Sociocultural changes and portrayal of women in advertisements: A temporal investigation across product categories

Abstract

We investigate how sociocultural changes impact the creative aspects of advertisements. We theorize that the sociocultural changes resulting from improvement in education standards and economic development improve the status of women in society. Next, we draw from the literature on self-congruence to argue that women with an enhanced status reject their decorative portrayal in advertisements and favor an empowered portrayal. As a result, marketers seeking to elicit a favorable response from consumers change their creative strategy to portray women in less decorative and more empowered roles. We analyzed television advertisements from the past 20 years across five product categories in an emerging economy. We find support for our key prediction and demonstrate a boundary condition for this effect. We show that the reduction in decorative portrayals is more likely to manifest in product categories where women exercise influence and not otherwise.