Eco-friendly advertising: a study of pictorial metaphors in environmental advertisements

Abstract

According to Cognitive Linguistics, metaphors are an essential cognitive tool to conceptualise certain domains of experience (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Following this conception, it can be seen how advertising campaigns use metaphors with the aim of making advertisements more attractive to their audience, thanks to the persuasive effect of this cognitive operation (Bosman, 1987; Goatly, 1997; Mio, 1997; Pascual & Silvestre-López, 2015). In this line, this paper deals with the use of metaphors in environmental banners which aim at stopping climate change. Consequently, it can be stated that the main aim of this study is to identify and analyse the underlying conceptual metaphors that help conceptualisers construe and reason about a collected set of environmental advertisements. This analysis is based on the conceptions around conceptual metaphor (Evans & Green, 2006; Kövecses, 2002; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), as well as the ideas postulated by Charles Forceville (1996) around the classification of ‘pictorial metaphors’. Hence, seven advertisements which use pictorial metaphors have been selected from a collection named ‘Visual Metaphors in Advertising’, available in the webpage www.pinterest.es. After the selection of the materials, these advertisements have been thoroughly analysed, taking into account: the type of pictorial metaphor that they employ, the main conceptual metaphor embedded in each of them, the identification of its source and target domain and how part of the conceptual structure from the source domain is attributed to the target domain. By doing so, it is intended to show how eminent advertising corporations use this cognitive tool to make their creations more appealing to their potential viewers, and therefore more successful in the advertising market. After following the necessary steps, it can be stated that the analysis of the collected data reveals that different types of pictorial metaphors have been employed in order for the audience to make sense of the intended message of the advertisements. Consequently, it can be concluded that pictorial metaphors are a powerful weapon in current advertising, since they play a vital role in making the audience reason about some domains of experience in an easier and more appealing way.