Selling Empowerment: An Analysis of Femvertising in Pakistan

Absztrakt (kivonat)

The representation of women in advertising has always been criticized and debated in Pakistan. Advertising plays an important role in shaping the behavior of society and how they associate stereotypes with genders. For years, the representation of women was only confined to representing women as an object of sex and gaze in advertising. However, with the emergence of social media and the fourth wave of feminism, there has been a noticeable change in how women are represented in advertisements in Pakistan. After the MeToo movement started in 2018 in Pakistan, brands started associating themselves with the social cause of feminism and promoting women empowerment through their advertising messages. This type of advertising that employs pro-female talent and raises awareness on women's empowerment is called femvertising. The main aim of this thesis is to explore how brands are changing the representation of women in advertisements by “selling” empowerment and what themes of femvertising are utilized in the advertisements. In this thesis, 4 different advertisements from 4 different brands were selected as a sample according to the principles of the purposive sampling technique. A content analysis examined what themes of femvertising are used according to the reading guide provided by Hsu (2017) and multimodal discourse analysis by Ledin and Machin (2020) that explained the semiotics behind colors, iconography, and typography in the advertisement. The analysis of these advertisements revealed commonly used femvertising themes such as promoting body confidence, encouraging women to pursue science careers, breaking gender stereotypes, appreciating women beyond their traditional roles, and, normalizing taboos such as menstruation and the use of contraceptives. Lastly, this thesis is not without limitations and due to the lack of studies on femvertising in Pakistan, I propose that future studies can look into femvertising themes on a larger scale and explore the effectiveness of femvertising messages and changing buying behavior of the consumers toward the brand.