From Colonial Consumerism to Green Advertising

A Conceptual Framework for Analysing Cultural Narratives in Indonesian Everyday Products

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-620-8_21How to use a DOI?

Keywords

colonial advertising; green advertising; social transformation; postcolonial theory; kearifan lokal

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel conceptual lens to inform the interplay between colonial advertising heritage and current green marketing discourse in Indonesia. Although the area of green marketing research in Indonesia is growing, there is no existing framework that links the Dutch East Indies colonial advertising heritage to the current sustainability communication. This paper fills that gap. By means of an integrative synthesis of postcolonial communication studies, Gramscian cultural hegemony theory, and Indonesian green marketing scholarship, the paper develops a diagnostic framework known as the Colonial-Green Advertising Continuum (CGAC). Under the CGAC, the ideological structures of advertising can be examined through four dimensions of analysis: aspirational logic, body politics, cultural coding, and transformation rhetoric. I show that these four ideas apply to both old colonial ads and today’s green ads in Indonesia. The same pattern runs through both, and it still shapes how Indonesian consumers read environmental messages today. Crucially, the framework also identifies conditions under which green advertising can function as genuinely counter-hegemonic communication, drawing on indigenous ecological values such as gotong royong (collective reciprocal cooperation) and kearifan lokal (place-based indigenous ecological wisdom) to produce social transformation rather than aspirational reproduction of colonial consumer logic. The paper concludes with a research and policy agenda indicating how the CGAC framework can guide future empirical work and inform the development of culturally grounded green communication governance standards in Indonesia.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Hardika Widi Satria
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/23
TI  - From Colonial Consumerism to Green Advertising
BT  - Proceedings of the 8th International Conference of Vocational Education, Applied Science and Technology (ICVEAST 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 269
EP  - 282
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-620-8_21
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-620-8_21
ID  - Satria2026
ER  -