor as well as clothing. In these instances of the megaphone effect, a select few ordinary consumers are able to acquire an audience without the institutional mediation historically required.A new kind of consumer behavior has emerged online in the past decade. The web has made it possible for ordinary consumers to reach a mass audience, to "grab hold of the megaphone," to adapt Bourdieu's (1999) metaphor. More consumers now have more opportunities to reach thousands of other consumers than ever before. This novel phenomenon has not yet received much theoretical attention. We draw on Turner's (2010) idea of a "demotic turn" in contemporary culture to situate blogs and other means whereby ordinary consumers take hold of the megaphone, and then we develop Bourdieu's idea of cultural capital to explain the processes whereby a select few ordinary consumers acquire a mass audience. Edward F. McQuarrie (emcquarrie@scu.edu) is professor of marketing, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053. Jessica Miller ( jlmiller@ smu.edu) is a graduate student in the Temerlin Advertising Institute, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75205. Barbara J. Phillips (bphillips@ edwards.usask.ca) is Rawlco Scholar in Advertising and professor of marketing,

The goal of rhetorical theory is always to organize the possibilities for persuasion within a domain and to relate each possible stratagem to specific desired outcomes. In this article we develop a visual rhetoric that differentiates the pictorial strategies available to advertisers and links them to consumer response. We propose a new typology that distinguishes nine types of visual rhetorical figures according to their degree of complexity and ambiguity. We then derive empirically testable predictions concerning how these different types of visual figures may influence such consumer responses as elaboration and belief change. The article concludes with a discussion of the importance of marrying textual analysis, as found in literary, semiotic and rhetorical disciplines, with the experimental methodology characteristic of social and cognitive psychology.

Narrative transportation-to be carried away by a story-has been proposed as a distinct route to persuasion. But as originally conceived, narrative transportation is unlikely to occur in response to advertisements, where persuasive intent is obvious and consumer resistance is expected. We analyze fashion ads to show how narrative transportation can nonetheless be a possible response to ads, if specific aesthetic properties are present, most notably when grotesque imagery is used. We then situate narrative transportation as one of five modes of engaging fashion advertising, each of which serves as a distinct route to persuasion. Interviews showed that consumers variously engage ads to act, identify, feel, transport, or immerse. We explain how aesthetic properties of ads call forth different modes of engagement and explore how grotesque imagery can lead to either narrative transportation or immersion. As routes to persuasion, transportation and immersion work by intensifying brand experience rather than boosting brand evaluation. (c) 2010 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

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