Persuasion Ethics Today

Margaret Duffy, Esther Thorson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317309635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Persuasion Ethics Today explores persuasive communication in the fields of advertising, promotions, public relations and integrated marketing communication, and is designed for course use in advertising curricula.

Ethical questions have become increasingly important in today's media landscape, and issues of regulation, privacy, and convenience are the subjects of heated debate among consumers, industry professional, policy makers, and interest groups. With the explosion of social media, mobile devices, tracking technologies, and behavioral targeting, the ethical issues about persuasion continue to increase in importance.

This book's goal is to offer a broad introduction to the ethical standards, challenges, understanding, and decision-making strategies involved in the practice of persuasion. Persuasion Ethics Today links real world persuasive communication activities to fundamental philosophies of ethics. It also offers tools for students and practitioners to engage with ethical dilemmas in a systematic way, and jumpstart debates about the right ethical choices in an increasingly complex media and social environment.

Section II
Criticisms of PR and Advertising Messages

5
Stereotyping in Advertising

We Are Not the People in Those Pictures

Thomas Bivins

Chapter Summary

Critics have complained for many years about how advertising portrays women in stereotypical ways, usually as moms or sex objects. Considerable research has shown that these stereotypical portrayals have real consequences for women, particularly girls who compare themselves with idealized images. This chapter explores another aspect of gendered advertising and examines how men are stereotyped differently than in the past. Stereotypes of men as tough, competent, and in control emerged in films and television programs, as well as in advertising. In recent years, images of the manly man, hero, breadwinner, and outdoorsman have been displaced by images of men as bumbling husbands and dumb dads. The usually humorous portrayals of men, particularly in home settings, show them as confused, incompetent, and in need of rescue by a calm and reasonable mom. The chapter explains how these portrayals may affect our beliefs about ourselves and sounds the alarm about “dumbing down” American males.

Introduction

Are men addicted to pickup trucks, fast cars, football, beer, and sexy women who will do just about anything to be near them? Yes. Especially if you believe what advertising tells us—which is, “men are in control.” On the other hand, can they cook dinner, do the laundry without mixing the colors, change a baby’s diapers, take the kids to school, or have real emotional connection with anything not on the first list? No. Especially if you believe what advertising tells us—which is, “men are not in control.” Are men confused by this mixed message? Probably. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Men aren’t used to being confused over who they think they are. Women, however, have been getting these kinds of mixed messages through advertising at least since the dawn of the 20th century when picturing them as the second line of defense in World War I shifted to returning them to the hearth where they supposedly belonged. Men, however, have generally been viewed as the first line of defense and the king of the workplace, where they not only saved the world but also brought home the bacon.

The problem is, and has been for over a century, that we are not the people in those pictures. We are complex, often bewildered, beings searching for who we are in a world that is increasingly loud, crowded, and baffling. Walter Lippman was among the first to suggest that stereotypes were a way of shorthanding the complexities of modern life. He knew that most of us simply couldn’t comprehend a world that we didn’t understand firsthand. Life is either familiar or strange, and stereotyping helped make the strange familiar. The downside, of course, is that what we’re not familiar with may eventually become the stereotype, and therein lies the problem.

Lippmann’s is a view of stereotypes as being inherently dangerous in that they side-step rational thought in favor of a shadowy illusion of life, leading the masses clinging to a culture they barely understand while rejecting out of hand that which is foreign to them.

(Bivins, 2009, p. 207)

How many of us believe, even tangentially, that Mexicans are lazy, that Asians are math whizzes, that the Irish are drunks and brawlers, that African-Americans are natural athletes? What do those beliefs lead to? Too often they reinforce a privileged class and power structure that seeks to exclude the unfamiliar or alien. Less obvious, however, are such stereotypical beliefs that little boys are by nature scruffy and dirty, that little girls are neat and clean, that women are adept at domestic chores, and that men are not. It could be argued that these seemingly innocuous stereotypes are less problematic. But are they? Many of these beliefs aren’t, in fact, based in advertising. They are the product of years of images often born of social biases and structures further perpetuated by the film industry, television programming, and other forms of media. However, as advertising began to mimic the creative techniques of other media, the stereotypes already generated by those other industries began to dominate in marketing as well. And as the techniques were adopted, new stereotypes began to emerge, either supporting those already in existence or created as an adjunct to those images. The girl left behind to tend the home front in the Hollywood version of World War II became the girl who kept on tending the home on television following the war. At the same time, advertising continued to dramatize a world of modern appliances designed to entice women back into their homes from the factories, which in real life had become their temporary quarters during the war.

Of course, advertisements are not films, but increasingly, thanks to the Internet, they are often abbreviated versions complete with characters, plots, and the inevitable stereotypes—which is not necessarily a bad thing. Advertisers have always been limited, by space, by time, by format. How do you sell diamonds, for example, without stereotyping both the giver and the receiver? Is it even possible for a wedding photographer to sell herself without the standard and stereotyped images of a traditional Western-cultural ceremony? And how in the world does one sell perfume, especially given what its product attributes are really about—a substitute for the weak, human pheromones that enhance sexual attraction. Stereotypes provide a shortcut to the sales pitch. We are presented with familiar images that set a recognizable context for that pitch. If we accept Lippmann’s (1920) premise that stereotypes provide us with at least an abbreviated image of the unfamiliar, then using this technique, on the face of it, shouldn’t be problematic. What is problematic, however, is that a stereotype, by definition, is incomplete. And repeated viewings of stereotypes can lead us to assume a truth that may not be true—mostly because differences in people are reduced to simplistic categorizations, sometimes negative, which then are served up as reality.

It’s clear, both from what we see every day in the media and from the innumerable academic explorations of the topic, that stereotyping abounds. Although many have argued that advertising merely reflects the society and culture inside of which it is produced, the question of what parts of society, which of its cultures, and what values are chosen to be portrayed is a big one. No one element in society is free from stereotyping in some form. Minorities, when they appear at all, are often portrayed as “representative” rather than individually defined. What this means is that minorities tend to appear consistently as a bundle of standard components representing a type rather than an individual. For example, journalist Tina Ramirez, writing for the Huffington Post, notes that the ongoing image of the “curvy, sexy and sultry Latina denies many Latinas their cultural identification based on the their physical appearances and sexual attractiveness, alone” (Ramirez, 2013). She points specifically to actor Sofia Vergara’s role in the TV sitcom Modern Family, which “fuels the stereotype that Hispanic women are sexy but also loud, crazy and spicy” (Nittie, n.d.). It’s also undeniable that some societal groups appear only as stereotyped afterthoughts (the old, the very young, the poor). Probably more than any other demographic in our society, women have been the focus both of stereotyping and of discussions on the subject. However, in order to take a different tack, we’ll address only one of the numerous possibilities here as an example of how stereotypes work and their potential affects. The lessons learned from this example should be applicable to all stereotypes, and the solutions are the same.

While much has been written about the gender stereotyping of women and girls, much less has been written about men, who have traditionally enjoyed a privileged position in society. But men are stereotyped, too. Because audiences, especially those for advertising, are typically classified by market segmentation (often by using demographic characteristics), there is a tendency to compress the subtleties of individuality into the most obvious attributes of the group. This may lead to a picture that is not only simple, but also can be misleading and, sometimes, offensive. In recent years, television has created a genre of men on numerous sitcoms who could only be classified as “the bumbling husband” type (Bivins, 2009, p. 198). Advertising, in turn, has mimicked this stereotype by picturing both boys and men as incapable of understanding the mysteries of laundry or cooking a family meal without purchasing it in a bucket or keeping themselves clean more than a few minutes at a time. Examples range from Homer Simpson to the title character on Everybody Loves Raymond. Author Chris Turner (2004), in his in-depth look at the Simpsons phenomenon, calls Homer “a big fat clown, a bumbling doofus, an all-but-universal dimwit.” (Turner, p. 320) And Australian journalist Alison Cameron (2005) writes that the character of Ray Barone is just one of a number of television husbands portrayed as inept fathers and poor role models. She notes that “as soon as Ray walks in the front door he mysteriously loses any of the abilities that make him a success outside. He is a thoughtless husband and a poor father interested only in television, food and sex.”

Of course, the tried and true image of men as macho, muscular, athletic, and in charge still exists, but in an increasingly gender-confused society, is the “dumb dad” the new normal for the male stereotype? As Marcellus (2013, p. 128) notes, “stereotypes are designed to limit and exclude those who do not fit narrow ideas of normalcy.” Thus being a male may also mean not being capable of doing anything remotely domestic or being childlike and very definitely not in control.

According to Gornick (1979), “Advertisements depict for us not necessarily how we actually behave as men and women but how we think men and women behave” (p. vii). She suggests that this serves a social purpose in convincing us that the stereotype is what we eventually believe we are or ought to be. How then do men relate to their environment when that environment tells them they are hapless imbeciles? Part of the problem is that this stereotype is relatively new. As late as 2002, Rohlinger categorized the role of men in advertisements into nine categories: the hero, the outdoorsman, the family man/nurturer, the breadwinner, the man at work, the consumer, the urban man, the quiescent (quiet/calm) man, and the erotic man. Nowhere to be seen, just a few years ago, was the image of the bumbling husband or the dumb dad.

Fast-forward ten years. In 2012, Philadelphia Magazine journalist Christine Speer Lejeune (2012) described what she considered to be “the most irritating commercial on TV.”

The narrative arc revolves around a man dipping his feet and his kid’s feet in glue, in an attempt to keep their socks from slipping down their legs. Eventually, Mom comes home, shakes her head at all of the manly idiocy happening in her home and saves the day by tossing her boys some new socks that stay up on their own. The whole thing is so, so stupid.

Lejeune was not happy. She continued by noting how “lucky” we all are because,

there are a billion more commercials just like it. Like the one with the dudes who track mud in on the carpet and then lie about it, because they’re clueless. Or the one about the dad who can’t cook without destroying the kitchen, because he’s clueless. Or the one where the guy doesn’t know the difference between yogurt and pie, because he’s clueless.

She ended by wondering whether “boys are getting the message that our society simply expects less from them? That it’s okay to be … clueless?”

Fairly recent research seems to back up her observations. Tsai and Shumow (2011) analyzed hours of television commercials over several networks to determine the roles of men as representatives of fatherhood and domesticity. They suggest that, “understanding how men are represented in advertising is imperative for understanding how marketers conceptualize contemporary gender roles and family dynamics, and how these representations impact male viewers’ understanding of gender roles in the family” (p. 39). Their findings support the belief that men are indeed depicted in marginal roles, especially in a family context. For example:

• They are less likely to be shown performing domestic chores.
• They have a lower involvement with their children (most often depicted as mischievous playmates instead of caretakers) and without wifely guidance are shown as incompetent as caregivers.
• No men are shown with infants. Tsai and Shumow suggest that this is because childcare may be the most demanding domestic task. We will come back to this one.

Josh Lev (2012), writing for CNN about the “dumb old dad” stereotype, points out that the “image of the hapless dad has long roots in American pop culture.” He cites research done on comics going back to the 1940s (LaRossa, 2000) showing fluctuating levels of fatherly incompetence over several decades. Not surprisingly, television has played a major role in depicting men as bumbling fools. Despite early television portrayals of fathers—especially in the 1950s and early ’60s—as the mature breadwinner full of sage advice (Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver), that characterization began to change in the ’70s and ’80s with shows such as The Cosby Show, Family Ties, and Growing Pains and has changed even further in the last decade as the still moderately wise fathers of those shows were replaced by targets of ridicule and indifference. (Lev, 2012). Today, it’s as likely as not that stereotypes of incompetent men will greet those of us who still watch TV—both in programs and their embedde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• SECTION I Introductory Issues
• SECTION II Criticisms of PR and Advertising Messages
• SECTION III Special Topics
• Index