How Well Do Advertising Images of Health and Beauty Travel Across Cultures? A Self-Concept Perspective
This research article talks about how self-image of beauty and health is viewed/transferred across different cultures. For this article, researchers have obtained data from five European cities and have included Caucasian women as the participants of their survey. According to this article, majority of women in this survey chose one of the given two models as an ideal self-image to look healthier or beautiful despite having the opportunity to choose neither of them. Moreover, many women identified a specific eye and hair color for beauty and half of the women identified eye and hair color for health. From this research, it was clear that there is some transferability factor related to self-image of beauty and health among various cultures, nonetheless, there are other localized factors where there is preference for specific hair color or eye color etc. Although this article studied only European and Caucasian females and focused on hair and eye color, this article is particularly of interest to understand how people relate to the models who are advertising the certain products. As mentioned above, majority of women chose one of the model as an ideal self-image, hence there is an increasing chance that if the given model endorses that product then the women (consumers) will view that product in a positive way compared to other products endorsed by other models. Hence, brands can profit from understanding the contemporary meaning of beauty in the area where they target their ads and hire the model who is more relatable to that culture and population.
This research provides us insight into how choosing models for advertisement can influence the choice of consumers. Hence, in nursing context, we can see that if more relatable people are used in public service announcements, there is more opportunity of spreading awareness among our targeted audiences. Likewise, it also helps us understand how some big pharma companies, or companies that sell various health and nutrition/dietary supplement products can lure consumers and influence their decision simply by using more relatable endorsers.
So, answering the question why many companies target young women, young women have more relation to social media and they also can use their online connection to influence their peer (Davies, & Burns, 2014). Also, I believe that young women are influenced by peer pressure and usually there is a pressure to confirm to certain standard of health and beauty, hence it is easy to lure young women to buy products. Likewise, empowering young women comes with a good social message so companies can also profit in the name of good deed or use young women as actual agent of change.