Beyond Beauty: Design Symmetry and Brand Personality

Abstract

Our research explores connections between a fundamental element of visual design, namely symmetry, and consumer inferences regarding brand personality. In contrast to prior work focused on broad affective responses, we propose that symmetry plays an additional, nuanced role in the communication of brand personality. Results of four experiments reveal that asymmetry in visual brand elements is associated by consumers with brand excitement, and that the effect is driven in part by the experience of subjective arousal. These findings contribute to growing interest in visual design and consumer processing, while extending current understanding regarding the communication of brand personality.

Design for Sustainability: The Effect of Lettering Case on Environmental Concern from a Green Advertising Perspective

“…When faced with such strong, authoritative advertising, people experience a higher level of fear arousal, paying more attention to the advertising's influential and dominant information [46,47]. Regarding the reaction people have to the tagline for the given information, the spillover effect suggests that the cognitive reaction to the tagline would transfer into the given product, service, or brand [48,49]. Therefore, we could expect that the fear arousal invoked by uppercase letters in a tagline could spill over into environmental threat advertising.…”

Making an exciting brand big: Brand personality, logo size and brand evaluation

“…However, other mechanisms that facilitate the interaction effect might exist. Recent research has found a significant association between an exciting brand and higher arousal (Bajaj & Bond, 2017). A bigger image also leads to higher arousal (Reeves et al, 1999).…”

“…The most widely used brand personality framework is the one developed by Aaker (1997), which contains dimensions of sincerity, competence, excitement, ruggedness, and sophistication. Visual elements' association with particular brand personality dimensions is well documented in the literature (for instance by Bajaj & Bond, 2017;Brasel & Hagtvedt, 2016). We associate logo size with the excitement dimension in current research for the potential perceptual and semantic linkage between them.…”

An immersive virtual discrete choice experiment for elicitation of product aesthetics using Gestalt principles

“…Symmetry does not always have a desirable influence on subjects' preferences. As reported in Bajaj & Bond's (2015) and Stamatogiannakis et al's (2015) works, the excessive use of symmetry in advertising artwork could 'backfire' when intended to cause excitement in users, notwithstanding its status as a badge of elegance within design science. While perfect symmetry can be considered as 'boring' , the use of asymmetric forms could provoke 'amusement' in subjects whenever it embodies a decipherable meaning (Kumar 2015).…”