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 and Johnson 1980). Following this conception, it can be seen how advertising campaigns use metaphors with the aim of making advertisements more attractive. In this line, this paper deals with the use of metaphors in environmental banners which aim at stopping climate change. 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 related to conceptual metaphor (Evans and Green 2006; Kovecses 2002; Lakoff and Johnson 1980), as well as the ideas postulated by Charles Forceville (1996) on ‘pictorial metaphors’. Hence, six advertisements which use pictorial metaphors have been selected from a collection named Visual Metaphors in Advertising, available at the webpage www.pinterest.es. These advertisements have been 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. The aforementioned analysis reveals that different types of pictorial metaphors are employed in contemporary advertising campaigns.