Health Advertising for Women - Essay Example

 Health Advertising for Women Health Advertising for Women Introduction The field of advertising for women’s health is not a recent phenomenon. Before the advent of modern medicine, women got information about their health, especially reproductive from families, local communities through folklore stories, midwives, and traditional healers. Women from the higher societies were fashion conscious and social functions provided the best avenues for one to display their best clothing or fragrances. These forums also provided vital avenues for exchanging information regarding new developments in fashion and beauty products. According to Hill (2012), the advertisers, however, dared not to air any offensive products until the 1920s when Lysol was introduced as a feminine hygiene product. The development in advertisements for the health products in the late 1800s and early 1900s were mostly premised on the need to portray the woman as a very happy and healthy wife (Hill, 2012). History of Advertising The early 19th century America saw the little circulation of print media. Hutchinson (2008), in his article in Magazine growth in the nineteenth century which was published in History of American Magazine Publishing argues that the advertisers themselves had not begun appreciating the value of the print media and its potential impact it could have on their products. Advertisements for manufactured products was not done on a large scale since the families in the 19th century rural America produced most of the goods needed for household use at home. However, few marketers got their start in business by marketing patent medicine (Hutchinson, 2008). The advertisement of drugs was one of the earliest adoptions of brand advertising and has continued this way to date. All this time, the medical profession was developing and taking shape. Emphasis was laid on specialization and the doctors of the time began issuing warnings to the public against taking health matters into their hands, as had been the norm (Chuppa-Cornell, 2013). The definition of advertising has varied over the years as tastes and preferences of the society changes with changing times. In its most general form, advertising can be defined as an attempt by a seller to persuade the audience to partake of a good or utilize a particular service. The development of modern advertisement can be traced back to the early 1900s when Thomas Barratt, an advertiser from London and an executive at the Pears Soap Company developed a series of advertisements to market the Pears Soap (Stockwell, 2012). Barratt style of advertisement sought to portray the mythical properties of the soap and associate its usage with the high life. According to Stockwell (2012), Barratt claimed in his posters and billboards that the Pears soap made one look more beautiful. He also went to a great length to convince the audience that the soaps were healthy. He used testimonials from doctors, chemists, and famous personalities to make his claims seem more authentic. These advertisements created a sort of consumer culture that was heavily influenced by media portrayal of the product. Barrratt’s works with the Pears Soap adverts demonstrated the potential that lay in the media and public campaigns. He sought to associate anything portraying high life with the soap and was largely successful (Stockwell, 2012). Before the Barratt revolution, the early 19th century was marked with the slow uptake of advertising; people bought goods based on the merchant’s reputation and not necessarily brand power. Most of the manufacturing companies concentrated in the production of household commodities like clothing, leather, ink, paper and many others (Hutchinson, 2008). There was little if any production or advertisements of women’s products. There were women traditional healers who gave advice on information regarding general healthcare. There was no specialized treatment designated for the womenfolk despite the fact that women served as nurses tending to the soldiers in the army hospitals, as well as assisting the in medical facilities operated by male doctors. Commercial advertisements for general products continued to dominate the advertising media well into the early 1900s. Advertising for women’s health, however, began appearing around the 1920 with the increasing manufacturing of sanitary pads. According to Chuppa -Cornell (2011), before the commercial availability of sanitary pads, the 18th-century women relied on folklore wisdom and information from neighbours, midwives and relatives in managing their reproductive health. The phenomenon, however, began to change in the early 19th century with increasing emancipation of the women and increased education opportunities. They were now able to corroborate the folk wisdom obtained from the neighbours and midwives with the information gained from attending lecture tours (Chuppa-Cornell, 2013). The information obtained from the community was not just limited to the issues of sexual reproductive health but also covered wide ranges of topics like good Housekeeping, beauty, and fashion. Changing lifestyles and tastes due to the industrialization efforts significantly interfered with this communal way of sharing information. As girls enrolled in school, it no longer became fashionable to get information from the community groups. To fill this void of information created through industrialization, the women turned to the magazines and newspapers. Advent of Women Health Advertising Advertisers usually target the variations in the way the male and females absorb information. This difference makes it easier to profile and target each category with particular messages meant to appeal to them and stimulate purchase. Advertisers for female health products have perfected the art of exploiting this psychological difference in order to create products that will appeal specifically to the women. For instance, the advertisement for beauty products target to capitalize on women’s desire to look good and beautiful. In Advertising to the American Woman, Hills (2012) observes that advertising has contributed immensely to shaping and dispelling the stigmas associated with the use of certain health and beauty products to treat body odour among women. The images used for women on the back cover of magazines are those of young, slender but physically fit women. These images are used to advertise a wide array of products and are not just limited to the healthy practices that the subject undertakes. For women, the use of such images to advertise a product means that their use makes one look like the image they see on the advertisement. The first female health commercial that targeted exclusively the female audience was a commercial ran in 1896 of a tampon, a form of sanitary pad used to manage the menstrual circle (Hill, 2012). The advertisement was of a Lister’s towel produced by the Johnson and Johnson Company. Due to the conservative nature of the society at the time, the commercial did not achieve any increment in sales for the company, and it withered away as rapidly as it had appeared. There were little more attempts at advertising women health products after the failure of the Lister Towels. Until 1920s when Kotex, another sanitary pad but now made by a different company, Kimberly-Clark appeared in the ladies home journal (Hutchinson, 2008). The successful introduction of the Kotex commercial sanitary pad led other companies to start experimenting with print advertisements. In the late 1920s, Lysol, a cleaning and disinfectant product developed by Reckitt Benckiser Company was marketed as a female hygienic product. The advert for Lysol claimed that vaginal douching with a diluted solution of the product prevented infections and vaginal odour hence leading to marital bliss. The Lysol advertisements, however, were greeted by disapproval from the medical practitioners of the time who said that the product eliminated certain bacteria useful for vaginal health while creating room for more dangerous disease-causing bacteria to thrive. In 1933, the advertisement for the first disposable sanitary pad or tampon appeared in the leading women magazines of the time. Advertisement for women’s health products was not only limited to the bra, Lysol, and sanitary pads. Several leading magazines began to be published in the late 1800s well into the 1900s. These papers focused solely on the interests of women. Topics discussed ranged from fashion, health, family diet to the general family and home economics issues. Role of the Women’s Magazines in disseminating health information The women’s magazines have played a great role in shaping the way health information is delivered to the women. With their female-specific contents, these magazines offered great support to the calls for specialization and professionalism in the medical practice as early as 1885. As the number of doctors from the medical schools of the time increased, there were increased calls for women to shun the traditional folk and superstitious medicine. The leading women magazines of the time echoed these calls by cautioning against risking one’s life at the hands of traditional healers in the name of saving. The papers infused medical information with its messages of home economics and how a mother could apportion the little resources, they had to meet medical cover. In one article of the ladies home journal, the magazine editor cautions the housewives against giving medication lesser priority. According to Chuppa-Cornell (2013), mothers were cautioned about getting treatments from the hands of the traditional healer all in an effort to save on a physician’s fee could end up being the costliest decision they ever made. The reasoning among both the editors and the medical professionals was that the services of the trained physicians offered the best sort of care that could be available and came with assurances of higher ethical practices. As such, the sacrifice was much worth it in the long run. Some of the magazines did not just limit their work to an advisory on the aspects of the home alone. Some like good housekeeping set up columns where medical doctors usually gave medical advisory opinions to the women audience. Between the 1920s and 1960s, the magazine ran a campaign in which it offered to test and guarantee the medical products advertised on its pages with an in-house seal of approval. The magazine thus served both as an authority in the fields of women’s health as well as advertisement for the products of the time. Their columnists advised the readers on a various range of issues from good nutrition, childcare, beauty and even physical fitness and even how to handle common diseases such as like flu, cold among others. The magazines gained wide readership between the years of 1920 and 1970 mainly because they established their reputation as women’s only and targeted mainly the middle-class and emerging professional women. However, their focus only dealt with general health and beauty, few if any focused on female-specific conditions like gynaecology, obstetrics, and birth control. The articles that received the highest attention were those on childbirth and pregnancy. The magazines failures to focus on female-specific condition were attributed to the prevailing conservatism. The reason they chose to ignore such subjects was more to do with the need to safeguard their reputation as respectable outlets rather than lack of professional knowledge about these subjects. Thus, access to information regarding these conditions became a nightmare for the majority of poor women in the lower income categories. Some turned to pamphlets and lecture tours while others were lucky enough to have access to a family physician from whom they could get information. This situation went on for several decades until the 1980s and 90s when magazine columnists began writing more candidly on issues regarding the female body. Buoyed by the gains in the feminist movements, the editors no longer feared the backlash that would have supposedly resulted from discussions regarding subjects that before would have been regarded as vulgar. The success of such initiatives like our bodies ourselves encouraged dissemination of more female specific information. The Our Bodies Ourselves initiative was a forum organized by female activists who had felt the need to come to a research organization that would be charged with giving information regarding the health of the women. The Boston initiative resulted in the publication of a popular book. Female medical professionals and doctors contributed to the book. The book struck a chord with the female readers and gained rapid popularity. Shortly after its publication, it went into worldwide circulation. Although published at a time when the society still frowned at the discussion of intimate body parts especially that of the female, the book enjoyed wide readership. Sales were mainly done underground to avoid altercations with the authorities. The purpose was mainly to offer information for females seeking to understand better their bodies. The book also acted as a catalyst and a tool for campaigning for women’s emancipation. Under one title of ‘Anatomy and Physiology’, the book opens by stating that the conventional wisdom that the mental strength is more important that the body strength has done a great disservice to the women folk. The 1960s saw a significant change in the way the world society treated women, and the advertisers were not left behind. The new advertisements for nearly all female products ought to portray themselves as offering that much-needed steps to the desired life in the high society. Beautiful women with long silky hairs were traditionally associated with socialites who cascaded the high life in cities and palaces. The ordinary women folk were peasants in the village who did not have adequate access to education and were mainly servants. Marketers simply preyed on their desire to cross over to the high society. Even advertisements for drugs were not only limited to the beauty products, but also even the abortionists sought to exploit this newfound frenzy. With more women entering the workforce and getting better pay, the benefits of this to the marketers were that there was an increased purchasing ability among their clients. The approval of Enovid, the first commercially available contraception pill in the 1960s created a revolutionary change among the abortionists. Not only did this enable the women to pregnancy prevention services but it also saved them the numerous trips to the abortionists. The ‘60s decade also delivered some of the landmark inventions in the field of gynaecology. The development of the first ultrasound devices was reported in some of the professional gynaecology magazines before bringing to the attention of the public. Women Health Advertisements in the 1960s Beauty and Personal Care Products. The 1960s marked the decade when a complete revolution in female advertising began. The whole of the advertising industry became light with myriads of female beauty products. Women gained more confidence and began to flaunt their bodies whether in public or private. The emergence of powerful cosmetic companies like Revlon and Max Factor created advertisements using images of beautiful girls with wide smiles on the cover of magazines. The beauty products were infused with health topics for skin care and general personal hygiene. These advertisements continued the trend set by the magazines that started before them by seeking professional endorsements for their brands. As tastes and preferences changed, the issues of brand identity and loyalty became apparent. Before the 1960s, the advertisers capitalized on the lack of brand loyalty and identity among the women to test different products and observe their reception by the market. Health products and services. The inadequacy of enough information from the home economics magazines of the time was greatly compensated for by the existence of professional magazines published by the American Association of obstetrics and gynaecologists. The women who did not get adequate information from the magazines turned to the professional magazines as well as the lecture tours for information regarding their bodies. The downside of these papers is that their circulation and hence usage were limited to the elite and the educated. The lower class and the general masses did not have the opportunity to study the information with them. Official advertisements for gynaecology services were purely for pregnancy and childbirth conditions. Abortion was strictly prohibited and as such, few if any advertisements for these services were carried in the mainstream media. Abortionists, however, continued to carry out their trade underground and used non-conventional advertising means such as the mail order to alert the public about their services. Information about abortion clinics spread mostly through the word of mouth. Advertisement for these services were disguised under phrases such as ‘relief services for women who are temporarily indisposed’ to refer to those who had unintentionally gotten pregnant while still wanted to continue enjoying the pleasure of not having children. Others like the Beecham pills during the Victorian England were marketed and distributed as laxatives. The advert carried out a list of ailments, which the pill treated but with an insertion that indicated that it also treats ‘Female Diseases.’ In the 1930s, the message content of these advertisements changed and abortifacients and other birth control devices were advertised for as remedies for women who are delayed. The 1940s saw a crackdown on the advertisements of these drugs. Abortifacients were declared unsafe, and the Federal Trade Commission stopped their usage. Advertisements for abortion in the early 19th century was more open and brazen compared to the 1960s when the conservatives and the Catholic Church campaigned strongly against such practices. The advertisements were popular partly because there was less organized professional opposition to the practice. The association for medical practitioners was still fighting for political relevance and power and was more concerned with entrenching the professionalism and eliminating folklore medicine. After the successful campaigns to liberalize abortions in the 1940s, treatment and regulation of abortion began to take the dimension of family planning. These efforts led to the opening of family planning clinics that offered not only family planning advice but also educated the women on the usage of contraceptives. Following the debate on the issue of abortion and the need to preserve life, some states started to legislate laws that would allow abortion on limited conditions such as to preserve the life of the mother or abortions performed on rape victims. The liberalization brought with it other challenges. Even as more and more marketers fought for advertising space in the print media, there were emerging contrary opinions by well-positioned professionals cautioning the public against the usage of the birth control pills. These professionals sought to decipher the information contained in the advertisements and compare them with the real medical power of the drugs they sought to promote. Many focused on their side effects and the way these medicines led to other complicated conditions for the woman. Elizabeth Watkins argues that the marketing decisions and not the scientific innovations behind the pill have continued to guide its positioning and usage in the modern society (Watkins, 2012). These sentiments, viewed in the light of the current availability of birth control products, can be taken as a valid indictment of the entrepreneurial drive of the pharmaceutical companies involved in the production of these drugs. While it is true that there has been a marked improvement in the sphere of how these drugs are packaged and delivered to the audiences, the fundamental drive is first to make profits for the manufacturers, hence there is a potential risk of compromise in terms of the quality. Some of the pills still have severe side effects that the manufacturers do not inform the users about. Some magazines highlighted the side effects of these pills. These range from the carcinogenic properties to the ability of the pills to lower libido and interfere with fertility. She cites the study by the Center for disease control, which found that hormonal contraceptives methods come with the risk of development of gastrointestinal diabetes in women (Hamilton, 2011). Martha Kempner (2012) also questions the rationality behind the increasing visits to the gynaecologists in this age of information. In her article for the reality check magazine, she uses the results of the study conducted on college girls who are visiting the gynaecologist for the first time in their lives (Kempner, 2012). The subjects in the study were sufficiently given information on what a gynaecology procedure entails. Although the author ends with a positive note about the need to see a gynecologist, the aspect she brings out is that information on these procedures can easily be found elsewhere, and one only needs to go for such visits only once . These criticisms and debates contributed to a change in the way marketers positioned their products. The advertisements for health products changed gradually over the years from just focusing on the need to prevent pregnancy to a more rational wholesome focus on the properties of the drug and its medical potency (Singer & Wilson, 2009). There was also progress in the development of the reproductive health category with scientists making breakthroughs with drugs that could manage natural biological processes like menopause. Advertisements for new drugs emerged in the 1990s that informed women of new drugs that could help set menopause early (Stockwell, 2012). Other drugs claimed to delay menopause and hence allowing women to experience conception at much later ages. Whether these claims were true or false could only be tested by the medical practitioners. Interestingly, respected medical journals endorsed these claims. Even some of the respected gynaecologists expressed strong agreeing opinion with these sentiments. There is a possibility that this could have been a marketing gimmick developed by the advertisers in order to realize more sales. However, contrary to the 1800s where such claims were taken as gospel truth while it took decades for any contrary expert opinion to reach the ordinary population, the 1990s was an information age and hence made it much easier for the population to get easy access to peer-reviewed journals. This ability enabled the women to compare opposing views and make their purchases from a position of information rather than relying on instincts stimulated by the advertisers. Advertisements about health products were also presented differently from the conventional way that it used to be. Once a product had been developed, and it hit the market, the TV channels invited medical practitioners who had different views about the same drug for live programs in a bid to keep the public better informed. In one commercial ad urging the women to take drugs that help manage menopausal hormone imbalances, one Dr Heartman appeared to discuss a drug for management of loss of estrogen produced by the drug manufacturer, Wyeth (Singer & Wilson, 2009). The doctor tied menopause to other medical condition like the Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and even blindness. In the ad, he urged women to do some informed research on their health and the possible effects of the setting in of menopause before taking the drug. As regulations regarding health practice became more and more strict, the drug manufacturing companies had to be more careful on what they informed the public about (Singer & Wilson, 2009). The general population is now more aware of their rights and privileges than they were during the times of Pears soap advertisement. There have been several cases where users who have developed complicated health conditions have sued the manufacturers for misinformation or failure to disclose all information regarding the negative side effects of the products. In an article in the New York Times of 2009, Natasha Singer highlights the plight of one Ms Connie Barton, who had one of her breasts removed during a mastectomy because she developed breast cancer from prolonged use of the menopausal drug from Wyeth (Singer & Wilson, 2009). This was not just an isolated case. There were thirteen thousand other people who had sued the company for different conditions they developed as a result of using the Wyeth drug. Yet Wyeth is not alone. There have been other claims around the world involving false advertising by companies promising different experiences such as instant weight losses to skin bleaching products that never worked. In the United States, Sensa, a fitness company was ordered to pay 25.6 million dollars to the Federal Trade Commission in consumer refunds for using false advertisement for a weight loss fad (FTC, 2014). Bibliography Chuppa-Cornell, K., 2013, ‘Filling a vacuum: Women's health information in good housekeeping articles and adverrtisements’, Historian, 10(4), pp. 34-49. FTC, 2014. Sensa and Three Other Marketers of Fad Weight-Loss Products Settle FTC Charges in Crackdown on Deceptive Advertising. [Online] Available at: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/01/sensa-three-other- marketers-fad-weight-loss-products-settle-ftc [Accessed 8 May 2015]. Hamilton, S. E. K. a. B. E., 2011, ‘Childbearing Differences Among Three Generations of U.S. Women’, National Center for Health Statistics, 10(1), pp. 202-240. Hill, D. D., 2012, Advertising to the American woman, 1900-1999, Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University. Hutchinson, P., 2008, ‘Magazine Growth in the Nineteenth Century’, History of American Magazine Publishing, 1(1), pp. 34-49. Kempner, M., 2012, Annual Visits to the Gynecologists Have Just Become More Affordable For Many. But Are They Still Necessary?. [Online] Available at: http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/08/06/annual-visits-to-gynecologists-may-have-just-become-more-affordable-but-are-neces/ [Accessed 10 may 2015]. Stockwell, F., 2012, A history of information storage and retrieval, (13th ed), Jefferson, N.C: McFarland. Watkins, E. S., 2012, ‘How the Pill Became a Lifestyle Drug: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Birth Control in the United States Since 1960’, National Institute of Health, 102(8), p. 1462–1472.. Wilson, N. S. a. D., 2009, Menopause, as Brought to You by Big Pharma. [Online] Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/business/13drug.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 [Accessed 8 May 2015]. Read More