branding realted to ads

The world of advertising is perhaps the place that epitomizes the contradictions of women as consumers. Women's faces and bodies are used endlessly in advertising to convince people to buy certain products. The many ads we see each day create roles for women. The image of the 'housewife' or woman working in the home is commonly used to sell household goods. Think of the mother selling laundry powder or Aunt Jemima selling syrup. Repeatedly using these images gives the impression that women have a limited role in our society: all women want is shiny floors and the best cookies. These images reinforce gender stereotypes and sometimes also racial ones. The use of the housewife in advertising belittles the wide variety of unpaid work women do in the home.

Ads also adopt positive and empowering language and concepts for retail purposes. For example, Nike has an ad campaign explaining that including girls in sports improves girls' self esteem. However, this message is only for the benefit of women Nike is 'targeting' - women who have enough money to buy Nike shoes. Naomi Klein explains that, "although girls may indeed rule in North America, they are still sweating in Asia and Latin America, making T-shirts with the 'Girls Rule' slogan on them and Nike running shoes that will finally let girls into the game." Women who sew the shoes in China receive barely enough money to survive, thirteen cents an hour, and little opportunity for any leisure at all.²

Women are figured in ads to sell a range of products from cars to vacations. The female image almost always fits a western beauty myth: women are frequently thin, young, able-bodied, heterosexual and light-skinned. More recently, advertisers have begun to use an idealized image of men to sell products; men pictured are strong, lean and muscular. The result of seeing these images many times is that young people, especially young women, think their bodies are inadequate; by attempting to fit the image, some develop eating disorders. Young men are now more frequently using steroids to look like the men in ads. Unrealistic and repeated media images can be bad for our health. American feminist and ad-critic Jean Kilbourne says that in advertising, "what we learn is that a woman's body is just another piece of merchandise. Not only is she a thing, she's a thing that's for sale. Women's bodies and products are completely interchangeable in the world of ads." Kilbourne sums up the underlying message of many ads as: "You're ugly, you're disgusting, buy something."³

The world of advertising needs constant refueling to keep itself in business. To keep us buying new things, advertisers create symbolic obsolescence. This means that advertisers give us the message that old things are out of style and we must have new fashions.⁴ We are 'behind the times' unless we have the latest thing. This manufactures demand - it creates the need for certain products where there was no need before the ad told us so.

Another more recent phenomenon is target advertising. Some companies gather information on consumers' spending habits. One of the newest ways is through points cards such as Air Miles or cards from a particular store. When we fill out applications to these programmes, we give out information about ourselves: how old we are, where we live, how much money we earn. Then when we use the cards our spending habits can be tracked. Advertisers buy this information and use it to shape their next advertising campaign. The same thing is done in on-line shopping on the Internet: companies gather information about their customers and sell it to advertisers. The result is advertising which is targeted directly at us. This can make ads difficult to escape. Our visual environment is becoming polluted with messages to buy more, and it becomes hard to know the difference between items we really need, and items we can do without.