I Wanna Be Like You
The Avatar Gaze and the Visual Rhetoric of Corporate Personhood in India's Amul Butter Advertisements
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21747734 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rohini Singh (0000-0001-5142-6237, Twitter (United States), corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 139-151 |
| Publication date | 2021-07-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Visual Communication Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1555-1393 • E-ISSN: 1555-1407 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/15551393.2021.1949998 |
| OpenAlex | W3204583753 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 18 |
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
Art · Avatar · Gaze · Girl · Humanities · Linguistics · Literature · Media studies · Mimicry · Persona · Personhood · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Rhetoric · Sociology · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |