Production of An Active Consumer 1

Part 1

Advertisements need ‘something’ that is more than the product which is being advertised. That ‘something’ can range from a song, a rhythm, a photo, an animation, an illustration, a diagram, a slogan, a text, a script, people, animals or anything. So now there is a need to reconstruct the previous sentence. Advertisements need ‘something’ which can be ‘anything’ but which is more than the product being advertised. This ‘something’ or ‘anything’ is not valueless nor does it appear as an already existing valued thing. This value is acquired in the process of active giver and active receiver which are not static positions. Many times the receiver becomes the giver and the giver becomes the receiver. This two way process is important in the context of advertisements and especially with the use of mascots to communicate with the consumer. When the mascots try to talk to people in a literal sense just like when the Amul girl talks to us through the newspaper she interestingly becomes a part of our daily private life where she is not only advertising the food but also talking wittily about the contemporary issues, news, events or tweets. Interestingly the mascots were once brand ambassadors who were born of trademarking at a time when the literacy rate was less and identification was preferred visually. But Interestingly once they acquired enough value to exist outside of the product packaging they started making autonomous appearances.

Today an Amul girl can become anyone at any time. The popular clothes of red polka dots and head bow are not mandatory today where she can change her clothes to any dress and nobody will be confused by her appearance. The brand mascot's non living character becomes much more alive than any celebrity doing an advertisement. We tend to trust the non living characters more than any Akshay Kumar, Salman Khan or Madhuri Dixit, because the flexibility of celebrities also allows us to shift our focus from different celebrities time to time. This trust is so fragile that it fears the media unknowingly. 

But when we see mascots like Amul girl, Nirma Girl, parle G girl we know that they are one of their kind and no one can replace them. We might feel that these non living characters have no rationale of their own and the creators are the true soul behind its creation. But that is not entirely true. The human tendencies of communication, sarcasm, appearance, aspirations are also acquired through the consumer. Many must have worked, analysed these mascots through their story of creation, how they have grown, how they have impacted the product itself or even the advertisements and the commentary that they do. I am more interested in the idea of how this appearance translates to common people and how the idea of a girl child as a mascot becomes the idea of a ‘national child’. This creation of universal national identity tries to fit in with every culture and community but on the other hand, people from different groups try to fit in a singular identity by imitating Amul girl’s appearance in fancy dress competitions or dancing, humming an iconic Nirma song, dancing like a Nirma girl etc. This dynamic of the imitations of each other contradicts when the Amul and Nirmal girl’s dress (which is almost a uniform) becomes the costume for common people and the sari and other everyday dresses become the costume for these mascots. The capitalist nature of penetrating everyday life in the form of brands and characters almost blurs the divide of the consumer and the producer, the living and the non living, need and excess etc. Through these different photos of people (mostly children, girls, women) wearing these iconic costumes, we can see how small alterations happen according to the social background, resources, aspirations, identities and social media. Even though the idea of imitating a particular mascot, the appearances differ, the bodies differ, the act differ. Amul girl has the freedom of transgressing culturally and socially created and maintained notions of femininity. But it is often neglected or avoided whenever it is perceived and recreated through the common people (consumer) and they end up becoming this fragile feminine identity. I have collected these photos from the internet and social media sites to map the universal yet particular, national yet local identities and to understand the importance of girl child as a mascot in a capitalist, nationalist, consumerist framework of the nation. I would like to see and understand the identity of these non living particular mascots through their living recreations from different social and cultural locations.