A Critical Discourse Analysis of Fairness-Product Advertisements for Women and Men

Abstract

Women and men have attraction for very fair color in Bangladeshi context. Every man wants to have his fiancé or wife to be very fair. On the other hand, girls want to marry a man who is very fair in complexion. For this reason skin whitening products earning huge profit in Bangladesh also suggests that fair skin means superiority and beauty. Skin whitening advertisements show fair skin is a necessity for success, and promote the use of their product to achieve the ideal face, partner, and desired behavior from the society and attention from the opposite sex. Most of the fairness creams are targeted to the young female population of the society and men are the new customers of the beauty industries besides women since men have become very conscious of their looks and lots of men buy such creams to look fairer. There are lots of beauty parlors for men which promise men that they will make them look fairer and lots of men spend huge amount of money to go to such parlors. The main purpose of this study is to raise awareness, so the consumers do not get influenced by the use of language/persuasive discourse in advertisements before buying any kind of fairness products. In order to do this, this study addressed two central research questions: how fairness-product ads influence the target people? and what is the impact of such ads? However, this study looks at how advertisements (TVCs and print ads) of fairness products for women and men persuade and manipulate common people in the Bangladeshi context, from a CDA perspective. In this Study the collected data were two types: advertisements (TVCs and print ads) and interviews (experts and common people). The data was analyzed according to Fairclough’s (2005) three dimensional approach of discourse analysis, and discussed in terms of discourse, ideology and power. In Bangladesh the concept of beauty is associated with fair complexion. The findings suggest that texts influence the consumers through their artificial and catchy language. The ad maker uses various colors in the ads. Ad makers of fairness ads use various light colors like pink, white, yellow, light green, orange, and so on in the ads to attract the attention of the consumers. TVCs of fairness products for men and women claim to change skin color of consumers from black to white and thus their fate will be changed and they will achieve successes at every stage of their life. The TVCs of fairness products promote the idea that fairness is equivalent to beauty, love and success. In our country being dark is seen as the source of many social problems, from the birth till marriage. Fairness ads state that fairness creams will make one white or fair within few days. The respondents of the study expressed that it is impossible to change dark skin color to white with the use of a cream. Most of the expert of the study also expressed that continuous use of the fairness cream made their face skin look fresh, but not white. Most of these fairness creams are non-prescribed products, and regular usage of skin fairness products has side effects for the face skin. They also expressed that the ads capture the market by their models and language; it is a kind of business policy to sell the products. Even the models who are performing in these ads, may have limited idea about the products, and may not use the products themselves, the consumers do not get influenced by the use of language/persuasive discourse in advertisements before buying any kind of fairness products.