The best a brand can be? P&G’s femvertising meeting hegemonic masculinity

Abstract: This thesis uses Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis and Multimodal Discourse Analysis to study how a house of brands, like Procter & Gamble (P&G), handles femvertising, that it is produced by its own brands. The paper analyses the phenomenon using examples from commercials that belong to P&G’s #WeSeeEqual campaign and the controversial commercial video from Gillette The best men can be. One research questions served as a guideline for this project: What characterizes the femvertising pieces targeting women and/or men, produced by the house of brands P&G for their brands Gillette, Fairy, Ariel and Always? In order to be able to study this phenomenon, the empirical materials that will be analysed are: 1) #ShareTheLoad by Ariel, 2) #MakeItFair by Fairy, 3) #LikeAGirl by Always, and 4) The best men can be by Gillette. As theoretical framework this paper uses Foucault’s theory of power and the theory of hegemonic masculinity by Connell & Messerschmidt. What was identified after analysing the data was that the different commercials always include hegemonic masculinity somehow in their content, in some it is attacked directly, in others in a subtle and implicit way and in others just excused or justified.