Adage reports that “Researchers Find Thin Models Make Viewers Like Brands More, but Themselves Less:”
A study by business professors at Villanova University and the College of New Jersey, inspired by Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty,” shows that ads featuring thin models made women feel worse about themselves but better about the brands featured…“They have higher evaluation of the brands. With the more regular-size models, they don’t feel bad. Their body image doesn’t change. But in terms of evaluations of the brands, those are actually lower.”
(Also, the women studied wouldn’t eat the cookies after they saw the skinny models, so this tactic simply doesn’t work for baked goods.)
None of this is really news, but the study is worth gander:
…the findings create something of a quandary for marketers, who might have a positive effect on young women’s self-esteem by showing more typical women in ads, but suffer in the marketplace as a result.
Um, doesn’t seem like much of a “quandary” to me?
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two comments
I feel it is. How can we expect to change the world of advertising for the good of our body image if ads featuring average to large size modles defeat their own purpose-to market products? If we take this research seriously and find no research which offers creative solutions here, this is a quandary for us all. This could well encourage the idea that Ads themselves can never change, so media awareness is the only real answer to our changing culture.
Posted by Myra
August 7, 2008, 9:27 AM
I am surprised that no one observed this is likely the "transfer effect". This effect has been observed and exploited by propagandists and advertisers for ages. I think it may be that we tend to infer cause and effect and to link things found together.
Three examples: 1) An insurance company wants you to see them as reliable and stable, so they use the rock of Gibraltar as their logo to make a link in our minds between the rock and the company. 2) A feminist magazine for young women wants to be seen as part of defiant youth culture, so it's logo looks like it's a spray-painted stencil and also like a wild-west cattle brand. They want to make a link in our mind between the urban graffiti culture, the scarlet letter, the wild west, and the idea of questioning labels or "brands" themselves. 3) An oil company with a history of contamination airs a television that features blue whales frolicking, trees, sunflowers, etc. The inference is that the oil company caused the joyful, lush and abundant flowering of nature.
We are not very sophisticated beasts, our brains make a connection between things that are found together. Making these associations is important, vultures circling usually means carcass nearby, bean vine means usually green beans to eat. It seems we can't distinguish between the abstract and the concrete. This research suggests to me that we cannot easily avoid concluding that an idealized body must result from an ideal product. There is an assumption of connection, of endorsement between two things found together.
A young female body that conforms most closely to the fashionable norm is treated like a property of enormous value, it is considered "ideal, perfect". A female body that "falls short" of the ideal is often a source of shame, "imperfect". Put a "shameful and imperfect" body next to your product, the product will seem shameful and imperfect, or perhaps even cause imperfection. Put an idealized body next to your product, the product seems ideal, or even cause beauty.
Posted by Jen
August 10, 2008, 2:21 PM
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