Contesting the social impact of marketing: A re-characterization of women’s fashion advertising

Abstract

The prevailing view is that imagery in fashion advertising is idealized, and that repeated exposure to the gap between ideal and real is toxic to women’s self-esteem, providing prima facie evidence for the negative impact of the marketing system on vulnerable consumers. We challenge this view of fashion ad imagery by means of content analyses and a survey supplemented by interviews. The prevailing view is shown to be ideologically rather than empirically based, and to confuse fashion with other quite different product categories. We conclude by discussing how fashion advertising, once cleared of this ideological debris, provides an opportunity to extend marketing theory to account for a broader range of consumer response across product categories. We also develop the concept of taste goods, such as fashion clothing, as a site where novel routes to persuasion can be studied.