Communication, visual communication, graphic design, and marketing are all closely connected concepts. Today they accompany us at every step of our lives. Communication enables us to govern relations, express feelings, opinions, decisions, to lead our lives. The messages we exchange can be verbal or non-verbal in nature, such as (pictorial) symbols, gestures, expressions, mimicry. Communication can take place at various different levels, ranging from a discussion between two individuals to global social interactions between groups or institutions. This is precisely why communicating with a wider audience is of great significance when marketing various products or services. Each day we are exposed to countless advertising commercials for which marketing communication is responsible. To achieve the goals of a successful marketing communication an awareness of the social and cultural integration is necessary, along with the use of original communication approaches that further bring the brand closer to the consumers. In order to achieve this, marketing communication is linked up with visual communication and graphic design. A well-designed corporate identity is precisely that part of marketing communication that makes the first impression on business partners and customers alike. This is why I have chosen to research the role of visual communication in marketing and understanding its role among adolescents, specifically high-school pupils, as my master’s thesis. To this end, I have carried out an action research, which is presented in the empiric part of the thesis. I have been verifying how well pupils understand the role of visual communication in marketing and how to improve this knowledge. The first step of the research was to determine the prior knowledge of high-school pupils in the field of visual communication and marketing with the help of questionnaires, a discussion, and an issued design exercise. The pupils have shown a degree of pre-existing knowledge but it turned out to be general knowledge that they were unable to put into practice. That is why I have introduced a change in the second step of the research and presented parts of the theory on visual communication and marketing in addition to presenting some practical examples to the pupils in a lecture called ‘‘From an idea to a product’’. Afterwards, by doing another exercise and analysing their works I determined their progress in the field of comprehension of the role of visual communication. During the lecture the pupils became ever more engaged, they showed much more interest than before, and their understanding of the topic was much better. What followed was redoing the first exercise but this time with an emphasis on the improvements. With the improvements and the defence there-of the pupils took all they learned into account and demonstrated a higher understanding of the role of visual communication in marketing.
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