Promoting one’s image: how the term “image” provides good copy for advertisers and politicians

It has been said that people can think only in images. If that is true it must always have been so, and cannot by itself account for the recent vogue of the word….If the Church is to regain any power it will need a complete face-lift of its image / The pay-pause has done much to undermine the Government’s image…. Anyone can find half a dozen similar examples in almost any day’s newspapers. The word, used thus, means the ‘idea’ — the general impression — of some person or institution received by the mind’s eye of an outsider, and the image he sees will determine for him whether the person is a good chap or a bad chap, the institution a good show or a bad show. Perhaps it is television that has done it. Politicians and advertisers and other advocates of themselves or their causes can now project their images into our very homes. This at least is clear: that though we may not care very much nowadays about the gift of seeing ourselves as others see us, we put a high value on that of persuading others to see us as we see ourselves. 

H.W. Fowler and Ernest Gowers, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage