The visual persuasion in print advertisements for Beauty

Résumé du document

Advertising is a 100 billion pound (annually) industry and influences the social and cultural classes throughout their lives. People are exposed to 2000 ads a day, constituting perhaps one of the most powerful informational force in society. Currently, advertisements sell values, norms, images, concepts of success and worth, love and sexuality more than the products. In the beauty products' market, the aspect of advertising most in need of analysis and change is the portrayal of women. Many advertisers claim that beauty is something that comes from the body. Diverse advertisements use perfection, desirability and lovability to promote the products. These strategies can also lead to virulent critics: can you speak about stereotypes? What about the emancipation of women in today's societies? Who is the new feminine woman? What are the different strategies to seduce women? This use of the woman in advertisements can be very ambiguous and has to be analyzed. Women are a new marketing target. A relation between the advertisements using and targeting women has to be established, analyzed and understood.

Extraits

[...] The passing of judgment of an issue under consideration related to a purchse. Identification: The act of identifying or the state of being identified A person's association with or assumption of the qualities, characteristics, views of another person or group. (Psychology or business) Objectification: A physical entity typifying an abstraction: embodiment, incarnation, personalisation Stereotype: A conventional, formulaic, and oversimplified conception, opinion or image. One that is regarded as embodying or confirming to a set image or type. Visual persuasion: The act of persuading or the state of being persuaded with something which is related to the sense of sight, something which can be seen or able to be seen by the eye. [...]

[...] The other focus group was a five-person one with older women (46-59) because they represent another target market with all the new beauty products proposed to older women (anti-ageing creams, age defying make- up I really wanted to get another kind of view about the use of women of advertising, to make a parallel with the advertisements in the past. I found the women who are working with me in the guildhall in Preston. They accepted to do it seriously. The experience was very interesting. I did not prepare specific questions or questionnaires. I only wanted to approach the most important themes of the analysis: the general image of women in advertisements, the evocation of brand names using women in their advertisements and their awareness about their purchasing behaviours. I chose different print advertisements taken in English feminine magazines. [...]

[...] Interviewers could plan different questionnaires according to the ages. A young lady absolutely does not understand an advertisement the same way or does not react as older women. Furthermore, it could be good to focus on the different market targets that women represent with their different ages. Data analysis The status of the woman in English advertising seems to have an impact on women's consumption of beauty products where the feminine gender is regularly used in advertisements.The importance of women as a target market has to be analysed. [...]

[...] The focus groups revealed some parts of the hypotheses seen in the literature review. The questionnaire was supposed to give exact quantitative and qualitative data. It was very useful to point out specific and strategic dilemmas with numbers to be more efficient than the focus groups. Indeed, the data were collected in two times to be more proficient. They were also analysed in two times in order to compare, to confirm or not the different hypotheses evocated in the literature review Problems and limitations Obviously, this analysis can not be exhaustive and perfect. [...]

[...] Stefano Hatfield (2003) does a brief analysis of Candie's perfume advertisement. The woman is having perfume sprayed down her cleavage by a man while she is smiling and happy. In reality, he explains that it can look more like a rape scene. According to him, the woman is in a submissive position, cowering under the man, “while he rips off her clothes to do whatever he wants, in this case spray her with perfume”. The slogan that accompanies the advert “Anywhere you dare” could even suggest that a man can act like this wherever he wants, and that the women should remain happy and willing to oblige him. [...]