Abstract: Point of Sales or Point of Purchase (POS or POP) advertising has a long history of linking products with the advertising images on signs, wrappers and product labels. For many products using this form or advertising, a sense or notion of place plays an important role in identifying the product to the consumer. Although textual references can build powerful identities with products and places, i.e. Pendleton Shirts ...a shirt manufactured in Pendleton, Oregon... images are also used by advertisers to make direct and sometimes subliminal references to a product's place/landscape connections. Sometimes these may have little to do with the product's origin. This presentation will explore how the imagery of place is used to sell a product at the point of purchase level. Examples of labels will be shown. Taking the landscape categories from D.W. Meinig's, Beholding the Eye a simple analysis model will be presented that students can use in evaluating POP images in the context of places and landscapes. David Lowenthal suggests that "beyond that of any other discipline... the subject matter of geography approximates the world of general discourse; the palpable present, the everyday life of man on earth, is seldom far from our professional concerns." Thus, even a lowly candy bar wrapper may have something of geography etched upon it! Consider the "Idaho Spud", the "Mountain Bar" or the "Old Faithful"...confections, all covered up at the point of sale in wrappers steeped in images of place!

Meinig, D. W., Ed. (1979). The interpretation of ordinary landscapes. New York, Oxford University Press.
"That oldest badge and basic tool of geography, the map, is a symbolic abstraction of spatial relationships and is applied by geographers to the study of many phenomena which are not directly part of the visible landscape. On the other hand, maps may be useful in the study of landscape but they cannot be sufficient, for the landscape must be visualized and if not directly, by our own eyes then by means of the best substitutes. The photograph or drawing, the depiction of the surficial totality of a scene, provides a more revealing illustration than a map."

Also See the EOU Acoustic Space Website for a class assignment podcast on environmental perception. http://www.eou.edu/~mmustoe/acoustic.html