Producing Aspirational Youth in a Postcolonial Market: Global Cool and Consumer Discourse in Bangladeshi Advertising

Abstract

This study examines how the Bangladeshi advertising industry discursively produces aspirational imaginaries of youth within a postcolonial context shaped by neoliberal consumer ideology. Drawing on postcolonial media studies and cultural studies, it explores how ideas of ‘cool’, modernity, and success are constructed, localized, and circulated through advertising discourse. Based on 50 in-depth interviews with advertising professionals—including clients (marketers), agency officials, and advertising filmmakers—the study analyses the narratives, representational strategies, and professional logics that underpin the construction of aspirational youth identities. Qualitative thematic analysis reveals a largely formulaic portrayal of youth aspiration that links upward mobility, lifestyle branding, and individual self-making to neoliberal consumption. These discourses privilege Westernized, urban, English-speaking, affluent, and predominantly male subjectivities, while marginalizing alternative youth identities shaped by class, gender, language, and spatial location. The findings further demonstrate how global advertising norms are selectively appropriated within Bangladesh’s cultural and historical context, reinforcing postcolonial hierarchies of aspiration in the global South.

Social Science Review [The Dhaka University Studies, Part-D], Vol.43, No.1, June 2026, pp. 49-73.