Marketing images of gender: a visual analysis (original) (raw)
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The Changing Roles of Gender in Advertising: Past, Present, and Future
Contemporary Southeastern Europe, 2020
The purpose of this paper is to navigate the rich academic literature on gender portrayals in advertising, and then to provide an overview on key findings and trends observed throughout the years. For several decades, women in advertising were likely to be depicted in traditional and domestic roles and were excluded from empowering roles and professional settings. Some progress has been acknowledged during the last decades, however, it seems that female role stereotyping is becoming subtler but still remains present. Male depictions have changed as well, moving from mere traditional masculine portrayals to a greater variety of roles, including decorative and family ones. In addition, the paper offers a cultural perspective by summarizing key findings regarding the relationship of gender stereotyping in advertisements and various country gender indices. Popular methodologies employed by content analytic studies in print advertisements are also presented. Finally, the paper accentuates current developments and tendencies regarding gender portrayals in advertising and outlines a research agenda that proposes timely and promising avenues for future studies.
A STUDY ON PORTRAYAL OF WOMEN IN ADVERTISEMENTS AND IT'S EFFECT ON CULTURAL VALUES
Today everyone needs to advertise their products to inform the customers about the product, increase the sales, acquire market share, and attain top position in their respective industry. Every business spends lot of money for advertising their products but the money spent will lead to success only when the best techniques of advertising are used for the product. In recent years, advertising has witnessed a significant transformation in attracting customer to buy/use their products/services. The need for advertisements has risen to great levels in print and visual media. One among the transformation is the way women are depicted in advertising, with changing times, reflecting the transformation taking place in society. Advertising is one of the major media that affect our daily life consciously and unconsciously and are responsible to play a significant role in shaping the society in a much broader perspective. Women today are no longer consolidated behind kitchen walls. Their aspiration for stepping out in the world made society to think differently. Marketer wisely utilized this transformation process to launch their product and advertisement strategically. This paper is a part of research work and the report will seek to define the portrayal of women in advertisements and its effect on cultural values. Survey research method is used for the analysis on the basis of gender and age. The literature review indicates that the women are portrayed mainly as an object of attraction. The results argue that the portrayal in advertising is changing the concept of respect about women, spreading uncultured values and also indicate women's physical beauty as an instrument to induce the products demands.
The woman in pieces: advertising and the construction of feminine identity
This article aims to analyze the representation of the feminine identity in advertising. It explores the notion of social identity as a category that is experienced in the tension between classification and value. It also discusses the logic by which ads elaborate an image and, while in this process, transform the woman into a silent and fragmented body. In this article, I follow the anthropological tradition of symbolic systems analysis, and with it contribute to the debate concerning social representations throughout mass communication in general and, particularly, in advertising.
Deconstruction of the gender binary in advertising: an interpretive analysis and discussion
Postgraduate dissertation awarded as Outstanding (A+). Abstract follows below. I hope you all enjoy. "The gender binary is a socially constructed system that classifies people by sex into two distinct, disconnected, polarised classifications of masculine and feminine. Historically, this paradigm has caused and reproduced a vast gamut of stereotypes, acceptable identities and expected behaviours which curbed and marginalised any other nonconforming types of expressions and existences. Marketing has long observed and applied such dyadic perspective, especially when it comes to advertising. However, intellectual and social fields such as feminism, postmodernism, post-structuralism, queer studies and queer theory have been challenging such dichotomy. Gender has been demonstrating to be a subjective individuality with fluid characteristics that may shift according to time and context. Hence, this study discourses about gender from its broad concepts to its co-relation with advertising. Moreover, an interpretive analysis methodology is developed and applied to observe and discuss how advertising has been able to adapt and contribute to this new social reality."
Advertising: Boon or Curse for Women
, http://www.euroasiapub.org (An open access scholarly, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, monthly, and fully refereed journals.) Abstract In this era of globalization, advertisers have been finding various ways of presenting the females in advertisements, to entice the buyers, which even seem to be working in their favour. But advertising as currently practiced, is a form of communication intended to promote the sale of a product or a service, to influence general public opinion. But when we talk about the way a woman is portrayed in the advertisements, then the opinion differs. There are various advertisements which present the female as a symbol of love, care, motherhood, gentleness, elegant, and all the femininity, whereas on the other hand there are certain advertisements which portray women as sex object or dutiful wives of their husbands. And the reason behind this differentiation is that the companies feel that this strategy will help to make their product popular. When we talk about today's advertisement world, there aren't many ads which somehow don't depict the females as either a young attractive woman or simply a housewife who is busy in doing the household work. They only understand women as a decorative element, an attractive figure or a housewife. In this paper, effort has been made to search the current image of women and challenges faced by them in advertising media. The paper envisages the need of a complete revolution in the way a woman is portrayed in advertisements nowadays., http://www.euroasiapub.org (An open access scholarly, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, monthly, and fully refereed journal)
Representation of Women in Advertisements
— The primary purpose of this paper is to understand people's perception about overt sexuality and objectification of women in advertisements through the ages. Substantiating the content with both-current trending advertisements and previous studies that have been conducted, the research paper analyses the difference in perception of advertisements among generations and brings to light the intentional shift in focus by brands from the features of the brand to the models in the ad. Women are particularly vulnerable to an advertiser's use of representation of people as symbols and are relatively powerless because of male dominance in today's society. Index Terms: Overt sexuality, objectification of women, advertising depictions and subordination of women
2019
The main purpose of the article is to characterize discourse strategies pertaining to the presentation of the male and female body in modern advertising and to describe how the images of body contribute to the creation or blurring of gender differences. In order to better represent the phenomena that have appeared or intensified in recent decades, theoretical considerations concerning gender and body were presented. The main theoretical framework is Raewyn Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity, the article also makes use of other theoretical concepts relevant in the context (e.g. the theories of Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard or Erving Goffman). The modern culture of the west, and especially advertising is characterised by two opposite, though non-equivalent trends: on the one hand, there are bodies gendered in the traditional way (male mesomorph body type and a slender female body). On the other hand, the opposite trend is associated with blurring gender differences (e....
This study of variations in television advertising interpretation, amongst respondents from diferent cultures, contributes to knowledge in advertising by extending Scott's (2994) print media research. We utilise a visual rhetorical approach to interpretation and suggest that pictures are not universal; visual interpretations vary as viewers use culturally-sited advertising knowledge and visual signs to interpret commercials. We suggest the visual rhetoric approach is usefil for interpreting complex communications, implications for marketing practitioners are discussed, and we conclude that advertisers should be aware of ascribed meanings of their international advertising, as subtleties in campaign interpretation may lead to dificulties in various markets.