Womens Role Portrayal Preferences in Advertisements An Empirical Study

Transcription

1 Lawrence H. Wortzel and John M. Frisbie Womens Role Portrayal Preferences in Advertisements An Empirical Study Has Women's Liberation changed women's attitudes toward female role portrayals in ads? TWO recently published studies analyzed the roles women portray in print advertising.^ Both of these studies were conducted by examining print advertisements in a variety of magazines and categorizing the ads in which women appeared according to the role the women in each ad portrayed. The Courtney and Lockeretz study, conducted in April, concluded that "feminists are at least partly justified in saying that advertisements do not present a full view of the variety of roles women actually play in American society."^ Essentially, Courtney and Lockeretz suggest that traditionally women tend to be portrayed in advertisements as homemakers, fashion objects, or sex objects. These role portrayals usually do not recognize that women work, or that they exist other than as homemakers, or fashion or sex objects. The Wagner and Banos study, conducted in January 1, found that "there has been a substantial improvement in emphasizing woman's expanding role as a working member of society."^ 1. Alice E. Courtney and Sarah W. Lockeretz, "A Woman's Place: An Analysis of the Roles Portrayed by Women in Magazine Advertisements," Journal of Marketing Research, Vol, (February 11), pp. -; and is C. Wagner and Janis B. Banos, "A Woman's Place: A Follow-up Analysis of the Roles Portrayed by Women in Magazine Advertisements," ^our/ia/ o/a/arif/i/r^ TJfjearc/i, Vol. (May 1), pp Courtney and Lockeretz, same reference as footnote 1, p... Wagner and Banos, same reference as footnote I, p.. Journal of Marketing. Vol. (October ). pp. 1-. Both of these studies presented well-analyzed documentation of the broadening of roles in which advertising portrays women. However, neither study addressed empirically the question of advertising effectiveness: What role portrayals are most likely to make the product being advertised appear most desirable to women? Does the ad's portrayal of a woman in a working role, for example, make the product more desirable than if the woman were portrayed as, say, a housewife or mother or in a sex-object or fashion-object role? Since much of the pressure to show women in advertisements in other than housewife or mother roles appears to have been generated by the Women's Liberation Movement, it is also worthwhile to ask: Do women who believe most strongly in the tenets of the Women's Liberation Movement also tend most strongly to perceive a product as more desirable when the woman in the advertisement is portrayed in a working role? The authors devised and conducted a rather simple, straightforward experiment to obtain some answers to the questions that have just been posed. In this respect, the foilowing two hypotheses were formulated and tested: H 1: When a woman appears in an advertisement, the desirability of the product advertised to women exposed to the ad will be enhanced if that woman is portrayed in a career or neutral (less traditional) role, rather than in a sex-object, family, or fash ion-object (more traditional) role. 1

2 Journal of Marketing, October H : Those women vv'ho most strongly agree with the tenets of the Women's Liberation Movement will most strongly consider a product's desirability enhanced when a woman appearing in the advertisement is portrayed in a career or neutral (less traditional) role, rather than in a sex-object, family, or fashionobject (more traditional) role. Methodology In this experiment, subjects were asked to "design" print ads by matching pictures of products with pictures of women. Two portfolios were prepared: one consisting of pictures of products, the other containing pictures of women. The product portfolio consisted of pictures of three products in each of seven product categories: small appliances, large appliances, women's grooming products, women's personal products, household products, foods, and men's grooming and personal products. The specific product categories were selected to provide diversity while remaining within the boundaries of plausibility; each product category is one in which the picture of a woman in an advertisement would not be unexpected. A run of print advertisements was reviewed for specific products prior to their inclusion in the experiment. Any product that consistently used advertising that portrayed a woman in a particular role was rejected to minimize possible bias due to conditioning. The portfolio of women's pictures consisted of five pictures depicting women in each of the five roles "neutral," "family," "career," "sex object," and "fashion object" for a total of pictures in all. Each picture was selected by a jury (a group of women similar to those who were to participate in the study) from a large assemblage of pictures. Jury members rated each potential picture on the basis of two criteria: (1) suitability for inclusion in an advertisement, and () sharp, unambiguous characterization of the desired role. The experiment used only those pictures that were determined by the jury to meet both criteria. The two portfolios were presented to a convenience sample of 0 young (ages 1 to ) women. While the sample of young women was not drawn randomly, every effort was made to ABOUT THE AUTHORS. Lawrence H. Wortzel is professor of marketing and chairman of the Marketing Department, Boston University. John M. Frisbie is assistant vice president and director of marketing services for the Palmer Bank Corporation, Sarasota, Florida. insure that a distribution of demographic characteristics would be achieved. To the extent that the sample may have been biased, it should have been biased toward including a higher proportion of women sympathetic to portrayals of nontraditional roles in advertisements since the sample consisted of young women. Younger women might also be less conditioned than older women to the expectation that women in ads will portray traditional roles. Each woman participated in the experiment individually and was given the following instructions: We would like you to "build" some advertisements. I will give you two portfolios, labeled I and II. Portfolio I contains pictures of products. Portfolio II contains pictures of backgrounds, or environments. For each product in Portfolio I select up to five backgrounds or environments from Portfolio II which most increase the desirability of that product in your eyes. That is, build the advertisement which would be most likely to make you want to buy the product. There are no right or wrong answers. The best advertisements are the ones you like best. Please avoid selecting product environment pairs which you are predisposed to expect through current advertising. And, if you don't think any of the backgrounds increases the desirability of any product, you don't have to pick any backgrounds for that product. On the next page is an answer sheet on which you can record your choices. Before you start, look through all of the backgrounds (Portfolio II) so you can see what the choices are. The instructions and the procedure, of course, were designed to give each subject the best possible opportunity to communicate the particular role portrayal that would make each product most desirable to her. The experiment did restrict the subject's choice. She could either choose one of the available roles or reject them all. In this way, the relative desirability of the five roles could be analyzed. If, however, some other role portrayal not included in the study would enhance the desirabihty of a product still further, this would not show up in the experiment. Each woman "built" advertisements for the 1 products and could build up to five advertisements for each product. Therefore, the study provided the results of 0 first choices ( product categories X products X 0 women). Both the products and the pictures of women were randomly ordered so that each subject had the product and background pictures presented to her in a different sequence.

3 women s Role Portrayal Preferences in Advertisements: An Empirical Study After she "built" her ads and the productpicture matches were recorded, each woman was given a self-administered pencil-and-paper test developed by one of the authors. The test had been previously validated using a similar sample of women. It was designed to measure attitudes toward several facets of the Women's Liberation Movement and consisted of a series of statements taken almost directly from writings of both pro- and antifeminists. The subjects responded to the statements using a five-point Likert scale running from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree." Factor analysis of the test items established that they constituted a scale. Some examples of the statements used in this test are: Women should have as much right to sexual freedom as men have. It should be normal for a married woman with children to have a career outside her home. The institution of marriage tends to exploit women in many ways. A good wife should be willing to follow her husband and live wherever his career takes him. Household tasks should be shared between husbands and wives. Our culture teaches girls that the most acceptable option to them as adults is motherhood. Because of their hormone systems, women should not have jobs in which they have to make important decisions every day. Findings Table 1 shows the aggregated results obtained for each product class. The 0 subjects made a totai of 00 first choices in each product class, and this table shows the percent of first choices in each product class that went to each role category. Only the subject's first choices are presented in this table, because analysis of second and later choices indicated no meaningful deviations from the first-choice pattern. For example, if a subject's first choice was a woman depicting a sex-object role, her subsequent choices tended to be pictures from the same role category. (More than % of second and third choices were from the same role category as the first choice; the other % were not systematically distributed.) Analysis of the data by individual products within product groups does not reveal significant deviations from the product group results presented in Table 1. The results indicated no consistent preference for specific female roles that always enhance product desirability and that cut across product categories. Rather, the women participating in this experiment appear to have chosen their preferred role-background on the basis of the specific product class with which they were confronted. For products that are usually used by households or families, the family role-background was preferred. Preference for the family role-background was marginal for small appliances and strong for large appliances and food. For products that women use alone (women's grooming and women's personal) the neutral or career role-backgrounds were preferred, although the traditional fashion role was still acceptable. There is no product for which a sex-object role was considered the most enhancing role portrayal. The one response in six that preferred the sex-object role for men's products was equal to the percentage that preferred it for women's grooming products. Further analysis of these data, controlling for education and for employment, revealed no significant deviation from these patterns. TABLE 1 PERCENT OF RESPONSES SELECTING EACH TYPE OF ROLF-BACKGROL ND BY TYPE OF ROLE-BACKGROL ND ROLE B.ACKGROUND Product Neutral Career Familv Fashion Sex Object No Preference (n) Small appliances Large appliances Women's grooming Women's personal Household Food Men's grooming and personal 0 1 % % 0 % % 1 1 1% 1 1 (00) (00) (00) (00) (00) (00) (00)

4 Journal of Marketing, October It appears that support or rejection of hypothesis 1 is dependent on the product that is being advertised. Generalizations cannot be made across product lines. For some products (i.e., women's personal and grooming products) the hypothesis was supported. The product's desirability to women was increased when the woman in the advertisement's background was portrayed in a neutral or career (less traditional) role. However, for some other products used in a household or family setting, the hypothesis must be rejected, because traditional or family roles were not rejected. In fact, they were preferred to the less traditional roles. If these data support any conclusion beyond the original hypotheses, it is that women react primarily to the product-use situation with which they are confronted, and do not wish to be stereotyped into any particular role cutting across situations in advertisements; they recognize and prefer to see themselves in a variety of roles, not excluding the more traditional ones. Table presents the same results as Table 1, but is controlled for subjects' attitudes toward the tenets of the Women's Liberation Movement. In developing this table, the factor scores for each subject were first computed based on their responses to the questionnaire on attitudes toward Women's Liberation. The subjects were then grouped by factor score into the categories "positive," "neutral," and "negative" toward Women's Liberation by dividing the array of scored responses roughly into thirds. As a result, subjects (representing product responses) fell into the positive category, subjects (representing product responses) fell into the neutral category, and (or 111 product responses) were classified "negatives." Across all products, the "neutrals" fell somewhere between the "positives" and the "negatives"; thus this table presents the sharpest contrasts that could be drawn, contrasts between those subjects who were either positive or negative in their attitudes toward Women's Liberation. The data in Table show that the role preference pattern for women with positive attitudes toward Women's Liberation was remarkably similar to the pattern for those with negative attitudes. Women with positive attitudes toward Women's Liberation did not show a consistent preference for neutral or career roles across all product lines. In fact, for many products, these women, positive in their attitudes towards Women's Liberation, preferred traditional family roles. Subjects' preferences depended instead on the specific product involved. Statistically significant differences (at the.0 level) between respondents who were "positive" and those who were "negative" toward Women's Liberation were observed for only two of the seven products, small and large appliances. However, some interesting, though not statistically significant, patterns can be observed. I. Across all product categories, the women with positive attitudes toward Women's Liberation were more likely to select a specific role-background than were women with TABLE PERCENT OF RESPONSES SELECTING EACH TYPE OF ROLE-BACKGROUND BY TYPE o^ BACKGROUND CHOSEN. CONTROLLED FOR RESPONDENTS* ATTITUDES TOWARD THE WOMENS LIBERATION MOVEMENT Attitude ROLE BACKGROUND Product LU W d i Li Women's Liberation Neutral Career Family Fashion Sex Object No Preference (n) Small appliances Large appliances Women's grooming Women's personal Household Food Men's grooming and personal ^ ^ ^ ^ 1% 1 > % % 0 1 1% % % 1 0 () () () () () () () 'Difference significant at the.0 level.

5 women s Role Portrayal Preferences in Advertisements: An Empirical Study negative attitudes. Furthermore, those women with positive attitudes tended to reject neutral role-backgrounds more readily than their "negative" counterparts. For six products out of seven, the neutral role was less preferred by "positives" than by "negatives.". Among all four product categories (small appliances, large appliances, household, and food) for which the family role was the most preferred, "positives" selected the role more frequently than did "negatives." These data do not provide support for hypothesis. Women with positive attitudes toward the movement do not uniformly reject traditional women's roles. The authors felt, though, that perhaps the reason for these results was that the Women's Liberation attitude test was too insensitive a classification instrument. Therefore, an attempt was made to develop a more sensitive classification. The Women's Liberation attitude measurement instrument included statements measuring several specific topics of concern to liberationists. Among the topics measured was repression. It would seem reasonable to assume that if there is any subgroup among women that would be concerned about the portrayal of women in advertisements, it would be the group that most strongly considered itself repressed by men. Consequently, a subscale measuring repression was constructed from the original scale. This subscale consisted of five items, including statements such as "Women are repressed by men in many ways," and "Female children are taught to behave in certain ways which lead to their repression when they become women." Repression scores were computed for each subject, and subjects were then grouped as to whether they perceived themselves as "high," "medium," or "low" in agreement with statements that women are repressed, using the most natural break points to be found in the scale scores. As a result of this grouping process, subjects (representing responses) were categorized as "high" in the belief that women are repressed, while subjects (representing responses) were categorized as "low." The results of cross-tabulation between repression and role preference, once more eliminating the middle category (those "medium" in "repression"), are presented in Table. These results show both the basic patterns presented in Table, and an interesting difference. 1. For four of the seven products, women who scored high in the repression subscale exhibited a greater frequency of "no preference" responses than did women who scored low. These results are a reversal of the results presented in Table. While positive attitudes toward Women's Liberation were accompanied by a sharpening of role choices, feelings that women are re- T.^BLE PERCENT OF RESPONSES SELECTING E.ACH TYPE OF ROLE-BACKGROUND BY TYPE OF BACKGROL ND CHOSEN. CONTROLLED FOR DEGREE TO WHICH RESPONDENTS CONSIDERED THEMSELVES REPRESSED ROLE BACKGROL ND Product Repression Neutral Career Family Fashion Sex Object No Preference (n) Small appliances Large appliances Women's grooming Women's personal Household Food Men's grooming and personal ^ ^ ^ ** 1% % % % 1 % % () () () () () () () () () () () () () () ^Difference significant at the.0 level.

6 Journal of Marketing, October pressed were accompanied by rejection of all the roles presented.. Even among those who scored high irr "repression," the traditional role was the most preferred for large and small appliances, household products, and food. However, those high in "repression" preferred this role somewhat less frequently than did those who scored low on this subscale. But the data in Table do not show consistent, statistically significant differences {at the.0 level) across all products, and do not provide much support for hypothesis. Considering the results presented in Tables and, hypothesis must be rejected. Even among women who have positive attitudes toward the Women's Liberation Movement, the product seems to be more important than the movement in determining which role portrayal will most enhance the product's desirability. Conclusions and Recommendations The results of this study should satisfy readers at both attitudinal extremes with respect to Women's Liberation. Male chauvinists can quite simply conclude that women are perfectly satisfied (and are probably willing customers) when portrayed in their traditional homemaker, fashion, or sex-object roles. Women's Liberationists, on the other hand, can just as easily attribute the results to socialization. They can conclude that the reason why the women studied here preferred the role portrayals they chose is that advertising (not to mention other facets of society) has socialized women to expect and accept traditional role portrayals in ads. Perhaps the most realistic conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that women are both reasonable and reasonably rational in their preferences with respect to role portrayals in advertising. They tend to select role preferences on the basis of product function, rather than on the basis of ideology. The data are most consistent with an interpretation that the perceived desirability of a product is primarily a function of the product's own usage and end benefits. The backgrounds selected by those women with both positive and negative views toward Women's Liberation cut across role types following remarkably similar response patterns. Among both "positives" and "negatives," the backgrounds chosen seemed to be based on their appropriateness to the product's usage and on their support and reinforcement of the product's end benefits. For advertisers, the results of this study should come as good news. Advertisements showing women may, it seems, portray those women in household roles if these roles provide an appropriate usage environment for the product and reinforce and support the product's end benefits. If the product is one that is normally used in a household environment, then women (both liberationists and nonliberationists) prefer to see it in this type of setting generating some kind of distinctive benefit to a woman who would normally be using it. If the product is one that women use personally, which somehow enhances their concept of themselves as women, then nontraditional roles are preferred. These preference patterns are expressed by liberationists and nonliberationists alike. These recommendations must, of course, be tempered by the limitations of the study. The study was limited by the number, type, and characteristics of the subjects, by the specific products used, and by the specific role portrayals presented to the subjects as choices. For example, there was a significant minority that expressed "no preference." And those responding who did make choices were limited in their alternatives to those presented. Possibly some would have preferred a man in the household role to any of the choices that were offered. In addition, it should be noted that the role cues used in this study were pretested for their straightforward portrayal of role types, minimizing all executional elements of tone and taste. Moreover, this study was cross-sectional. It is probable that role portrayal preferences could shift over time. Advertisers should note, therefore, that these recommendations are for general role types (traditional and nontraditional roles) and are to serve as broad guidelines for the initial creative concept. Clearly, the creative process itself and the executional elements of tone and taste are beyond the scope of this study. However, the study does provide a methodology by which other possible role portrayals can be tested, and perhaps some judicious testing can further refme the guidelines suggested herein.

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