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AUDIENCE PERCEPTION OF FEMALE MODELS IN ADVERTISING MESSAGES

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1    Background of the study

For any organization, advertising occupies the most important marketing activities, in modern economics; advertising occupies an important market position. The industry (advertising) has grown to an important economic entity supporting lives of millions of people in the world. Advertising is not only an economic activity, but it articulated, different ideas, attitudes and values, which shape out social life and consumption patterns. Therefore, it can be said that advertising has become and form by virtue of signifying practices.

Advertisements, articulates meaning to words although this depends on how we interpret them. Advertising is such an influence in our society that determines our needs what we care about, how we raise our children, what our interests are and so on. Advertising plays a role involving a number of relationships, power and satisfaction; in this light, advertising has over the years used women as tools/implement to persuade consumers into buying a product and portray the women beautiful and desirable. As noted by Puranik (2011) “advertising is nothing but a paid form of non-personal presentation or promotion of ideas, goods or services by an identified sponsor with a view to disseminate information concerning an idea or product” is called advertisement.

In present day marketing activities, hardly is there any business in the modern world which does not advertise. However, the advertisement differs from business to business.

Areas (2008) said that “advertising is the structure and composed, non-Personal communication of information, usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature, about products, about services and ideas, by identified sponsors, through various mass media like radio, television billboard, newspaper, magazine, with the aim of creating awareness”.

This definition has a close link with that of Dominick (2007), which says that “advertising is any form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, and services, usually paid for, by an identified or known sponsor. Advertising makes use of various media to reach out to the consumers across the globe”.

Thus it is seen as the process of persuading potential customers to buy products or promote its services. Wikipedia (2011) give way that any organization that wants its products to know and looked for, has to create awareness through advertising.

Wilson, cited in Asemah (2010) said that advertising is controversial in nature and that in the early twentieth century, people clamored for the regulation of advertising. Believing much of it was exaggerated and untruthful. The United Nations conference on women recognized the importance of the mass media on the image of women/female models. As noted by Ingham, television is widely known to represent and reinforce the mainstream ideology of contemporary western culture particularly. While television representation of women have changed greatly in the last twenty years alone, in other to accommodate the changing role of women on the society, one is led to ask how much the ideology had changed behind the more modern representations of women. If this is the case, then it is important for us to question how real the representations of women are on television and how this affects the attitudes of those who watch. Some of the most watched and perhaps influential genres of television viewing are advertisements on soap operas, in a world where women are numbered greater than men, can television be said to reflect the world as it is or dictate it?

Lipmann (1994) averts that gender representation on a small scale has always been important for one to understand what it means to be male or female. Looking at it in terms of advertising (possibly considering the most important aspect, powerful and influential medium in this ever increasing commercial society) is to look at it with more serious eye from the image inflicted upon us in the patriarchal mass media that surround us, it is assumed that we have been encouraged to mould ourselves into a set ideal. For a woman, that means having beauty, elegance, passivity and good domestic ability. One of the reasons televisions is resistant to the messages as conflicting with women’s desired to consume. Advertisers do not want to present to the audience a liberated woman, because this new woman does not want and thus, will not buy their products. For this reason, the paper actually examines the perception of the audience of female models in advertising messages, using “Always Ultra” commercials as the study.