Advertisement Messages about Women and Gender: Beach Body Ready Ad
According to Zimmerman and Dahlberg (2008), women have continued to play important roles in modern advertising either as targets or as objects. Women have become dominating targets in advertisements mainly because as a group, they make close to 85 percent of all the purchasing decisions. The subject of sexualization and objectification of women in publicity has continued to capture the attention of researchers who claim that such portrayals stimulate consumers to buy. In relation to the portrayal of women and gender in advertisement, this analysis examines the “Beach Body Ready” advertisement by Protein World with a focus on how the advertisement portrays women and further conveys
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The advertisement featured a bikini clad woman and was interpreted by viewers to be conveying the message that if women wanted to be ready for the summer and for the beach, they had to shape up and look like the woman that was portrayed in the advertisement. As a result, for them to achieve the desired shape they were to buy the weight loss products being advertised by Protein World. This advertisement was received negatively by readers who believed that it was meant to body shame women who had weight issues as well as those who were struggling with self-esteem and self-acceptance resulting from weight gain.
According to Ethan, Basch, Hillyar, Berdnik and Huynh (2016), various studies have examined the effects of magazine readership on outcomes such as body shape and these have found out that editorial content and advertisements have the potential to trigger disordered eating habits. The study goes on to say that body types used in advertisements have the tendency to influence the adult and adolescent females eating habits and even body images. This study also goes ahead to reveal that advertisements have the tendency to feed off female insecurities especially when it comes to weight
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This connotation already rules out any woman who falls short of this description or physique. The deeper meaning derived from this is that women who are ready for the beach should look exactly like what is portrayed on the advertisement. The advertisement’s portrayal of women in this light can therefore be further decoded to mean that anyone with a body shape different from what has been portrayed in the advertisement is inferior, not good enough and therefore not ready for the beach. Such a portrayal brings forth a gender stereotype that looks down upon or rules out women struggling with weight issues, or those who feel insecure with the fear that they will be judged if they step out to the beach with bodies that do not look like the one being portrayed on the advertisement. The message being conveyed by the advertisement therefore is that being good enough as a woman is directly linked to one’s body shape, thus anything less than what is portrayed in the advertisement does not suffice. This leads to a shallow definition of womanhood which is purely based on one’s physique or the ability to have a sexually appealing body that is approved by the society. The Beach Body Ready advertisement therefore uses body shape as the criteria through which women should be defined