Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

P
revious academic research looking at how
animals have been portrayed in popular
culture – specifically the tabloid press
(Herzog and Galvin, 1992), greetings cards (Arluke
and Bogden, 2010), visual arts (Kalof et al. 2011),
and T.V. and print adverts (Lerner and Kalof, 1999;
Phillips, 1996; Spears et al. 1996) - has generated
a number of themes, or roles, in which animals
are frequently cast. The popular media has often
used animals as a symbolic and allegorical short
hand to quickly conjure up simple constructs;
loved one, saviour, pest, object of wonder,
attacker, and victim, to name a few. Animals
have also been repeatedly presented in roles
such as that of human tool and emblem of
nature at large. However, there are additional,
more complex, factors affecting representation
that have also been identified by previous
research. These include the degree of
anthropomorphism of the animal, whether social
or moral valuations are made regarding the
animal, if any transformative effects can be seen
THE TIGER IN THE TANK
Despite the complexities and inconstancies of the human-animal relationship non-human animals [1] have been
intimately interwoven within human culture for thousands of years. Representations of animals exist across many
mediums, with roots clearly visible in Palaeolithic cave paintings and early carvings, evolving human language,
music and drama, and narrative fables and folk stories. Unsurprisingly then animal representations continue to be
rife throughout our modern lives and across much popular media.
Text by Cluny South
31
between product and animal, and finally whether
our understanding of the meaning of a product
or an animal is likely to be fundamentally altered
by association with the other. This latter point, the
potential power of popular media to shape the
human-animal relationship, has been notably
considered by Spears et al. (1996), who
constructed a symbolic communications model
(SCM) in order to examine how a culturally
constructed world (CCW) might interact with
representations of animals in marketing contexts.
Such was the backdrop to the study I
decided to carry out when my curiosity was
ignited by a parallel advertising research project.
My previous industry experience background in
factual animal programming had already amply
fuelled my interest in popular animal
representations. For some time I had wondering if
animals suffered in the popular media, a little like
typecast actors, constrained by culturally
constructed roles - roles that were generated by
human stereotypes and biases of what it was like