An unbiased comprehensive oversight synthesis of three decades of gender-related advertising research is undertaken. Seventy-six articles found in premiere marketing, psychology, sociology, and communications journals were reviewed. Findings of the gender role research indicate advertisements are generally moving toward a slightly less stereotypical stance. Findings of the selectivity hypotheses research indicate females versus males process advertisements differently. Findings of the spokesperson gender effects research indicate controversy exists, and the gender advertising response literature findings assert gender differences in advertising responses exist. Finally, the gender brand positioning literature specifies gender differences exist. The findings are synthesized and implications are suggested.

Gender Issues in Advertising—An Oversight Synthesis of Research: 1970–2002

Consumers, acting independently of marketers and advertisers, have started creating and disseminating documents that strongly resemble, in form and intent, ads for the brands that they love. Employing a netnographic method, this paper investigates consumer-generated, commercially relevant artifacts by examining the brand community centered on the Apple Newton, a brand that was (along with its supporting advertising) discontinued in 1998. The members of the Newton community create commercially relevant content to fill the void created by the lack of advertising for the brand. These artifacts reflect tensions with the marketer, the market, and the community itself, and imbue the brand with powerful meaning. These data reveal that consumers can be quite skilled in the creation of brand-relevant communications, applying the styles, logics, and grammar of advertising. The ascendancy of consumer-generated content prefigures revolutionary changes in how advertising is defined and practiced.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/20460795

Vigilante marketing and consumer-created communications

The Act of Reading

As a media genre, advertising offers a unique opportunity to study how the beauty ideal is constructed across cultures. This research analyzes the content of advertisements from women’s fashion and beauty magazines in Singapore, Taiwan, and the U.S. to compare how beauty is encoded and found a noticeable difference between the portrayals of women from the U.S. and from the two East Asian societies in terms of sexual portrayal. In addition, Asian ads contained a large proportion of cosmetics and facial beauty products whereas the U.S. ads were dominated by clothing. These findings suggest that beauty in the U.S. may be constructed more in terms of “the body,” whereas in Singapore and Taiwan the defining factor is more related to a pretty face. The article also discusses how feminist critiques of the sexual objectification of women in advertising may need to be considered within their historical, Western context of origin.

http://icm.cm.nsysu.edu.tw/teacher/JOC.pdf

The Construction of Beauty: A Cross‐Cultural Analysis of Women's Magazine Advertising

For more than three decades, research has theorized about and investigated consumers' attitudes toward advertising. In this study, we interview fourteen U.S. consumers using the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, a method that involves semi-structured, in-depth, personal interviews centered around visual images. Our metaphor and cross-case analyses further contribute to an understanding of consumers' impressions of advertising and the meanings that they associate with it. The metaphors attributed to advertising reveal that advertising has positive value, in that it relates information (hostess, teacher, counselor, enabler, and magician), provides entertainment (performer), and stimulates growth in the economy (engine). However, the goodwill derived from these aspects of advertising is countered by several liabilities, as epitomized by the omnipresent being, nosy neighbor, con-man, seducer, and evil therapist metaphors. In addition, three groups (the ambivalents, the skeptics, and the hostile...

Interpreting Consumer Perceptions of Advertising: An Application of the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique

The authors combine discursive textual analysis and the findings from long interviews to understand and theorize about the ideological representations of women in a specific discursive field of advertising: ads in women's magazines. They synthesize findings of previous research with their findings to propose revisions to the current communication model of advertising, explicitly incorporating historical perspective of meaning(s) construction.

Glenda Shaw-Garlock

Papers

The Ever Entangling Web: A Study of Ideologies and Discourses in Advertising to Women