Skip to main content

Print Advertisement: Nivea Moisturizer

To start off, here's some basic information about the advert. Its target audience is young women, as the main focus of the advert is a young woman, and the product is cosmetic, a product type commonly advertised to this target audience. The cosmetic in question is "Nivea Smooth Milk: Body", a type of moisturizing cream.

As the ad is written in English and comes from a German (Western) company, it can be concluded that this advert comes from a Western cultural background. Since Nivea was founded in 1911, it can be inferred that this ad was made in 2011, due to the quote "100 years skin care for life".

The ad seems to imply that physical attractiveness is the most important factor in a happy relationship, due to the happy couple featured in the image, and the slogan "For visibily smooth and touchably soft skin" (misspellings came with the ad), which seems to imply to the viewer that moisturizer brought the couple closer together (the image has them embracing each other). Obviously, since this is an advert, it emphasises the 'importance' of mosturizing and having smooth skin, which was done by showing the female model's bare back and arm (which were both smooth). In short, physical attractiveness, not personality nor any other aspect of a person, is focused on in this ad.

Despite being both the target audience and the focus of the ad, this ad does not seem to be empowering them. Rather, this ad implies that they are valued for being 'beautiful/perfect', and tries to sell them the product by trying using appeals such as the need for affiliation and need for attention. The personality and other aspect of the woman in the ad is ignored, instead drawing connections from her smooth skin to her relationship status. To me, it seems as if the ad is reducing women down to a single characteristic; beauty. Whether or not this was intentional of the ad is debatable, but it seems that the company's pursuit of getting its target audience (young women) to buy their products, has marginalised them at the same time, reinforcing the need to use cosmetics, as dictated by societal customs (meaning that the need for affiliation in this case, is not limited to the ad). Now, I don't think this is necessarily for malicious reasons, but rather, the company's economic self-interest. By using pathos, they use common insecurities (do I look good?, etc.) to get more to buy their products. This seems to be more of an industry-wide characteristic, and not limited to Nivea.  

Comments

  1. Unknown23 November 2016 at 13:58

    I definitely agree on the advertisement reducing women down to a single characteristic, in which was beauty. The man next to her helped emphasize that point, in which the product's purpose was to make connections on the smooth skin and the couple's relationship status. Directing women to the need of using such cosmetics to attract the opposite sex.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This is Water and Alice Munro Short Stories

Alice Munro’s short stories are usually about women and families from a suburban and or rural setting. She discusses topics such as gender roles and interpersonal relationships, usually from a woman’s perspective. What David Foster Wallace’s theory on education can do with this, is that it allows us, the reader, to adjust our perspective, to be sympathetic to the characters. Although I personally am not a girl growing up in a post-WWII Canadian small town, I can still relate to or at least empathise with the characters and their emotions that Munro has created. In Munro’s stories, her characters tend to have personal flaws or defy the tradition character ideals, for example the narrator in “Boys and Girls”, despite her desire to keep her role helping her father and dislike of the role women are designated for in her family, she ends up subconsciously transforming, until she starts to fit the mould of what her family and society says a woman should be. While we, the audience, may expec...
4 comments
Read more

Ibo Background Assessment

Note: Written from a non-Ibo person perspective, however the person has knowledge of what the Ibo culture is and what their achievements are and is speaking on behalf of it at the Royal Colonial Institute’s annual dinner. Set in the Late Victorian era, as the assignment suggests. Words in-between this: [ ], are explanations of phrases, and would not be said in the actual speech.             Greetings, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Royal Colonial Institute. As you all know, this is a time of great change in this world. In the span of 100 years we’ve gone from walking on foot and horseback, to being able to get to Edinburgh from London in only 8½ hours whilst sitting, in relative comfort. Despite losing America a century ago, the British Empire has grown immensely since then, acquiring massive territories in Africa. Truly, the Sun never sets on the British Empire. But despite your dominance and hegemony over the world, the human...
3 comments
Read more

Podcast Assignment

In class we had to do a podcast about an endangered language. My group, Lingo-radio, featuring Azim, Seo Jung, and myself, did a podcast on Romansch, one of the four official languages of Switzerland. We went for a conversational/natural type of podcast, and based our dialogue on bullet-points, rather than a strict script. Here is the file:
2 comments
Read more