To select the sample of ads from all the ads I recorded was the most challenging thing since I tried to avoid as much subjective preference as possible, but at the same time, I wanted to choose the case rationally as an arbitrary selection could subconsciously lead to an invalid and worthless comparative study.
In the process of selecting advertising cases in this study, the possible impacts on the validity of the case selection and the accuracy of the analysis can be assumed as: the chosen advertising case is not general in the country or does not have a large number of audiences. In order to ensure the objectivity of case selection, thus ensuring the effectiveness of case comparison and analysis, that is, to ensure that selected advertisements can represent a particular type of female advertising representation in the country, this study will adopt the following collection and sampling methods: first, long-term observation of a large number of television commercials in China and the UK. Through the observation of television advertisements from 2014 to 2018, I will make sure the advertising cases selected in this study for comparative analysis are typical and representative in the UK and China respectively. Second, the case selection is based on the review of related research on women's representation in the UK and China respectively. The analysis of previous literature further helps to narrow down the scope of case selection. Finally, the commercials selected for comparison are from the same brand or for similar products in the UK and China to make the case comparison more practical and effective. By selecting advertisements of the same brand or the same type of products, the similarity of the representations of the female groups are ensured, thereby the similarities of the way and the purpose of advertising representations between these two countries is guaranteed, and the randomness of case selection could be avoided to the utmost. Also, some advertisements are too short and lack of value of analysis. Therefore, this study does not consider the advertisements fewer than ten seconds when selecting advertisement cases.
The detailed information of the selected 19 advert cases and the purposes of case selection are shown as follows:
* ASOS (the UK) and Vipshop (China)
In the first discussion chapter, which examines the advertising constructed femininity, I selected four television commercials from two fashion brands - British B2C brand ASOS and Chinese shopping website Vipshop.com, which both have significant influences in the local markets - for comparison.
As it has been concluded in Chapters 4 & 5, the growth and development of feminism in Britain have largely changed the public's understanding of 'being a woman'. The new ideas brought by post-feminism are opposed to the essentialism-based concept of gender, focusing on self-identity, subjectivity and cultural differences. Popular feminist rhetoric, on the other hand, was absorbed and employed by advertisers, and has quickly been applied as commodity feminist ideas to shape the image of new femininity in advertising. As a result, ASOS adverts Support the Talent and More
Reasons to Move which emphasise subjectivity and weaken gender difference can be
seen as the examples of the representations of non-traditional femininity in British advertising industry16.
In the case of China, the unique political and historical backgrounds and the particularity of Chinese advertising have led to a lag in the development of the Chinese feminist thoughts. At the same time, Chinese feminist remarks cannot be effectively reproduced into advertising representation as British feminism has done. For Chinese women, the most pressing task now is to fight for economic 16 The main broadcasted platform of the ASOS adverts is the Internet. However, as television gets
more digital today, the Internet has become a platform for television and TV advertising (Wolk, 2018), and many brands are advertised on both television and digital platforms. Therefore, although this research mainly focuses on the traditional television adverts, the ASOS adverts are also considered as one of the research objects as there is no obvious difference between the chosen cases and other TV ads.
independence and gender equality. So, I chose two Vipshop.com ads, which showed us a group of young female consumers owning independent financial ability. These female consumers, who have significant consumption capability, are the spokespersons of the new femininity in China today.
* McDonald Red Bean Pie a Taste of Home (China); Happy-wife Vegetable Fresh (China); McDonald Dad (the UK); and McCain We Are Family (the UK).
Chapter 8 focuses on the advertising representations of women in families for two aims: to examine how women's roles in the families changed and how the structures of families changed. I achieve these aims through two panels of advert cases. The first panel discusses the representation of one woman in one family. The cases chosen for comparison are the Chinese McDonald advert Red Bean Pie a Taste of Home and the British McDonald advert Dad. The primary purpose of the first panel of case studies is to examine how women's roles in the families changed. The second panel examines the representations of women in various families by the cases Happy-wife Vegetable
Fresh (China) and McCain We Are Family (the UK), aiming to explore how the
family (which used to be considered as a significant element of femininity, see Chapter 5) changed in these two countries.
As it has been discussed in Chapter 5, the family is seen as more fluid and diverse in Britain, and British women now have the opportunities to live outside the heteronormative families. Therefore I chose the British McDonald adverts Dad and McCain ad We Are Family which show the diversity of family styles as typical cases to discuss the relationship between woman and family represented by the advertisement.
In comparison, the significant changes happened within the Chinese family are reflected as the gender roles and the financial rights of women in families. As introduced in Chapter 4, the most significant dilemma that Chinese women are now facing is to keep a balance between working in the society and taking care of their
families which put double pressure on most Chinese women. For some particular reasons, Chinese feminism has always been negotiating with nationalism, politics and Confucian gender norms, and the pursuit of gender equality and economic independence is still the top one task for Chinese women. The most obvious changes that have taken place in the typical Chinese family is the significantly improved economic power of the woman in the family. Therefore, McDonald's red bean commercial Red Bean Pie - A Taste of Home, which describes the different roles and social statuses of two female generations and the Happy-wife advert Vegetable Fresh which describes various families are suitable for the cross-cultural comparison of women in the families.
* Mercedes Benz (the UK) and Mercedes Benz (China)
Chapter 9 looks at the representations of new middle-class young women and examines how globalisation shapes images of modern women and the identities of the new women. This chapter selects the Chinese commercial and British commercial from one of the well-known global brand Benz for comparison. A series of new women portrayed in these two ads potentially suggested free-choice and independence as two important slogans of global feminist discourse that are arguably important to feminist projects in both the British and Chinese societies.
* Bodyform (the UK) and Sofy (China)
Chapter 10 discusses the different influences of feminism on women's body display in advertising. I select two commercials of British sanitary brand Bodyform and Chinese sanitary product Sofy respectively. The Bodyform advert Red Hit shows us the empowerment of women and girls which is in the same line with feminist ideas while the Sofy advert Magic Rabbit represents the traditional Chinese femininity with a strong colour of gender-based essentialism. Although these two commercials look very different from their themes, female characters, narratives or even colours, however, these two ads are highly representative in their respective countries. On the one hand, with the awareness of 'feminism sells' and the wide application of
commercial feminism in the Western countries, advertisers started to seek for a more feminist way to represent female characters, on the other hand, as it has been discussed in Chapter 4, Chinese feminism is not an independent and fully developed discourse at present. For Chinese women, compared with the objectification of female body, the greater challenge comes from fighting for economic rights and political rights. Gender stereotypes in Chinese society now are deep-rooted much more than in the British society. Besides, influenced by the particularity of Chinese advertising industry, the female representation in Chinese ads is relatively less 'feminist' than that of the Western countries. In summary, the commercials of Bodyform and Sofy are typical in the UK and China respectively, and the comparison of them could reflect the degrees of development of feminism in each country.
This chapter will answer the following two related questions: to what extent television advertising uses female body and femininity as its marketing strategy to please male gaze; to what extent feminism and post-feminism affect and change the shaping and display of female bodies in the UK and China.
* Durex (the UK) and Durex (China)
In Chapter 11, I extend the discussion from the fourth discussion chapter and investigate representations of sexuality and nudity which are related to the female body in advertising texts. This chapter chooses two Durex commercials from China and the UK respectively. The represented female body in this chapter is considered as a commercialised myth connoting various social norms, regulations, laws and rules, imaginations, and meanings attached to the symbol of female body. This chapter will discuss how the nudity of women and sexual content are differently represented in the British and Chinese adverts and why. Different representations of female bodies here not only reflect different social norms, rules, laws and regulations, but also indicate the different cultural meanings and functions of nudity of female body and the influence of cultural traditions on the representation of the female body in different contexts.
* Hungry House (the UK) and Smithfield (China)
In Chapter 12, I examine how the Asian woman is represented in the British advert and how the Caucasian/British woman is depicted in the Chinese commercial. This chapter chooses two food commercials to compare how exotic femininities are represented in the UK and the China respectively - the British hungry house commercial which contains a young Chinese female character and the Chinese Smithfield commercial acted by Caucasian characters.
* Just Eat (the UK), Mr. Clean (the UK), and Jinlongyu Cooking Oil (China)
Chapter 13 discusses the relationship between female advertising characters and advertising represented ideal masculinity in different countries, from the British advert Just Eat and the Chinese Jinlongyu Cooking Oil advert. The two adverts both use the family as the backgrounds of their narratives, both contain interactions between male and female characters and show the imagination of women on the ideal male figures. This chapter not only shows what the idealised masculinity is in different countries or how the woman's idealised male character is constructed and represented in various cultural contexts but also illustrates how women take participate into the construction process of the ideal masculinity. During the case selection process, I found an interesting point when discussing the gendered symbol of hug in the Chinese advert. Therefore, I selected another advert case the British Mr. Clean commercial which also represents the hug between the female and male characters, to compare the cultural meanings of hug between the Chinese and British advertisements.
There are three things that need to be noted for the case selection: first, many of the cases I have chosen cover various aspects of femininity and female's identities; therefore, the content or narrative or the location of some ads may be repeated. For example, the case study commercials which depict women in family involve elements of feminism and considerations of globalisation at the same time. However, I will try
to focus on one or several points of view in each discussion chapter, and make sure each case comparison has its explicit research aims and arguments. Second, the dialogues, background sound and slogans in the Chinese ads are translated into English by myself. Last, more detailed information of the selected ads and the case selection criteria could be seen in the Table 6.5 below:
Theme Selected Case17 Count ry Lengt h (s)
The Selection Criteria
Femininity Vipshop 1 China 35 Contains woman or women;
Fashion advert. Vipshop 2 China 32 ASOS 1 UK 64 ASOS 2 UK 41 Woman and Family
McDonald China 19 Contains woman or women;
Shows the woman-family relations; Food Product advert;
HappyWife China 30 McDonald UK 89 McCain UK 32 New Woman Mercedes Benz
China 52 Contains the new woman or
women; Mercedes advert; Mercedes Benz UK 16 Woman and Body 1
Sofy China 15 Shows women's body;
Napkin advert;
Bodyform UK 61
Woman and Body 2
Durex China 20 Shows women's body;
Contains gender interactions; Durex advert;
Durex UK 21
Exotic Smithfield China 15 Contains white woman in the
17 In the chosen cases, the first broadcasted years of the Happy-wife, Sofy and Durex adverts cannot be
confirmed, but these cases still could be found on television and were displayed on these brands' official websites as the case adverts in the data collection year, which shows that these adverts are qualified for comparison.
Femininity Chinese advert; contains East Asian woman in the British advert;
Food product advert.
Hungry House UK 16
Woman's Idealised Masculinity
Just Eat UK 30 Contains woman's idealised man;
Food or food service advert.
Mr. Clean UK 31
Jinlongyu China 60
Table 6.5 Selected advert cases (2015-2018)
6.8 Summary
In summary, this research employs the qualitative research method based on the mythological mode to compare and analyse the Chinese and British advertising representations with reference to the research framework of female advertising image in Cortese (2015). This research selected 19 advert cases for comparison. The main research method of this study is semiotics. To adopt the method of semiotics means that this study takes the construction of female advertising character in advertising texts as a symbolic system to study the cultural and ideological meanings behind the representations. This study uses semiotics to compare and analyse the symbol of women in advertising representations between the UK and China, and it also looks at the following perspectives including the function of women in adverting narrative lines, nonverbal lessons or body images of the female and male advertising characters, relevant composition of , the meaningful verbal or written part of a message such as slogans and dialogues in the chosen television ads.
This chapter not only discusses the reasons for choosing semiotics as the methodology, but also identifies an analytical framework for the cross-cultural comparison of female representations. In addition, this chapter details the data collection methods and results. In this research, 10 British advertisements and 9 Chinese advertisements were selected. The discussions of women's representations include the following
angles: the advertising constructed femininity, women and families in advertising, new women, the female body display, nudity and sex, the images of ethnic/exotic women, and women's idealised male images. The next seven chapters will make detailed analysis and comparison of these advert cases.
Chapter 7 the Constructed Femininity in the Consumer Culture: Women in