Artificial, cheap, fake: Free associations as a research method for outdoor billboard advertising and visual pollution

Abstract

Abstract The free association method is often employed in marketing research to investigate perceptions of a particular product or brand in different socio-cultural groups of customers. In our research, international and domestic students produced free associations in response to photographs of outdoor billboards from two different locations in one city (city centre and outskirts). The results indicate that free associations can depict qualitative aspects of outdoor billboards like poor quality (relating to the categories of amateurish and fake), problematic content (relating to female stereotypes, gender stereotypes and cultural differences), and that they have the potential to capture the general atmosphere of the neighbourhood (categories of decay, depression, danger and past).