I Wanna Be Like You: The Avatar Gaze and the Visual Rhetoric of Corporate Personhood in India's Amul Butter Advertisements

Abstract

This article analyzes India’s long-running Amul Butter campaign to delineate some of the visual strategies by which a company projects a persona as an ordinary citizen. I argue that the company’s mascot, the Amul Girl, functions as a corporate avatar who oscillates between her world and that of her viewers and enlists viewers in an exchange of gazes. In doing so, the Amul Girl avatar represents a corporate being seeking to live and look like an Indian person. The essay concludes by asking what kind of Indian the Amul Girl reveals Amul to be and suggests future lines of inquiry for visual scholars interested in the projection of corporate persona.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Cara Finnegan for her feedback on an earlier iteration of this project and Rahul da Cunha of da Cunha Communications for providing permission to reproduce the advertisements featured in this article.

Notes

Notes

1 All ad images in this article appear courtesy of Amul. Amul ads are cited in text by an abbreviated version of the headline at the top of each ad and its year of release. Ads from 1976–present day can be accessed from the Amul Hits page of Amul’s corporate website (Amul, n.d.b), where they are catalogued by year (https://www.amul.com/m/amul-hits). Pre-1976 ads have been sourced from elsewhere and are listed separately in the References list.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rohini S. Singh

Rohini S. Singh is an assistant professor in the Communication Studies Department of the College of Wooster. Her research examines how ideologies and structures of power manifest in rhetorical texts such as speeches, news texts, and visual images. She is particularly interested in the politics and images of South and Southeast Asia and the role of corporations and economic logic in public life. Her research on neoliberal rhetoric in Singapore and Time magazine’s cover portraits of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru has been published in journals such as Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies and Western Journal of Communication. E-mail: [email protected]