Roland Barthes’ “Rhetoric of the Image” essay from Image – Music – Text, Translated by Stephen Heath. Hill and Wang, 1977. (excerpt)
In this text, we learn that an image holds and conveys meaning in three different ways for example it could be a linguistic meaning something literal that you can read and understand the message from, a coded iconic message meaning the message is kind of hidden, and maybe not for everybody and since its coded a person has to have prior knowledge in order to decode it, and lastly non-coded iconic message meaning it’s not hidden like a coded message for instance statue of liberty represents new york city, its iconic and everybody knows it. We can see in this ad that it is heavily influenced by Italian culture, each color that is used in this ad is picked carefully, and if you look carefully you can see that the same colors are used in an Italian flag even when I first looked at it I thought its an Italian brand but it’s not, it’s a French brand. Another thing I noticed is the excess use of the color red to me it almost looks like tomato sauce and the bag is also used smartly because the strings also look like spaghetti itself. This is a perfect example of linguistic, coded, and non-coded messages.
I think they persuade us to believe that it’s an Italian brand or has some links to it because food like spaghetti and pizza are known as famous Italian cuisine and they used stereotypes about spaghetti related to Italy to influence the audience because if you look at it from a business point of view it’s a smart move because it’s hard to convince people to buy a french spaghetti brand over an Italian spaghetti brand than and I think it worked perfectly.
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