27 Jun PREFERENCES FOR WOMENS ROLES IN ADVERTISEMENTS
This Article was written by Jacob M. Duker and Lewis R.Tucker, Jr. in 1977. In this article the discussion is based on the portrayal of women in advertising. The article basically says that the negative impact of women through advertisement showing them as housewives or sex objects have become a major source of concern for the women. The National Organization of Women (NOW) complained in 1971 that the women were still portrayed as domestic adjuncts, demeaned housekeepers, dependent on men, submissive, sex objects and unintelligent.
According to the article the research that was conducted by Courtney and Lockeretz, sexton and haberman on advertisements and print advertisements concluded on the note that women were not portrayed accurately meaning that the advertisements do no show the actual role occupied by women in a Society and the image of women reflected in ads is quite narrow. Now only the proportions of sex-object role portrayals have decreased significantly whereas the others have not. However the role of women in advertisements has improved quite a lot since the old times as they are not portrayed as the stereotyped women as they were portrayed before. But still the fact is that more advertisements are made on women being as sex objects, or house wives. As the hypothesis statement of this article states that there is no difference in the perception of advertisements portraying women in the role of mother, sex objects, housewife, or glamour girl between female subjects who show strong and those who show weak orientations toward the women’s liberation movement.
In order to explain this relationship quantitative research was conducted in which College students were used exclusively because they are the ones who are most likely to adopt current popular opinion towards both women’s lib and sex role portrayal in advertisements. Moreover it relies on the use of actual advertisements. Ads were pretested to insure that they did reflect the identified feminist issues. The pretests involved discussion of the ads with 30 female under-graduates to identify ads whose literal (as opposed to symbolic) messages were understood and which did project the image of women respectively as mother, sex object, glamour girl, housewife, working mother, modern woman, and professional, respectively. The following advertisements were chosen. 1. Mother feeding baby with a new disposable bottle (mother). 2. Beautiful female positioned by a line of cosmetics explicitly emphasizing “sexiness” (sex object). 3. Beautiful female being featured as a center of attention because of her “beautiful hair,” the result of using a well-known creme rinse (glamour girl). 4. Several housewives taking part in a testimonial for a new pressure-type drain opener (housewife). 5. A cereal ad featuring a mother with a young daughter discussing the importance of pursuing a career while being able to look out for the welfare of the family (working mother). 6. Beautiful female positioned in a hair coloring ad as an independent individual free to pursue anything without worry (modern woman). 7. Biographical profile of a female orchestra conductor indicating the brand of Scotch whiskey she preferred (professional). The advertisements was shown to 104 females between the ages of 18 and 21 who represented the student body of a northeastern university. The sample is biased toward younger, educated individuals. Coming to the Results only for advertisement 2, which portrayed a female as a sex object, did they obtained chi square value of 4.122 begin to approach significance. For all other role representations, the chi square values reflecting differences among groups did not exceed 1.76. These findings are especially striking because they involve the reactions of the two conceptually predetermined polar groups, the traditionalists and the pro feminists. Of further interest is the finding that the three groups of respondents showed no significant differences in both their positive and their negative reactions. The two polar groups both liked the portrayals in advertisements 2, 3, 4, and 7, both disliked the portrayals in advertisement 1, and groups were divided relatively evenly toward those in advertisements 5 and 6. This study has established an important conclusion with regard to profeminism and its relationship to reactions to roles for women (portrayal of women) in advertisements. We know now that having pro-feminist opinions does not change the roles being assigned to women in advertisements.
Women’s Role Portrayal Preferences in Advertisements: An Empirical Study
This Article is written by Lawrence H. Wortzel and John M. Frisbie in Oct, 1974. This article is based on the two published studies which did research on the role that women portrayal in print advertising. The Courtney and Lockeretz study concluded that the women are right on the part where they say that full views of their roles in a society are not shown. They are always shown as housewives or some fashion object or the most common as sex objects. These roles do not define a women and role they play or have to play in a society. The other case study by Wagner and Banos indicates that there has been a large amount of improvement in showing women’s role as a working member of a society. However they did not do much research on the effectiveness of the advertisement meaning that what kind of advertisement do women find more appealing or does the advertisement showing women in a working role make the product more better or desirable compared to the advertisements in which women were shown as sex or fashion object.
Therefore this research has two hypothesis statements, one, when a women appears in an advertisement the desirability of the product advertised to women exposed to the ads will be enhanced if that woman is portrayed in a career or neutral role, rather than a sex object, family, or fashion object role.
Two, those women who most strongly agree with the tenets of women liberation Movement will most strongly consider a product’s desirability enhanced when a woman appearing in the ad is portrayed in a career or neutral role, rather than a sex object, family, or fashion object role.
The traditional role of women was however not rejected. In this experiment, subjects were asked to “design” print ads by matching pictures of products with pictures of women. Two portfolios were prepared: one consisting of pictures of products, the other containing pictures of women. The product portfolio consisted of pictures of three products in each of seven product categories: small appliances, large appliances, women’s grooming products, women’s personal products, household products, foods, and men’s grooming and personal products. The specific product categories were selected to provide diversity while remaining within the boundaries of plausibility; each product category is one in which the picture of a woman in an advertisement would not be unexpected. Any product that consistently used advertising that portrayed a woman in a particular role was rejected to minimize possible bias due to conditioning. The portfolio of women’s pictures consisted of five pictures depicting women in each of the five roles-“neutral,” “family,” “career,” “sex object,” and “fashion object”-for a total of 25 pictures in all. The two portfolios were presented to a convenience sample of 100 young (ages 21 to 35) women. While the sample of young women was not drawn randomly, every effort was made to insure that a distribution of demographic characteristics would be achieved. The results indicated no consistent preference for specific female roles that always enhance product desirability and that cut across product categories. Coming to the result we must see that the women participating in this experiment appear to have chosen their preferred role-background on the basis of the specific product class with which they were con-fronted. For products that are usually used by households or families, the family role-back-ground was preferred. Preference for the family role-background was marginal for small appliances and strong for large appliances and food. For products that women use alone the neutral or career role-backgrounds were prefer-red, although the traditional fashion role was still acceptable. There is no product for which a sex-object role was considered the most enhancing role portrayal. After doing several research and experiment the article concludes by saying that women are indeed very happy when they are portrayed as traditional homemaker, fashion or sex objects. Women did find their liberation in ad to be portrayed by a housewife role. The reason they prefer these role portrayals they chose could be that advertisement has played a big part in making women accept the traditional role portrayals in ads in advertisements.
Amanda B. Bower (Autumn, 2001)”Highly Attractive Model in Advertising and the Women who Loathe Them: The implications of Negative Affect for Spokesperson Effectiveness”
This Article is written by Amanda B. Bower in 2001. In this article the author tries to explain the impact that good looking models in advertisements, have on the self esteem of the women. As we know that the use of Attractive Models in advertising has become very popular in the world today but the effect is yet to be measure. Some women may have negative effects by comparing themselves to the attractive model and may think less of themselves. The purpose of the research was to find out that if the highly attractive images of women in advertising can persuade and if they have a positive or negative impact on the women living in a society. The physical Attractiveness plays a very important role as women want to compare themselves with the images of perfection, flawlessness, skinniness and beauty depicted in advertising. Would the one comparing herself would have an effect on her self-esteem and have a negative effect on the spokes person effectiveness. The results of the study showed that the people who compared themselves to the spokes person actually had a negative reaction and the effectiveness of the spokes person was reduced. This tells us that that there although there may be negative relation between negative effect and spokesperson efficiency but still the negative relation has to be more high for model derogation to take place. The patterns suggest an interesting limited condition. For Methodology 38 undergraduates were chosen and were given 5 photos of models to select from who would look better using the treadmill. The photos that were given were chosen from more than 100 photos of models from different magazines and none of them were from advertisements. While conducting the first study it was kept in mind that HAM would be the ones with who majority would like to compare themselves so to simplify the findings, a second study was performed. It was decided to take such a product that would emphasize more on the malleable part of woman’s physical appearance. This was done in order to see if the negative effect still existed when the body was not strongly emphasized on as it was done in the first case study. Regarding first study results strong evidence was shown that the comparers report relatively high levels of comparison with the model, whereas non-comparers report relatively low levels of comparison. Comparers had more negative feelings and found the models to be more attractive than the non-comparers. Results regarding Study 2 where One hundred eleven women participated indicated that the mean beauty evaluation (10.88) was again at approximately the midpoint of the scale and was not significantly different from the HAM beauty in the first study. This suggests again that the subjects view the model as representing the average beautiful model presented in advertising. The purpose of this study was see whether the highly attractive models had an ability to persuade and also if HAM’s had an positive or negative effect on women. Results showed that more importance is given to Spokesperson expertise and evaluation of product in a advertisement in product evaluation and intentions.
Images of Women in Advertisements: Effects on Attitudes Related to Sexual Aggression
This Article is written by Kyra Lanis and Katherine Covell in 1998. In this Article they have tried to make a point that portrayal of women by media can influence sexual attitudes and beliefs. As we all know that Advertising has a very strong power of persuading and manipulating. Bretl and Canto(1988) estimated and found out that a average american is exposed to over 37,000 advertisements each year. Certain Role Portrayals have been played by women in advertisements but according to this article very little attention has been given to the portrayal of sexuality of women in advertisements. So basically the purpose of this article and research is to see the effects of advertisements when women are presented in sexually provocative or a non-traditional manner. According to the article the stereotypic portrayal has an impact on attitudes of women as they become more conscious and have social anxiety meaning they start to believe that they have to be like the stereotypic women displayed in advertisements as the others might start judging them if they act differently. Secondly their desire and motivation to achieve anything becomes very low and their interest in politics participation decreases and this all because of the impact of stereotypic portrayed of women in advertisements.. For the experiment 90 participants were taken out of which 45 were males and the other 45 were females and they were all undergraduate students from university of Toronto. There were 2 studies on which participants had to participate. First study was to make own judgments about some advertisements and a second study in which they had to assist with the normalization of a questionnaire being made by a researcher. The results showed that control advertisements were rated as more appealing than the sex objects and progressive advertisements. The research further concludes by saying that although in some places women are also being depicted in wide range of social and occupational roles but there has been a vast increase in the sexually exploitive use of women in advertisements.
A Longitudinal View of Women’s Role Portrayal In Television Advertising
The Article has been written by Marjorie Caballero and Paul J. Solomon in 1984. In this article by Adrian Furnham and Nadine Bitar, growing awareness of women’s role in society has been told meaning that women are now participating more in the labor force and that is changing the image of women and now people are again evaluating women’s contribution in a society. This role of women also has had many criticisms and some revolve around the stereotypical sex-role portrayal of women in the mass media. Here, the hypothesis of this article would be that the marketers and society have begun to accept the changing role of women.
The article also tells that according to the findings Women were portrayed more in decorative roles and in the home compared to men. And even if they were shown doing work in advertisements, the jobs that they had in the advertisements were traditional “female” Occupations and there was rarely a time when women were portrayed as professionals or authorities. The image we assume of a women by watching advertisements are of a young beautiful girl found in her home or kitchen and whenever she has any problems she is looking for some male influence to solve her problems. She is a sex-object and her job is take care of the male. For the research a quantitative methodology was followed, total of 2095 and 1872 commercials were reviewed and analyzed in 1977 and 1980 respectively. The Commercials were analyzed according to the following variable which was channel, time of day, ad distribution, characters women appear with, age, product category, role played by women and voice over.
According to report trends by Schneider and Schneider showed that the changing roles being shown in the advertisements are
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