As digital inclusion becomes a growing indicator of wellbeing in later life, the ability to understand older adults’ preferences for information and communication technologies (ICTs) and develop strategies to support their digital literacy is critical. The barriers older adults face include their perceived ICT risks and capacity to learn. Complexities, including ICT environmental stressors and societal norms, may require concerted engagement with older adults to achieve higher digital literacy competencies. This article describes the results of a series of co-design workshops to develop strategies for increased ICT competencies and reduced perceived risks among older adults. Engaging older Australians in three in-person workshops (each workshop consisting of 15 people), this study adapted the “Scenario Personarrative Method” to illustrate the experiences of people with technology and rich pictures of the strategies seniors employ. Through the enrichment of low-to-high-digital-literacy personas and mapping workshop participant responses to several scenarios, the workshops contextualized the different opportunities and barriers seniors may face, offering a useful approach toward collaborative strategy development. We argued that in using co-designed persona methods, scholars can develop more nuance in generating ICT risk strategies that are built with and for older adults. By allowing risks to be contextualized through this approach, we illustrated the novelty of adapting the Scenario Personarrative Method to provide insights into perceived barriers and to build skills, motivations, and strategies toward enhancing digital literacy.

The ability of older adults to engage with information and communication technologies (ICT) is crucial in today’s more digital and connected world. Anxiety about and failure to adopt and engage with ICT is increasingly likely to be a barrier in daily living for older adults, potentially reducing their freedom as consumers, quality of life, independence, and wellbeing. It may also be a significant factor in social and economic exclusion. Drawing on consumer behaviour, ICT theories and frameworks, and a quantitative survey of 706 older Australian adults, this paper examines factors influencing anxiety in engaging with ICT. Our findings show that perceived anxiety was associated with increased subjective norms or when others placed pressure on older people to engage more with ICT and when older adults perceived increased risks associated with ICT engagement. Conversely, reduced levels of perceived anxiety were correlated with a positive attitude towards ICT and when older people had the technical and cognitive resources to adopt and engage with ICT. The results highlight the importance of building, renewing, and reinforcing digital competencies in older consumers. Understanding factors associated with ICT-related anxiety means that organisations will be better placed to develop campaigns, products, programmes, and policies for older consumers that actively reduce anxiety, increase their use of ICT, and reduce the digital divide.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate how visual aesthetic referents used in branding can help foster a transnational imagined community (TIC). The authors use brands embedded with Middle Eastern visual aesthetics as a research context. As such, the study aims to examine how Middle Eastern non-figurative art is used by non-Middle Eastern brands to foster an imagined Middle Easternness. Design/methodology/approach: Through a critical visual analysis, the authors apply a visual social semiotic approach to Middle Eastern art canons to better understand the dimensions of transnational imagined communities. Findings: The study finds and discusses six sub-dimensions of Middle Easternness, which compose two overarching dimensions of TIC, namely, temporal and spatial. These sub-dimensions provide brand managers and designers with six different ways to foster transnational imagined communities through the use of visual aesthetic referents in branding. Research limitations/implications: This research identifies the specific visual sub-dimensions of brands that enable transnational communities to be imagined. Practical implications: Understanding the visual aesthetic sub-dimensions in this study provides brand managers with practical tools that can help develop referents that foster transnational imagined communities in brand building to achieve competitive advantage and reach a transnational segment. Originality/value: Prior studies have primarily focussed on how visual aesthetics help in understanding issues related to national identity. In contrast, this paper examines the use of visual aesthetics in branding from a transnational perspective.

Marketing depends upon images in on and offline environments, and research methods in marketing must be capable of addressing the issues such images signify. By connecting images to the cultural context of consumption, researchers can gain a more thorough understanding of how images embody and express cultural values and contradictions. This chapter presents qualitative methods for conducting critical visual analysis of images, including brand and advertising images, film and photographs. It draws on a theory of visual consumption to show how cultural codes and conventions inform contemporary marketing images, infusing them with visual, historical and rhetorical presence and power. We discuss how marketing communication draws upon the ideology of the group portrait as a visual technique for representing identity. We treat advertising imagery much the way art historians treat pictures, analyzing examples using classic art-historical techniques framed within representation understood as a cultural practice.