I Wanna Be Like You: The Avatar Gaze and the Visual Rhetoric of Corporate Personhood in India's Amul Butter Advertisements

Abstract

This article analyzes India’s long-running Amul Butter campaign to delineate some of the visual strategies by which a company projects a persona as an ordinary citizen. I argue that the company’s mascot, the Amul Girl, functions as a corporate avatar who oscillates between her world and that of her viewers and enlists viewers in an exchange of gazes. In doing so, the Amul Girl avatar represents a corporate being seeking to live and look like an Indian person. The essay concludes by asking what kind of Indian the Amul Girl reveals Amul to be and suggests future lines of inquiry for visual scholars interested in the projection of corporate persona.