Fetishizing Women: Advertising in Indian Television and Its Effects on Target Audiences

Introduction Advertisements are a powerful means of social communication. They are an important tool used by marketers to promote their goods, services or ideas to their prospective customers. Kotler and Keller (2008) have defined advertising as any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor. Their main aim is to increase sales through positive impressions on audiences, about their products and services, by grabbing their attention, through persuasion in a very short span of time; before turning the page of a magazine/ newspaper, before changing the channel of the TV; before clicking the new screen on a computer; and while driving on the highways. Advertising is omnipresent; one cannot escape from the influence of advertising. It has the ability to control the market by creating diverse personal needs, changing attitudes, self-images and preferences. While some consider advertising as a mere economic activity with the single purpose to sell (Frolova, 2014; Rekha & Maran, 2012), others considered it as the mirror and maker of culture (Harun, Teo, Hussin & Nasir, 2014). Role of Physical appearance in Advertisements In advertisements physical appearance plays an important role in the process of communicating and convincing, offering a consistent contribution to different kinds of marketing strategies (Lin & Yeh, 2009). As handsome and beautiful models have good brand recall value, advertisers generally try to associate idealized parts of the endorser's body with various products, and in the process, models set a standard of beauty for the audience. Studies have proved that both men (Pope, Phillips, Olivardia, 2000, Agliata & Dunn, 2004) and women (Stice and Shaw, 1994; Heinberg and Thompson, 1995; King, Touyz, and Charles, 2000), being repeatedly exposed to advertisements, try to imitate the models as their role models by using the advertised products. This process of self-modeling has resulted in depression, stress, low confidence, and body dissatisfaction (Mitchison, Harry, Griffiths, Murray, Bentley, Gratwick, Harrison & Mond; 2016), which has been recognised as a precursor to heavy dieting and eating disorders. While women are encouraged to control their weight through dieting; men are expected to mould their bodies through exercise. Thus, women are vulnerable to the culture of thinness (Heinberg, 1996); men are subjected to a culture of hyper-masculinity (Agliata & Dunn, 2004). Though physical appearance is important for both males and females, and models in advertisements affects both the genders (Cash, 1997), Striegel-Moore and Smolak (2000) note that beauty is the core feature of femininity as portrayed by the media. Helgeson's study (2001) reveals that girls had a greater negative body image and lower self-esteem than boys. Hargreaves & Tiggemann (2004)'s study demonstrates that exposure to images of idealized beauty in the media on the body image of both adolescent girls and boys, led to increased negative mood and appearance comparisons for both; yet, the effect on appearance comparison was stronger for girls. In the Indian context a study conducted by Iqbal, Shahnawaz & Alam (2006), reveals that though there was a negative correlation between the body image and depression of male and female students, males had significantly more positive body image than females. Thus, while advertisements also have an impact on males' body image, the present study mainly discusses the impact of advertisements on females. According to Wells, Burnett and Moriarty (2003) in comparison to the other media, television has three key advantages: its influence on consumers perceptions is pervasive; it can reach large audiences in a cost effective manner; and, its sound and moving images create strong emotional and perceptual impacts (p. 280). Thus, this study mainly focuses on television advertisements. …