Abstract: Pictorial rhetoric uses rhetorical means to analyse pictures and explore the process of meaning generation and its effect on audience interpretation. Focusing on the persuasive pictorial rhetoric of marketing communication, this paper analyses both the structure and the semantic operation of visual objects. At the same time, it summarises the factors that affect consumer interpretations of pictures and the effects that pictorial rhetoric has on consumers’ cognition and emotion. Some relevant topics of the sequential studies of pictorial rhetoric are also identified.
Keywords: picture, rhetoric, marketing communication