Nature, environment, and advertising

Nature imagery and ideas regarding ‘the natural’ form an important part of advertising and popular culture generally. While appeals to environmental protection and ‘green’ or ‘sustainable’ consumption wax and wane in public communication, nature imagery continues to figure prominently in advertising and other media discourse. Advertising is perhaps particularly interesting in this regard because it effortlessly and seamlessly draws on culturally deep-seated and taken-for-granted meanings of nature and the natural, and reworks these in ways which promote consumption, particular world-views and particular identities. Starting from the recognition that nature is socially, temporally and culturally constructed, this chapter explores the key ways in which advertising uses and articulates ideas of nature. It reviews research which has examined the nature-discourses deployed in advertising content and their role in articulating and reinforcing public definitions of the environment, consumption, and national/cultural identity. The chapter examines how constructions of the natural and nature are deployed in advertising and other mediated communication to appropriate the homogenising trends of globalisation and to enlist national/local/cultural distinctiveness and symbolism in the service of product promotion and consumption, in ways which ultimately tap into and reinforce particular political/ideological views