Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
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Credibility
: Sustainable marketing communications must:
-
be integrated with a broad-based sustainability strategy at an operational
as well as policy level;
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engage with credible NGOs working in the field of sustainable development;
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use green labels or certifications awarded by independent and respected
bodies.
Art, activism and the public interest
Visual metaphor or backgrounds in advertising imagery are frequently used to suggest
particular associations - natural, energetic, fresh, powerful, cool, sexy, and so on.
However, much media and advertising research demonstrates that there is no guarantee
that visual metaphors will be either recognized or interpreted by audience members
in the way that advertisers or producers intended. A number of factors here are
important, including how media consumers read an image, and their gender, age,
cultural values and perceptions, political interests, visual literacy, and personal
experiences and motivations. As Proctor
et al
. write:
Arguing that human-engineered communication systems are purposive in nature,
we assume there is intentionality in consumer communication and accept the
inevitability of a polysemy of interpretations because of the 'member resources'
of the interpreter. However, in examining advertisements where metaphors may
be perceived, it is interesting to consider the possibility of the intended message
never reaching the consumer because of the ambiguity of the message, which
may lead to a plethora of interpretations. It is therefore interesting to explore
what consumers do take from these messages.
(2005: 55-72)
Phillips and McQuarrie (2004) suggest that visual figures can be effectively
differentiated in terms of their visual structure, defined terms of the physical
arrangement of image elements and their meaning operations, and understood in
terms of the instructions for the inference they suggest. Visual structure and meaning
operation are fundamentally rhetorical ideas. They are rhetorical because they
distinguish and bring out the available possibilities for creating a deviant visual
interpretation. Some photojournalists straddle the worlds of fine art and political
activism, thereby giving their work both cultural and political capital. Green archi-
tectural designs may operate in a similar fashion to inspire and prefigure future
possibilities. The aerial photographs of Yves Bertrand communicate both the Earth's
beauty and the impact of human activity on the planet, offering a personal aesthetic
that is more emotive than the remote sensing images produced by orbiting satellites
and published in such works as the United Nations's
One Planet, Many People
(Singh, 2005) or even Andrew Johnston's (2007) glossy
Earth from Space
. Sebastiano
Salgado combines a high art photographic style with an incisive reportage that brings
out the cruelty and human costs of economic globalization, but people from every
walk of life are creators of their own images with their camera phones or with their
bodies. Powerful, cinematic design can enhance a coffee-table book from being a
piece of interior decoration to being a stimulating and disturbing learning tool. The
