What Does Nike's Positive Gender Stereotypes

Every time you flip a magazine, change channels, or go online, you are struck with images of models who are super skinny with flashy outfits and have excessive make-up on. Ads not only try to sell their products, but also promote how females should look like. These models are airbrushed and photo shopped which is false advertisement. The media progressively encourages a thinner body image as the ideal for women. We see advertisements every day. Some of these ads use manipulative strategies that influence our choices and spending habits. For example, “One in every three articles in leading teen girl magazines included a focus on appearance, and most advertisements used appeal to beauty to sell their products.”(Teen Health) To grab the viewers’ attention, especially females, they include

This essay seeks to analyze Nike’s recent “equality campaign” commercial that was released in February 2017. Nike, the American sports brand giant who makes up 31% of the athletic footwear market (Keady, 2011), has been noted for creating political statements alongside the consumer goods that they produce. As seen in the short black and white filmed advertisement, famous American athletes Lebron James, Megan Rapinoe, Kevin Durant, and Serena Williams are depicted standing up against social inequalities experienced by racial minorities and other marginalized groups; other marginalized groups include those such as the LGBT community as represented by soccer star Megan Rapinoe. The basic idea behind the piece is to illustrate that if equality

In our society today a business is not a business without an advertisement. These advertisements advertise what American’s want and desire in their lives. According to Jack Solomon in his essay, “Master’s of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising,” Jack Solomon claims: “Because ours is a highly diverse, pluralistic society, various advertisements may say different things depending on their intended audiences, but in every case they say something about America, about the status of our hopes, fears, desires, and beliefs”(Solomon). Advertisers continue to promote the American dream of what a women’s body should look like. They advertise their products in hopes for consumers to buy them, so they can look like the models pictures in the ads. Behind these ads, advertisers tend to picture flawless unrealistic woman with the help of Photoshop. In our society today to look like a model is an American dream and can be the reasons why we fantasizes and buy these products being advertised. “America’s consumer economy runs on desire, and advertising stokes the engines by transforming common objects;signs of all things that Americans covet most”(Solomon).

For women, advertising exemplifies the ideal female body. According to Kilbourne, young girls are taught from a very early age that they need to spend lots of time and money to achieve this “physical perfection.” But realistically this cannot be achieved. The ideal woman’s body is Caucasian, very skinny, big breasts, no flaws, and pretty much no pores. This cannot be achieved because it is physically impossible to look like this; the illusion comes from the secret world of Photoshop. No woman is beautiful enough so they leave it to technology to create perfection. The supermodel Cindy Crawford said, “I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford!” She knew the realities of Photoshop and body image, and more women and girls need to become aware of this as well.

Many fitness advertisements proclaim the idea of the "perfect" body. This is done in ads targeting both women and men. This constant display of the "perfect" body causes women and men to feel like they have to look like the featured models to be accepted, which can often lead to negative body images. One source of advertising where the idea of the "perfect" body can often be seen is in print advertisements featured magazines. These fitness advertisements are usually for athletic shoes/clothes or weight-loss products and often feature a model who is thin and toned. As mentioned by Chandler and Sabiston (2009) there are two types of fitness advertising; model-focused and product- focused (Chandler and Sabiston, 2009). With

Gender role bias in advertisements has been so prevalent for so long that the untrained eye wouldn't even discern it. All the same, these biases, for the most part, put women in subordinate positions and men in dominant ones. This assumption on both the genders is unfair and demeaning. These ads portray women as subservient and play toys for men. Not only do the models depict an image nowhere near close to reality, but their bodies are scantily clad and what few clothes they are wearing are very revealing.

Visually, most companies in todays media present models and unrealistic figures in their advertisements to make regular people strive for greatness, so much that it has become an issue in today’s pop culture. This Nike commercial completely went

There are rules in place meant to instill the value of slimness in women and shame women who deviate from those ideals. West (2016) describes the ideal women in her chapter Bones as “graceful” and “slim” and “she can put her feet up on a chair and draw her knees to her chest. She can hold an ocean in her clavicle.” Harris-Moore (2016) discusses in her chapter about mass media and perfection that the recent steps away from the slim ideal are seen in the recent Dove campaigns featuring “real” women who more resemble Lena Dunham’s nakedness. Harris-Moore goes on to state while that is a progressive idea, ABC did not want to air a Lane Bryant commercial in which a fuller-figure woman lounged around her apartment in lingerie. This may because the woman is in lingerie and ABC is reluctant to sexualize fuller-figured bodies, or because the commercial deviates too far from the thin ideal with a commercial model being portrayed in a nude landscape where her “imperfections” are the selling point. The Dove commercial is showing “real women,” portraying nakedness, while the Lane Bryant commercial is portraying a nude

In today’s time we come across a vast amount of advertising using various forms such as outdoor billboards, print advertisements, TV commercials and online advertisements. Advertising is a very common means of getting customers to see one’s message, brand and product. However, it is apparent that advertising is intentionally deceptive in the sense that it tries to prey on one’s weaknesses as a human being. For example, beer commercials constantly use sex appeal with attractive women to charm men and perfume commercials use the idea that their product will bring women the love that they have so long desired. Likewise in the Nike advertisement featuring Serena Williams, the advertisers use vivid visual elements to convey the idea that Nike products will make the consumer popular, athletic, beautiful, skilled, talented, hardworking and ultimately successful. This definition of Nike is achieved through the use of the famous athlete, the words of the ad, her facial expression, her stance and the background scenery.

In this advertisement for Gold's Gym, you have a very pretty athletic looking woman in color in the front. If you notice in the background you will see a very sad looking person with a curvy body in a bikini in black in white. This ad is saying to have pride in yourself you must lose pounds. This shows the ideal body image as fit, skinny, nice hair and tan body. This can cause a negative impact on how the public views their body. Many young adults want to fit in with what society shows in the media. Advertisements have an impact on how most believe they should look.

When researchers asked one hundred eighteen female, college-aged students to look at twenty pictures in ads from women's magazines, they felt a sudden change in mood after the pictures were observed. There was notable depression in the women, a depression that has seemed to hit many women after leafing through women's magazines (Key and Lindgren 11). This depression is due to the fact there are so many negative messages being conveyed in advertisements that are published in women's magazines. But who can blame the women for their depression anyway? When the majority of the ads in women's magazines show super-skinny models advertising nice clothes, makeup, jewelry, etc., one might find themselves to be a little down. Skinny models portray their figures to be the cultural norm in Western society today. How often does one find a model in a woman's magazine that is over a size six that is not shown advertising plus size merchandise? The answer is not very often, or sometimes never at all. If women do not see their body type being depicted in

Advertising uses a lot of different techniques to show the public the perfect female image. Body doubles and computer retouching are two examples of how advertisers are able to “doctor” images. The majority of women we see in magazines, music videos. and movies do not appear in reality, as we perceive them in the media. We may actually believe we are looking at one woman’s body when we are actually looking at sections of three or four women’s bodies, which, when spliced together, shows us the best parts of each women’s body as the final product. Women cannot attain these impossible standards of attractiveness. Young girls learn very quickly that they must spend much time, energy, and money on achieving these standards.

One will see a white female with pouting red lips and the very petite body that resembles a thirteen-year-old girl. The extremely artificial women and the heavily photo-shopped pictures in these ad’s create a norm and make those women who look differently, feel insecure of who they are and make them feel as if they are less of a woman, for example they tend to over represent the Caucasian, blonde with bright eyes, white complexion and a petite body. This is an unattainable beauty for most women, which has caused many to develop issues such as eating disorders, depression and the very much talked about these days, anorexia.

My overall impression of this advertisement at first glance is the selection of men shoes they have. There seems to be no trace of any women shoes on the cover for some odd reason, they do advertise “Best Selection of Top Brands for the Entire Family,” but all I see is boots and athletic shoes for men. My eyes are drawn to the coupons on the bottom of the page and the 25 % off on selected Nikes on top of the page because let’s get real, everyone loves to save money. The colors on this advertisement make you just stop and see what it’s all about.

In this article,”Does Size Matter?” it discusses a report of a paper on the psychological study made to test the advertising media’s claim that ads using thin body models are most effective in selling the product. It also tested the premise if attractiveness of the model was a contributing factor despite body size and wether or not representing thin body image as ideal has a detrimental effect on women.