The visual clichés of legal cannabis promotion on social media

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper presents a visual analysis of 1,236 Instagram posts from cannabis brands during the immediate period after Canada’s 2018 cannabis legalization. Promotional texts crafted by brands, whether print advertisements or social media content marketing, are rich sociocultural communicators. For decades critical scholars have analyzed deeper ideological stories from the common tropes, codes, and clichés of consumer advertising. Situated in this established body of literature but applied to a novel and recently introduced consumer product (legal cannabis) on a twenty-first-century promotional platform (Instagram), this research identifies the common visual clichés used by cannabis brands and analyzes their underlying sociocultural meanings. The findings locate seven visual clichés that ultimately fetishize cannabis as a commodity by hollowing out its labor contexts, objectifying it, and then re-filling it with arbitrary desires and feelings. The analysis suggests that commodity representations of legal cannabis are aided by the use of long-deployed advertising codes. The reliance on these codes can be attributed to a unique combination of factors: the meta-marketing goal of normalizing cannabis in addition to promoting individual brands, the necessity of navigating regulations, as well as the hyper-stylized visual culture of Instagram.