Featuring a female model in advertisements initially started
with advertisements on products like alcohol and adult entertainment. The trend
then spread like a wildfire in the market and is still being widely used
although being exaggerated. It has become a compulsion now to have a beautiful
model in all kinds of advertisement, which sometimes seems unnecessary. They
seem to sell anything from shaving gel to cars.
Many women right activists say that the women are being
projected as merely an object by such advertisements. But the harsh truth is
that advertisements featuring women is influencing viewers of all ages and
advertisers have realized this. The advertisement starts with an attractive
woman posing in seductive ways followed by the product or the service offered
by the company. The beauty of the model already lures the customer, so
advertisers do not have to put in more effort to motivate them.
But there are certain drawbacks in using women models in some
advertisements and if a consumer is smart enough, it won’t take time for him to
realize that. It is totally irrelevant to feature a female model or an actress
in advertisement promoting men products. Some good examples of this point are
showing a woman in axe deodorant commercial and comparison of a partially nude
woman’s body to the body of a car. Second drawback is due to more concentration
on the model, the attention deserved by the product is not sufficient. The main
focus of the advertisement is lost.
Surprisingly only few male models advertises for male
oriented products. Even a picture of a woman on an Internet commercial seems
not logical to some extent, as there are thirty percent of female internet
users and seventy percent of male internet users, worldwide. To add to it,
advertisers cannot explain why beautiful bodies bring success to advertisement.
Advertisements are convincing and motivating tool, which can
leave a deep impact on the minds of the viewers and plays a major role in
molding the culture and attitude of the people. Expansive and extensive
portraying of women in this manner merely reduces their image to an object of
passion. Emphasis is laid only on the physical beauty of the woman like
features, body curves. After the commercial has been shot, using graphical
technology, any kind of imperfection of the body is altered which in a way
sends out the signal that only perfect people are meant to use the product.
The companies have a moral responsibility also in the
society. These commercials have a negative impact on the society and leads to
problems faced for the common woman. The major ill effect is the pressure on
woman to get those near-perfect bodies. They get so pressurized that they take
the unhealthy way to reach the set goals. They develop eating disorders; their
health gets affected which may sometimes result in irreparable damages. And
those who never make it to that point, face humiliation and get taunted by
everyone around them. This results in depression and other long-term
psychological diseases.
According to researches and surveys conducted, most of the
women vow that commercials lower their self-confidence and they visualize
themselves as unattractive due to the image being portrayed of the perfect
woman in ads. In America, seventy-five percent of healthy females think that
they are over-weight. Half of the women populations are on some kind of diet
program and nearly ten million women suffer from serious eating disorders. The
weight of a fashion model is twenty three percent less than an average weighed
ordinary woman.
Advertisements haven’t spared women being beaten up. In a
particular after shave lotion commercial, the background voice says that its
essential to learn martial arts because once a man applies the company’s
product, women around will be attracted and will pounce on him. Towards the end
of the commercial, they show a male model kicking several women model that seem
to have attracted to him. This is degradation of respect of women to the lowest
level.
After all this exposure, women viewers identify themselves as
the weaker sex. Some think that males decide their self-worth. Over exposure of
women as sex objects have triggered cases of physical assault and rapes.
Majority of the women are taking the wrong way to get those stick figures,
which are results in diseases, sometimes leading to death. And most of this is
attributed to the advertisements that pour into the lives of innocent people
everyday. Marketing ethics should be built to raise the status of woman in the
society and give them the due respect but not degrade them.
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