Sociology Research Paper on Globalization and Cultural Reproduction of the European Beauty Standard

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Comparing portrayals of beauty in outdoor advertisements across six cultures: Bulgaria, Hong Kong, Japan, Poland, South Korea,

and Turkey

Pamela K. Morris*

School of Communication, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

(Received 12 November 2012; accepted 16 January 2014)

This research expands scholarship on cross-cultural investigations by examining ideas of beauty through the lens of outdoor advertisements. Using a content analysis method, 293 images of women in outdoor advertisements from six different cultures, including Bulgaria, Hong Kong, Japan, Poland, South Korea, and Turkey, were reviewed through a framework of advertising and consumer culture, globalization, and theories of beauty. The findings revealed that differences across cultures exist and that beauty ideals are culture dependent.

Keywords: advertising/public relations; cross-cultural communication; content analysis; women; gender studies

Advertising is an important social institution. Scholars have shown how advertising reflects culture and serves as a distorting mirror that emphasizes certain attitudes and behaviors, thereby reinforcing selected lifestyles and values (Pollay & Gallagher, 1990). Mass media play a central part in defining cultural standards, particularly the more ephemeral qualities of attractiveness, femininity, and beauty. Advertising has long been criticized for stereotyping women in narrowly defined social roles (Uray & Burnaz, 2003) and for perpetuating unrealistic beauty ideals that privilege being young, being thin, and being white (Frith, Shaw, & Cheng, 2005, 2009).

The literature on women’s images and beauty styles in advertising is heavily biased toward the USA. However, the global economy demands more cross-cultural explorations for a thorough understanding of the social impact of advertising on gender categories (Cheong, Kim, & Zheng, 2010; Skorek & Schreier, 2009). With the rise of globalization and the expected growth of global advertising expenditures (Bell, 2013), it is essential for those in both the academy and industry to understand different markets and to become more culturally sensitive. The present study contributes to the literature on globalization, gender, and the emerging economies of Eastern Europe and Asia, using a cross-cultural comparison to draw out various aspects of the consumption of beauty. This investigation is unique in its examination of the outdoor media platform and in the cultural groups it compares.

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Asian Journal of Communication, 2014 Vol. 24, No. 3, 242–261, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01292986.2014.885535

© 2014 AMIC/SCI-NTU

Theoretical framework

The three complex discourses that intersect in this paper – advertising and consumer culture, globalization, and beauty – all suggest that the images of women found in advertisements are deeply rooted in culture and specific to particular locales.

Advertising and consumer culture

Scholars across the disciplines consider advertising to be more than bare communication about consumer products; it is also a carrier of cultural values (Albers-Miller & Gelb, 1996; Cheong et al., 2010; Pollay, 1983). In her seminal 1978 work, Williamson uses linguistic semiology to suggest that advertising operates through a complex system of signs to ascribe meaning to objects. She identifies advertisements as signs, the basic units of language and meaning that consist of two components, the signifier and the signified. The signifier, such as the word ‘woman’ or even an image of a woman, is just a meaningless object without the signified. The signified is the meaning of the word, image, or product, without which the signifier would be inexplicable. In order to be understood, a sign must comprise both signified and signifier.

A sign is not an independent object. Signs point to referent systems that are objects external to the sign unit. For instance, the real woman whose picture is used in an advertisement is the referent of the picture, while the complex webs of social meaning and significance exclusive to a particular culture that come with her individuality constitute the referent system. Advertising draws its meaning from these referent systems, which are based on culture and ideology or knowledge that is constructed in such a way as to legitimize social inequalities (Rose, 2007). Williamson (1978) calls the referent systems called forth by the signs in advertisements mythological systems.

Advertising translates between systems of meaning and interchanges values from different areas of life. By correlating emotions and other intangibles with physical objects, advertisements link possibly unattainable feelings and lifestyles with things that can be acquired (Williamson, 1978). Advertising messages promise youth, confidence, sexual appeal, beauty, and happiness through the purchase and use of particular brands. Advertising does not invent these emotions and connotations; rather, it transmits culturally salient meanings via sign systems already known to a certain group of people.

Moreover, in order to keep their brand relevant and credible for the target audience, advertisers continually refresh product messages and images. In the context of increasing global marketing pressures, Western conventions and ideals are disseminated across cultures and circulated into social values and everyday life (MacRury, 2009).

Globalization

Guillén (2001) defines globalization as ‘a process leading to greater interdependence and mutual awareness (reflexivity) among economic, political, and social units in the world, and among actors in general’ (p. 236). Globalization is an uneven process that is complicated by local production, distribution, cultures, and economies. Rather than exemplifying either of the opposing concepts global identity (Arnett, 2002; Zhang & Khare, 2009) and consumer ethnocentrism (Guo, 2013), globalization is dynamic (Garrett, 1992).

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The literature documents how local societies adapt, reinterpret, and respond to Western consumer culture, striving to make Western concepts culturally meaningful. Üstüner and Holt (2010) called this indigenization; other terms that are used include crealization, syncretization, domestication, and glocalization. Indigenization ‘involves not only constructing local identity in a dialectic engagement with Western cultural power, but also constructing status for class factions that lack the cultural capital to compete in the global consumption field’ (Üstüner & Holt, 2010, p. 53). Indigenization exhibits elements of postcolonialism in which colonized individuals engage in resistance and reconstruction by subverting and appropriating their colonizers’ texts to create alternative, hybrid, or entirely new meanings (Lee, 2003a). Although advertising shapes consumer preferences, globally expanding corporate marketers have found that inclina- tions molded by cultural and social norms are often resistant to change (Jones, 2011).

Although the outdoor advertisements in the present study are culture specific, the messages are influenced by the complex networks of globalization. To understand the visuals in these communications, particularly the images of beauty, it is necessary to consider both global and local contexts.

Beauty

Beauty is culturally constructed based on norms, experiences, and socialization to create standards among ages, races, and nationalities (Bjerke & Polegato, 2001; Shepherd & Deregowski, 1981). Beauty is fluid and changes over time (Solomon, Ashmore, & Longo, 1992), which makes it an especially elusive concept to study. The affective body, as outlined in the work of Michael Featherstone, provides a theoretical framework for analyzing beauty.

The affective body

Featherstone (2010) recognized that beauty is more than physical attractiveness and that the relationship between body image and self-image is not as simple as looking in the mirror. The sense of self, of one’s identity, is incorporated into self-image and beauty in complex ways that reject the ‘mirrored self’ as the sole conveyor of meaning. The concept of the affective body ‘points to unseen and unnoticed aspects of interpersonal interactions, which are more difficult to conceptualize and articulate’ (Featherstone, 2010, p. 196). The affective body is not just about the clothes you wear; it is about how you carry yourself and your inner self, attitudes, values, and outlook. This is most apparent in the work of stylists whose creation of a ‘look’ does not simply consist in altering or enhancing the client’s face and body. Through the reformation of body movement, carriage, and language, groomers and stylists can help their clientele project positive affective charges. This power to affect others through body rhetoric has been noted as a characteristic of charisma (Featherstone, 2010). One goal of the present study is to identify the features of a holistic ‘look’ that lead to the meaning of beauty.

Activities/roles

The affective body interacts closely with behaviors, jobs, responsibilities, and organiza- tional policies to create concepts of cultural identity and subjectivity (van Zoonen, 2000).

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For women, a large part of this process focuses on being attractive, beautiful, and ‘feminine,’ where ‘feminine’ means the socially constructed characteristics associated with the category ‘woman’ (McDowell & Sharp, 1999).

Previous studies of women’s roles in advertising have identified interesting variations among cultural representations of women. Wiles, Wiles, and Tjernlund (1995) found in a multiple-country investigation that Swedish advertisements most often portrayed both men and women in family and recreational roles, while American advertisements showed a more marked distinction between gender roles, with a greater prevalence of women in more decorative portrayals, where they have no obvious role or contribution to the message beyond merely appearing in the image. In a comparison of women’s fashion magazines, Morris and Nichols (2013) observed that advertisements in American publications presented more nonworking women and women in decorative roles than advertisements in similar French magazines. On the other hand, Furnham and Imadzu (2002) found that the more stereotypical portrayals of women in television advertisements were trending down in Great Britain and other Western cultures. The same study found that Japanese messages continued to cast men more often than women in authoritative roles, where they provided scientific or factual arguments for products. The women in these advertisements tended to be young users of the product in question and offered opinions rather than facts. All of these studies reveal that the affective side of beauty, as displayed through behavior patterns, body language, and clothing, is culturally diverse. In simple terms, beauty is in some ways culture specific.

Beauty types

To examine body language and representation in advertising, Solomon et al. (1992) identified beauty types and used a multidimensional scale to sort and analyze photographs of professional fashion models. Their study revealed six distinct types of good-looking women: classic/feminine, cute, sex kitten, sensual/exotic, girl-next-door, and trendy. Englis, Solomon, and Ashmore (1994) subsequently reviewed beauty types in magazine advertisements and found that the trendy, classic/feminine, and sensual/exotic types were portrayed most frequently.

Several studies have used these categorizations of beauty to explore differences across cultures. Maynard and Taylor (1999) studied the beauty types of young girls shown in Japanese and American versions of Seventeen magazine. They reported that Japanese girls were portrayed almost exclusively as smiling, giggling, cute, and girl-next-door types, while girls in the American magazine were posed with serious expressions for a more defiant and independent look. Frith et al. (2005, 2009) also found differences in magazine advertisements in Singapore, Taiwan, and the USA. While classic portrayals were most common in all three cultures, the sensual/sex kitten style appeared in the USA more than in the other two locations, cute/girl-next-door images occurred most frequently in Taiwan, and trendy styles were the most frequent in Singapore.

These investigations show that the types of beauty used in advertising vary and indicate preferences across cultures. The studies examined beauty categories and found differences between the USA and the Asian markets of Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan, and also between the Asian cultures themselves, specifically, Singapore and Taiwan. Additional research can build on these investigations by examining other Asian cultures as well as newly emerging European markets.

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Face versus body

Cutting across these different types of beauty, there is the dichotomy between the face and the body. For women, the binary system of facial beauty and body sexuality is culturally significant and can signal to the researcher how the media use women. Historically, the face played a large role in theories of physiognomy, which linked moral purity to physical beauty (Wegenstein & Ruck, 2011), and the cultivation of beauty has its foundations in that context. Cunningham, Roberts, Barbee, Druen, and Wu (1995) studied beauty among Asians, Hispanics, and white Americans, and identified attractive females as having large eyes, expressive, higher eyebrows, small noses, narrow faces, smaller chins, larger lower lips, wider smiles, and full hair across all three cultures. Moreover, big eyes, full lips, flawless skin, and high cheekbones are characteristics used to describe beautiful women depicted in advertisements and media throughout the world (Cunningham et al., 1995; Goodman, Morris, & Sutherland, 2008). In general, these ‘universal’ markers of beauty stem from a love of facial symmetry (Yin & Pryor, 2012).

However, beauty need not be exclusive to the face. Advertising has long been criticized for using attractive females with sexy bodies to grab attention and promote interest in products (Jhally, 1995; Kilbourne, 1999). The question of whether beauty is about a woman’s face or her body is especially pronounced when images from Western and Asian cultures are compared. The relative importance of bodies and faces has been explored by examining which product types are promoted most prevalently. For example, a study by Frith et al. (2005, 2009) reported that magazine advertisements for clothing and fashion dominate American magazines, while advertisements in Singapore and Taiwan have a larger proportion of cosmetics and skin care products. Similarly, a study by Xie and Zhang (2012) found more skin beauty product advertisements in magazines in China than in the USA. They concluded that the differences reflect conceptions of ideal beauty: Americans focus on bodily beauty, whereas Asian markets emphasize facial beauty.

While these studies reveal that the face and body reflect key aspects of beauty, advertisements also highlight other human qualities that produce signifiers symbolizing culture-specific appealing images.

Race/origin

Skin color and ethnicity can also be considered as attributes of beauty. Whiteness is a desired feature for beauty in Asian cultures, where white skin is associated with social status, marital opportunities, and income potential (Li, Min, Belk, Kimura, & Bahl, 2008). The desire for whiteness makes Caucasian models popular in some Asian cultures. Li et al. (2008) found a prevalence of Caucasian models in Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea, and Frith et al. (2005, 2009) observed more Caucasian than Chinese models in women’s magazine advertisements from Singapore and Taiwan. Another study found that Caucasian models and those with Westernized looks were most favored and scored highest in attractiveness among South Koreans (Bissell & Chung, 2009).

Preferences for a model’s race may be based on the type of product the advertising message promotes. In a comparison of women’s magazines from China and the USA, Xie and Zhang (2012) discovered that skin beauty advertisements contained more local than foreign models, with Asian women shown in China and Caucasians in the USA. In

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contrast, Frith and Mueller (2003) found Caucasian women rather than local models featured in magazine advertisements for lingerie in Malaysia and Indonesia.

These distinguishing features of a woman’s physical appearance (face/body, race, origin) are used in advertisements as a signified to suggest the concept of beauty. According to semantic theory, each image stands for something other than itself by connecting the signifier with the broader network of meaning understood by the consuming audience. This not only creates meaning, but it also perpetuates social norms (Rose, 2007), including those specific to women.

Local factors

The locations to be explored in the present study were selected to provide variations in Western and Asian cultures, with differences in historic, economic, and political attributes, and also to include societies that are rarely investigated. The selected locations needed to offer plenty of outdoor advertising and had to be accessible to the researchers. To satisfy these objectives, this study includes the Eastern European cultures of Bulgaria, Poland, and Turkey and the Asian cultures of Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea. Relevant cultural characteristics for these regions and the particular sites are provided in the following sections.

Eastern Europe

The Soviet Union used various strategies of power throughout its satellite countries under Communist rule, and the outcome of the collapse of the Soviet Union was therefore diverse and locally specific (Johnson & Robinson, 2007). While the Soviet Government promoted social equality for women through higher education, work, and childcare, women’s true social position was cloaked by government manipulation. Women became overburdened with domestic and occupational responsibilities and began to resent the very notion of women’s rights, as they saw the concept as exploitative and ideologically based (Grigar, 2007).

Women’s voices are often drowned out in the post-Communist East due to the suppression of civil rights, gender discrimination, and resistance to Western values (Kotzeva, 2010). Post-Communist cultures are also characterized by extreme individu- alism, political apathy, and nationalistic ideas that have weakened women’s causes, stifled a common feminine language, and repressed a universal meaning for femininity and masculinity. With social and political differences marked by large gaps, ‘post-communist gender constructions should be analyzed only at the intersection with social group, ethnicity, education and other social status construals’ (Kotzeva, 2010, p. 89). While the Communist states treated gender differently, the effects were similar, including ideological messages about socialism and equality that neutralized gender differences in the public sphere (Grigar, 2007).

Bulgaria

In January 2007, Bulgaria became the newest member of the European Union (EU). Bulgarians believed that joining the EU would open up political and economic

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opportunities and help stabilize the new democratic system that was born after the fall of the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1989 (Katsikas & Siani-Davies, 2010).

The Communist-era rhetoric promoted images of economically and politically active women who sacrificed themselves for the system and a brighter future (Kotzeva, 2010). Despite images of gender equality, there were hidden inequalities, including lower pay and more responsibilities for women. Women functioned for the state and were not allowed to develop their individualities (Kotzeva, 2010).

Poland

Under Communism, the ideal Polish woman was built from the mixed iconography of Catholicism and Communism. This image differed from the images in other Soviet-run states, such as Romanian women who were seen as ‘mothers of the Romanian nation’ and Soviet women who were workers, heroic mothers, and Russian peasants (Johnson & Robinson, 2007). The Catholic Church’s involvement was contradictory, as it supported the struggle for political freedom while at the same time espousing conservative and traditional roles for women (Grigar, 2007).

Matka Polka, or Mother Pole, is the idealized nationalist propaganda icon of model womanhood and has frequently been used by both the Polish Government, during and after the Communism era, and the Catholic Church, which plays a large public role in Poland. Matka Polka bears new Polish citizens, manages the home, and is the guardian of national values. Through this icon, Polish institutions strengthened the model of a traditionally passive woman who can realize herself only in the domestic space with her family (Grigar, 2007).

Turkey

Turkey has an economic, political, and cultural relationship with the West that began in 1923 with the new Turkish Republic. During the cold war, the USA played a dominant political and economic role, although it had little cultural influence because of import restrictions. That changed when markets opened up in the 1980s and American television programs and advertising agencies began promoting American consumer brands. Turkish people aspired to American-style consumption, especially by the late 1990s (Üstüner & Holt, 2010). The display of Western tastes and lifestyles interpreted from a Turkish perspective was an attempt by Turkish people to secure higher social standings (Üstüner & Holt, 2010).

Asia

The three Asian cultures featured in this paper are similar both in their location and as emerging or re-emerging economies, yet they are varied in culture and ideas about women’s beauty and place in the public space.

Hong Kong

Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, which created international interest about the postcolonial identity of the province: What is Chinese? What is Hong Kongese?

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(Lu, 2007). The colonial domination by the British forced people in Hong Kong to rely on the family for economic stability (Lee, 2003a). In industrializing Hong Kong, working-class Chinese labored for low wages and had little or no social welfare. To survive and advance, families combined resources. Women were expected to contribute. Modern economics did not free women from subservience in the patriarchal society, and today they remain subject to patriarchal authority, which controls women’s labor, life chances, and appearance in the public sphere (Lee, 2003a).

Given its economic status, Hong Kong can no longer be classified as a Third World state nor Hong Kong women as Third World women; instead, they show how ‘globalization, postcolonialism, and Chinese patriarchy have variously shaped women’s status and subjectivity in the context of colonial modernity’ (Lee, 2003b, p. 200). The current fashion is for women to write about female sexuality and exposing the body (Lu, 2007). In part, this could be considered body politics, an expression of the ‘liberation and excess in the Chinese experience of modernity’ that women never had (Lu, 2007, p. 54). It is also cultural commercialization of the body, specifically for media effects (Lu, 2007) and self-promotion. It shows that modern women are not passive but active in ‘posing as sexual, young, beautiful, rebellious, and anti-intellectual’ (Lu, 2007, p. 54), with dreams of becoming celebrities in the consumer economy.

Japan

Japanese of all classes have long enjoyed a consumer culture within an imperial system (Silverberg, 2007). Even during the 1990s recession, the Japanese middle class had a growing affluence. Women used this as a basis for asserting their mobility and independence, and they became active in their own complex systems of prestige and economics while remaining financially and politically tethered to their husbands (Rosenberger, 2001).

Japanese women have received contradictory messages, as media encourage young women to focus on appearance, sexuality, status, and mobility – calling this freedom, individuality, and independence – while at the same time offering images of romantic weddings, motherhood, and prosperous husbands. Individuality is seen as global and modern, while compassion, respect, and community are unique and valued qualities of Japanese life (Rosenberger, 2001).

Hasegawa (2002) argued that Japanese gender is constructed on two axes. First is infanticization, meaning the postponement of maturity and potential for transformation. Immaturity suggests an incomplete identity, hollowness, and unisexuality or a not yet distinguished sexuality. Second is the difference relative to the West and the femininity of Japanese males that is suppressed. In addition, there is the concept of kawaii. Most prevalent among males and females in their teens to their thirties, kawaii includes cute, pretty, and lovely, or something precious and innocent. Kawaii characters dominate in animation, toys, and almost every aspect of Japanese consumer culture, including the sex industry’s advertising (Hasegawa, 2002).

South Korea

Since the end of the country’s military rule in 1987, women in South Korea have progressed, with more legal rights, political representation, and government agendas that

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support gender equality – despite the conservative Confucian culture (Jones, 2006). There is much optimism that the democratic process will enable a balance of power between conservative and progressive groups to produce a civil society that will continue to support and strengthen political, human, and socioeconomic rights (Jones, 2006).

However, South Korean women’s sex-and-entertainment trade, which started in the late 1970s, has thrived and diversified along with the country’s economic boom and the growth of a middle class with disposable income. By the 1990s, men could easily find sexual services and female companions. In this century, ‘female entertainment and prostitution are ubiquitous, stratified, and accessible to all classes’ (Pilzer, 2006, p. 303). The development of these two types of feminine beauty, which we have termed the ‘Madonna/Whore complex’ in the West, creates divisions among women as they develop their own subjectivity and are asked to purge their own sexuality or to give up autonomy and become a sexual commodity.

Research questions

As previously outlined, there is theoretical evidence suggesting that cultural values are deeply ingrained in advertising through a complex sign system involving both affective and physical ideals of beauty, as well as unique local interpretations of globalization forces. Historic, economic, and political/cultural factors, especially those that are relevant to women, will be reflected in women’s images in outdoor advertisements and therefore provide a way to analyze these images. Accordingly, the following research questions were developed to systematically study the complex concept of beauty as seen in visual messages.

RQ1: How do women’s activities/roles shown in advertisements differ across the six cultures?

RQ2: How do women’s beauty types depicted in advertisements differ across the six cultures?

RQ3: How do women’s physical appearances portrayed in advertisements differ across the six cultures?

Method

According to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (2013), there are over one hundred different platforms for out-of-home advertising, including billboards, bulletins, digital billboards, posters, walls/spectaculars, bus shelters, and street furniture. For this study, outdoor advertisements were operationalized to include commercial messages in any of these formats that could be seen from street view and the audience’s perspective.

For the purpose of uncovering and better understanding the cultural construction of beauty, women’s portrayals in outdoor advertisements were content analyzed. This method is commonly used in investigations exploring communication, as it is a way to take snapshots of a society at specific times and places that can then be reviewed (Ji & McNeal, 2001; Lombard, Snyder-Duch, & Bracken, 2002). In advertising studies, content analysis provides the opportunity to compare media images with the real world (Wimmer & Dominick, 2000).

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Images were reviewed first for statistically significant differences between cultures and then through critical discourse analysis, a way to interpret communications and illuminate how they work to create and maintain societal power relations (Johnson, 2008). Critical discourse analysis considers how discourse is interconnected with political, economic, and social conditions. It theorizes that communicative events are particular discourse moments enacted through texts, discourses, and everyday activities that combine to create social meaning and impact (Johnson, 2008). Here critical discourse analysis is used to examine portrayals of women to uncover beauty ideals across six diverse cultures: those of Bulgaria, Hong Kong, Japan, Poland, South Korea, and Turkey.

Sampling and data organization

Outdoor advertising images of 293 female models were collected between May and July of 2012 from neighborhood districts, heavy-traffic streets, and dense urban areas of nine major cities: Sophia and Vargas in Bulgaria, Warsaw and Kraków in Poland, Istanbul in Turkey, Hong Kong in China, Tokyo and Osaka in Japan, and Seoul in South Korea. All sites were identified with guidance from local contacts and international advertising specialists. As in other studies of this type (e.g., Morris, 2005, 2011), the researchers walked the chosen areas and took digital photographs of all outdoor advertisements that could be seen from street view. Billboards, bulletins, posters, banners, bus shelters, kiosks, wall paintings, transit cards, and any other signage with the purpose of promoting a commercial message were included. The location of each outdoor visual was noted in project journals. Upon returning home, the researchers downloaded photographs to a computer, created jpgs, and filed images by culture.

The primary researchers identified and labeled the outdoor advertisements that were suitable for investigation. The sample for this study included only messages that contained women, the study’s unit of analysis. The images also had to be clear enough to read and analyze. Condensed jpgs were incorporated into PowerPoint slides for labeling, viewing, sharing, and coding.

Coding

The author developed the initial coding scheme based on a review of the literature and past investigations, as previously outlined. Experts from each culture (both male and female, and all but one, graduate students) were consulted for the translations and helped to organize the coding.

Once the translations and coding instructions were finalized, the author coded advertisements from all locales. The culture experts coded their respective samples after they were trained for the coding process using outdoor visuals that were not part of the sample. Upon completion, the author and culture-expert coders met to compare all of the results, discuss disagreements, and reach final decisions by consensus.

For an intercoder reliability check, the author and a research assistant who was trained for this project coded 20% of the samples from each locale, selected at random. Lambda was used to test the strength of agreement. Results for the primary variables in this study are: model’s role (λ = .86), product affiliation (λ = .87), beauty type (λ = .90), face/body (λ = .90), race (λ = .78), origin (λ = .78), and product type (λ = 1). The coding took approximately three months.

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Several variables were used to measure dimensions of women’s beauty, including women’s activities/roles (RQ1). Specifically, models were coded into five role categories: (1) occupation (dressed in a uniform or business clothes, or seen in an occupational setting), (2) family (pictured inside or outside the home with children or a partner), (3) recreational (portrayed in sports or other leisure), (4) model/celebrity (wearing or showing the product), and (5) decorative/ambiguous (displayed in an unrealistic setting, in an awkward position, or not part of the scene). Activities/roles were also reviewed with respect to three product affiliation groups: (1) user (model is using the product), (2) endorser (model is recommending or demonstrating the product), and (3) symbolic (model is detached from the product or using it in ways not intended). For distinctions between beauty types (RQ2), the scoring used four styles: classic, sensual/sex kitten, cute/ girl-next-door, or trendy. Overt physical appearances (RQ3) were operationalized by coding how much of the woman’s body was visible (face-only, more than face/less than full-body, or full-body), her race (Caucasian, Asian, African, or other), and whether the woman’s origin was local or foreign. Basic product and brand information was also captured and grouped into eleven categories (alcohol/tobacco, beauty/personal care, outerwear clothing, lingerie/swimwear, entertainment/media/communication, food/non- alcoholic beverages, home products, fashion accessories, transportation/travel, services, or other).

Results

To analyze beauty ideals across cultures, 293 female images from 221 outdoor advertise- ments from Bulgaria, Hong Kong, Japan, Poland, South Korea, and Turkey were content analyzed. Of the total sample, Hong Kong represented the largest proportion of women’s images (28%) and Turkey the smallest (10%), while Japan, Bulgaria, Poland, and South Korea yielded 18%, 17%, 15%, and 12%, respectively.

The frequency of the advertisements with women is significant, because as signs, they play an important role in the development of the public’s ideology. For example, in some locations, women are excluded from appearing in promotional material or are deleted from it, as recently happened with the Swedish Ikea catalog in Saudi Arabia (Woman deleted, 2012). Although the presence of women in advertisements may be detrimental when women are treated as objects, their mere presence on large public billboards inculcates the consumer citizen to the public presence of women.

To determine whether particular portrayals of women showed statistically significant differences across the locales, a chi-square analysis was conducted for each variable considered as part of the complex notion of beauty. Cramér’s V was used to test the strength of the association. Statistical results are reported in this section, while an in-depth analysis is provided in the discussion section.

Activities/roles

The first research question, exploring women’s activities/roles in the images, found statistical differences on two counts, including for the five role portrayals. Females were most frequently represented in model or celebrity characterizations in all locales. The next most frequent portrayals of women in Japan (31%) and South Korea (29%) were decorative or ambiguous, while all other locales depicted the smallest proportion of

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women in decorative or ambiguous renderings. We collapsed occupation, recreational, and family role categories into one variable to represent active women who are ‘embed- ded’ in culture, in contrast with models in more decorative positions who are only there as passive objects. Embedded women are subjects and symbolically represent a more affective type of beauty (Featherstone, 2010). The second greatest number of portrayals of women in outdoor advertisements in Turkey, Bulgaria, Hong Kong, and Poland were of women in embedded cultural positions.

In addition, the data showed that the portrayals of the women’s product affiliations were statistically different across cultures. Women were depicted most often in product- user roles in Hong Kong (72%), Poland (67%), Turkey (60%), and Bulgaria (48%), while women in South Korea and Japan were most often shown in symbolic presentations (54% and 44%, respectively). The endorser affiliation was least common, although in Turkey, South Korea, and Poland, the second largest numbers of women were seen in such portrayals (27%, 26%, and 20%, respectively).

Beauty type

The second research question found that beauty type yielded statistically significant variations across the six cultures. Japan was the only location where women were most often portrayed with classic images (39%), although cute/girl-next-door images were a close second (35%). Cute/girl-next-door visuals accounted for the highest percentages in Turkish and South Korean advertisements (47% and 37%, respectively), while sensual/ sex kitten renderings topped the list in Bulgaria and Poland (31% and 29%, respectively). Women in trendy styles led in Hong Kong (39%), where the least represented type was classic (17%). However, trendy beauty was the least frequent type of beauty portrayed in all other locations (Bulgaria, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey) except for Poland, where cute/girl-next-door was the least frequent type.

Physical appearance

Female beauty is often judged by physical features, and the third research question considered how overt appearances varied across cultures. Appearances were analyzed based on three primary variables: face/body, race, and model’s origin.

Face versus body

The findings revealed statistically significant differences across cultures for the parts of women’s bodies that were shown. Japanese and South Korean advertisements had the highest proportion of models coded as face-only (35% and 23%, respectively), while Polish and Bulgarian advertisements were coded with high percentages of full bodies (49% and 44%, respectively) and had relatively few visuals with face-only renderings (13% and 10%). Hong Kong also yielded a low percentage (6%) of face-only images, while none were observed in Turkey.

Race

Women’s race was also considered as part of their appearance. As in other studies (e.g., Frith et al., 2005, 2009), significant statistical differences with respect to race were

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found, with advertisements reflecting the local races of each location. In Bulgaria, Poland, and Turkey, the women were almost exclusively Caucasian, while Asian women were the majority in Japan and South Korea. The race of women in Hong Kong was evenly split between Caucasian and Asian.

Origin

The women’s origins differed significantly across locations. Bulgarian and Polish advertisements featured local models exclusively, and these were by far the majority in Turkey, Japan, and South Korea (93%, 89%, and 77% respectively). Hong Kong female models were equally split between local and nonlocal. Table 1 provides cultural crosstab tables for the chi-square analyses.

Further analysis

The women’s appearances were further reviewed to explore differences suggested in the literature. Asian and European advertisements were compared for face-only/full-body poses. The results were statistically significant (χ2 = 8.89, df = 2, p < .05, Cramér’s V = .17), with 46% of the European advertisements picturing full bodies while 16% of the Asian messages featured faces exclusively. The face-only/full-body comparison was also analyzed according to the woman’s race, with Caucasian women found to be depicted more often in full-body poses (44%) while a high share (21%) of the Asian women revealed faces only (χ2 = 21.15, df = 2, p < .001, Cramér’s V = .27).

Further review revealed that the women’s race and origin varied based on the product being advertised. Lingerie and swimwear advertisements featured Caucasians exclusively, whereas advertisements of all other product types were more balanced between races (57% Caucasian and 43% Asians). In addition, beauty product messages almost always featured local (96%) rather than nonlocal models.

Discussion

This exploratory study aims to expand the literature of cross-cultural research on beauty ideals by examining images of women in six diverse cultures within a theoretical framework of advertising and consumer culture, globalization, and beauty. The images were first inspected for statistically significant differences between cultures. They were reviewed with a critical discourse analysis that considered variations among the portrayals in the context of economic, social, and political practices to enhance our understanding of the culturally constructed concept of beauty.

Decorative/symbolic versus active

Women were not frequently presented in decorative or symbolic ways in any of the sample locations, although such portrayals were more common in Japan and South Korea and less prevalent in Eastern Europe. The latter may be related to Eastern Europe’s use of propaganda billboards under Soviet leadership. Soviet women were mothers and workers first, to support the Soviet state, and were never portrayed in decorative roles because they were asked to work twice as hard as men (Grigar, 2007). The historical Soviet

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discourse might still have some impact on the women in those cultures today. In Japan and South Korea, in contrast, the ‘Westernization’ of women has a much more ‘American’ flair, reflecting advertisements in the USA where women are often pictured in stereotypical images (Frith et al., 2005, 2009).

In Hong Kong, the high proportion of ‘active’ women may speak to a culture where women are asserting themselves and celebrating their newfound freedoms and bodily sexuality (Lu, 2007). However, their excessive behavior in the new consumer economy, including a large sex tourism trade (Lu, 2007), makes it more likely that women will appear in the context of selling something, although it may be exploitive.

Table 1. Dimensions of beauty.

Bulgaria Hong Kong Japan Poland

South Korea Turkey

Role Occupation, family, and recreational

13 (27%) 22 (27%) 16 (30%) 9 (20%) 6 (17%) 10 (33%)

Model or celebrity 23 (48%) 49 (61%) 21 (39%) 33 (73%) 19 (54%) 16 (54%) Decorative or ambiguous

12 (25%) 10 (12%) 17 (31%) 3 (7%) 10 (29%) 4 (13%)

χ2 = 21.79, df = 10, p < .05; Cramér’s V = .19

Product affiliation User 23 (48%) 59 (72%) 20 (37%) 30 (67%) 7 (20%) 18 (60%) Endorser 3 (6%) 11 (14%) 10 (19%) 9 (20%) 9 (26%) 8 (27%) Symbolic 22 (46%) 11 (14%) 24 (44%) 6 (13%) 19 (54%) 4 (13%) χ2 = 54.47, df = 10, p < .001; Cramér’s V = .31

Beauty type Classic 11 (23%) 14 (17%) 21 (39%) 12 (27%) 8 (23%) 6 (20%) Sensual/sex kitten 15 (31%) 18 (22%) 9 (17%) 13 (29%) 8 (23%) 8 (27%) Cute/girl-next-door 13 (27%) 18 (22%) 19 (35%) 8 (17%) 13 (37%) 14 (47%) Trendy 9 (19%) 31 (39%) 5 (9%) 12 (27%) 6 (17%) 2 (6%) χ2 = 35.45, df = 15, p < .01; Cramér’s V = .20

Face/body Face-only 5 (10%) 5 (6%) 19 (35%) 6 (13%) 8 (23%) 0 More than face, less than full body

22 (46%) 44 (54%) 30 (56%) 17 (38%) 13 (37%) 24 (80%)

Full-body 21 (44%) 32 (40%) 5 (9%) 22 (49%) 14 (40%) 6 (20%) χ2 = 51.29, df = 10, p < .001; Cramér’s V = .30

Race Caucasian 48 (100%) 41 (50%) 5 (9%) 44 (98%) 8 (23%) 28 (93%) Asian or other 0 40 (50%) 49 (91%) 1 (2%) 27 (77%) 2 (7%) χ2 = 152.86, df = 5, p < .001; Cramér’s V = .72

Origin Local/domestic 48 (100%) 40 (50%) 48 (89%) 45 (100%) 27 (77%) 28 (93%) Foreign 0 41 (50%) 6 (11%) 0 8 (23%) 2 (7%) χ2 = 78.45, df = 5, p < .001; Cramér’s V = .52

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As signs, advertisements socialize and perpetuate norms, including behaviors and roles, for a particular culture. Images signify what is appropriate and beautiful in women, and the visuals in advertisements reveal that being active and engaged with subjectivity is valued in some cultures, while women play a bigger role as props, decorations, or symbols in others.

Beauty type

While outdoor advertisements in Bulgaria and Poland both employed the sensual/sex kitten look more often than the other beauty types, the differences between these numbers and those for the next most common beauty types are small. This may reflect a difference in how women in advertisements are proposed to be the most commonly used. Unlike what we may think of the sensual type – ‘sex sells’ – we are actually seeing that sex is employed less often across-the-board (e.g., Piron & Young, 1996) and that other more affective types of beauty (classic, cute/girl-next-door, and trendy) are being used instead and just as frequently in Eastern Europe and Asia.

In Japan, women were largely rendered in decorative or ambiguous roles, with symbolic product affiliations and face-only depictions, and approximately one-third were coded as cute/girl-next-door types. Many of the visuals featured women who wore bangs and looked like young girls. These observations seem to suggest infanticization and kawaii, as theorized by Hasegawa (2002). The implication is that women are passive and available for men to complete their identities. The findings also support the literature describing how women in Asian cultures have been oppressed throughout history (e.g., Li et al., 2008).

Faces versus bodies

In Japan, 35% of the advertisements with females show only their faces. This could be because Japan has the world’s second largest cosmetic industry, after the USA (Miller, 2006). It could also represent the notion that women are consumers in their own right. Even though women may be linked to their husbands’ political and economic spheres, they have their own space where they compete for status and prestige (Rosenberger, 2001). Williamson (1978) suggested that advertisements highlighting the face use the ‘object’ value that our own faces have for us. The face serves as an object primarily because we never see our own faces without the alienating intervention of a mirror or photograph, so that the face is not completely incorporated into our individual senses of identity. Our face can be sold back to us as consumers via makeup or skin care products, and it is thus appropriated by manufacturers and made into a commodity for purchase (Williamson, 1978).

In contrast, Hong Kong has extremely few face-only advertisements (6%), a finding that is unexpected given past research on face versus body portrayals in Asia compared to the West. For example, Frith et al. (2005, 2009) argued that in traditional Western art, the female body is the object of sexual stimulation, which implies that a full body is sexier and will be used to sell in the West. In a study of advertisements from magazines in Singapore, Taiwan, and the USA, Frith, Cheng, and Shaw (2004) reported that Asian women appeared in facial beauty messages more often (55%) than in clothing advertising, which contained more Western models (47%), from which they concluded that Western women are constructed in terms of the body. The colonial history of Hong Kong – it was built on a model that provided a sort of ‘West’ in the ‘East’ – could be why Hong Kong trends toward the Western model of using mostly bodies.

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Turkey has absolutely no face-only advertisements. This is interesting, given the complex history of advertisements for women who wear headscarves. In early advertisements promoting veiled women, faces were absent, i.e., blocked out. The model’s identity was suppressed, which ‘erases subjectivity altogether and ascribes anonymity to women’ (Sandikci & Ger, 2007, p. 198). This is reinforced by the data, as 80% of Turkey’s commercial messages feature more than the woman’s face, but only part of her body. The careful nature of these proportions may be due to the same impulse not to overly sexualize or invite subjectivity for female consumers.

The data also demonstrated that portrayal of the body versus the face is location specific rather than region particular, or in other words, global. Bulgaria’s statistics are in some ways closer to Hong Kong’s than to Poland’s. This is an important point for concepts of globalization: we cannot use ‘Asia’ or ‘Eastern Europe’ as though they are homogeneous entities.

Race

Bulgaria, Poland, and Turkey featured primarily white women in their advertisements, with 100% white Caucasians in Bulgaria. The latter may reflect Bulgaria’s wave of nationalism and political project of ‘Europeanization’ (Katsikas & Siani-Davies, 2010; Ranova, 2010). Perhaps in an effort to signify that the country is truly part of the European Union, Bulgarian advertisements may prefer women of nonethnic European demographics. Polish advertisements contained only one nonwhite model, which could be explained by Poland’s nationalism (Johnson & Robinson, 2007). Turkey’s use of mainly white models is interesting and may be because Islam has become overly politicized (Sandikci & Ger, 2007), so that darker-skinned women are avoided by advertisers.

South Korea and Japan feature mostly Asian women in their advertisements, reflecting the desire to appeal directly to the women of those cultures, with the overall trend of women in these advertisements selling items to women rather than to men. The white woman is an anomaly in this context and is thus used to make an advertisement more striking. It has been conjectured that white women are used more often in ‘sexy’ commercial messages in Asia (Frith et al., 2005, 2009), but while this may be so, our additional analysis found that only 20% of the Caucasian women in Japanese advertisements and 37% of the women in South Korea were coded as ‘sensual/sex kitten.’

Hong Kong shows an even mix of white and Asian women in advertisements, which probably reflects the postcolonial nature of the city and its economy, which is unique for China. In addition, the women are portrayed in similar ways, with the distribution of the crosstabs of race/beauty type following a similar pattern for white and Asian women.

Limitations of the study and future research

Every research effort has limitations, and this study is no exception. As each of the sample locales is one place at one time, the data represent a cross section of outdoor advertising, a quickly changing mass-media platform that can be seen by all. Because of the nonrandom sample, the results need to be used with caution, and further investigations can help validate the findings. As this line of research progresses, future explorations can employ cultural attributes, like economic development and government types, as

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independent variables to explore correlations with the concepts of beauty operationa- lized here.

This paper centers on women, but future analyses could also include men’s images to reveal the proportions of men to women, allow a comparison of the activities of the two genders, and generally help formulate a better understanding of women’s positions in society. Interviews with citizens in the different locales’ urban environments about their awareness of street advertising and their perceptions of beauty ideals projecting from the images could be of interest for both academics and practitioners. It would also be worthwhile to identify the advertising agencies, and whether they are local or global, as well as to interview the producers who make the decisions to use women in their messages.

Conclusion

This research builds on previous theories of advertising, globalization, and beauty to further the scholarship on ideas of beauty across cultures. The investigation’s unique contribution to the literature is that it offers quantitative and critical analyses for identifying and understanding the differences in portrayals of women in cultures that are rarely explored. The research findings show that the images portraying women are culture based and that, as signifiers, they symbolize to the public ideals of beauty as well as social norms. The cultural variations are revealed in this study by comparing portrayals and using a holistic perspective to include both physical and affective notions of attractiveness.

With the march of globalization, culture is increasingly fluid, which makes it more difficult to identify but ever more important for both practitioners and academics, particularly international and intercultural scholars, to study. By increasing their awareness of the world’s peoples and societies, current and future practitioners can gain a sharper eye for culture-specific habits, preferences, and styles, which will better prepare them to develop and plan advertising communications that will achieve their goals. In the academy, scholars can critically review images for narrow stereotypical portrayals of women. As advertising’s visuals of women circulate into the discourse of beauty and standards of gender, it is increasingly important to understand these images.

Notes on contributor

Pamela K. Morris (Ph.D. Syracuse University, 2004) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication, Loyola University Chicago. Her primary research interests are cross-cultural advertising, branding, visual communications, and advertising pedagogy.

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