Femvertising as a resource of meaning-making and identity negotiation – A consumer cultural perspective
Abstract: There is a tendency for organizations to draw on social and political issues to make brands relevant to consumers, among which the appropriation of women empowerment discourse has attracted considerable attention because of its success in practice. Give the paucity of studies both in strategic communication to evaluate consumers responses to organizations’ communication strategies and in advertising studies to examine the emerging form of advertising to empower women, this study focuses on femvertising from consumers’ perspective. Taking the “leftover women” discourse in SK-II’s “Marriage Market Takeover” commercial as an entry point, this study uses consumer cultural theory to explore the ways in which Chinese female consumers attach personalized meanings to femvertising and use femvertising to address the conflicts between their personal identity and social identity as “leftover women” in Chinese society. Verbatim texts of 21 narrative interviews were analyzed through interpretative narrative analysis with specific emphasis given to conflicts in the respondents’ narratives. The findings of this study reveal that Chinese female consumers tend to adopt extensive and intensified postfeminist notions to interpret femvertising. Consumers’ critical readings of the commercial also suggest their preferences among countervailing cultural meanings, which reflect their identity negotiation process. The implications for future research on femvertising studies are discussed.
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