Sunday, March 5, 2017

TOW #21 – FedEx Ad (Visual Text)


As online shopping grows more popular among Americans, there is perhaps some competition over how these items are being sent. American Delivery Corporation FedEx uses implications of being fast and reliable in order to attract more possible customers to use their service for shipping items of all kinds through the mail.
The simple FedEx box extends its promise through this apparent option for express delivery, and the passing of the object from the sender to the recipient straight through the box serves to show it off. The delivery is implied to be extremely quick, so people will not have to wait weeks just for something to come in the mail. It appeals to a general desire for things to be quick and convenient, so more people will ideally begin to prefer FedEx’s delivery service since it offers just that.

However, while the deliver may be quick, many people may expect valuable objects to be handled carelessly in the mail, and usually customers are very wary of checking their products to make sure they were not damaged. Should the product be damaged, the customer’s trust in the delivery service handling it will typically fall almost instantly, and they will also probably feel burdened with the task of needing to exchange their product. Using this, FedEx attempts to appeal more to the audience by displaying a seemingly expensive vase as the object being shipped from one location to the other. Going into the box, the vase appears to be in perfect condition, and the person receiving the vase seems to be accepting it in that same perfect condition. This implies reliability and careful handling of products, so customers may feel as though they can rely on FedEx to safely deliver their merchandise. Combined with convenient speed, FedEx manages to largely establish itself as what may be the ideal delivery service already despite there being no words to go along with the picture. The addition of text to solidify these implications, however, could have made this argument stronger by asserting their reliability and convenience. The image relied almost too much on how the viewer interprets the benefits being offered, and to blatantly state them could have possibly furthered FedEx’s persuasion of Americans to utilize their service.

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