Osječki zbornik, Vol. Vol. 30 No. xx, 2011.
Original scientific paper
Ideological construction of women in the interwar period: advertisments of Georg Schicht factory
Željka Miklošević
; Odsjek za informacijske znanosti, Filozofski fakultet, Osijek, Hrvatska
Abstract
The Yugoslav factory of Georg Schicht was founded in 1921 in Zagreb as part of Schichts concern which produced and sold toiletries mostly in Central European countries. In 1928 the company merged with a Dutch company Margarine Unie and in 1930 formed part of Unilever, the world's largest multinational company in the oils and fats business. Socio-economic aspects of three laundry products by the Georg Schicht Company - the Jelen and Lux soaps and the Radion laundry powder - have been explored in this paper through their advertisements published in newspapers and magazines in the period between the two world wars. Appearing regularly in the print media popular with the Osijek readership, Schichts ads on the one hand witnessed to the socio-political, economic and cultural climate of Osijek and Croatia within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and, on the other hand, facilitated discursive construction of social and economic identities of women. They caused and reflected developments which led to a change from the traditional society based on agriculture to corporate capitalism, mass production and consumption, bringing Croatia and Osijek into line with the contemporary European and global trends.
A general turn towards a new marketing principle to advertising through consumption enticement based on non-rational or symbolic grounding occurred in the mid-1920s. The development of a new way of thinking about commercial persuasion went hand in hand with changes in the print media caused by the use photography and art which allowed for innovation in the associational dimension and argumentation. Images shown on ads attempted to present less the performance of the very product and more the qualities desired, or considered desirous, by consumers, such as state, glamour, happy families.
Forming part of modern social communication, advertisements for Schichfs laundry product show those products as part of wider social goals and processes by forming social and individual meanings associated with the material characteristics of the products. Characterized by their reliance on social resources in constructing messages as well as the introduction of illustrations with their ability to communicate those message at a glace the ads belong to the second stage of advertising - the symbolic product - the stage which adopts strategies that shape social motivation for consumption. In contrast to contemporary advertising practices and resulting ads which require considerable interpretation skills, these ads show a direct correlation between the text and images. The text in effect explains the image to the extent that it is a verbal translation of the picture, or vice versa. It assumes a role of interpreter of illustrations and a certain educational role in teaching people visual language and thereby the language of advertising messages.
Schichts products dominated over the Osijek print media during the 1920s and 1930s period through forceful advertising campaigns. Ads for the three products analysed in this paper demonstrate the ways in which advertising reflected as much as helped shape gender ideology in the public media space.
With its visual and textual elements, each of the ads represents particular social group and relies on their aspirations, especially those traditionally seen to belong to women. The traditional feminine categories have for a long time been shaped by popular ideology through strategies devised to consolidate consumer society with the help of mass media. Popular images of women and femininity defined by commodities reinforced womens role in mass consumption, and their roles of mothers and/or housewives. Women were on the one hand seen as acquiring fixed meanings primarily related to family functions in an effort to reinstate the traditional divide of gender roles in the post-war society. On the other hand, consumer society which laid the foundation of modernity, provided women access to the public domain, the real one at department stores, and the discursive one in the mass media, presenting them as modern participants in the social and economic developments. The duality present in the discursive construction of female identities is discernible in the ads for the Schicts products explored in this paper. Advertisements for the Jelen soap were marked with national, traditional ethnographic features and the predominant message of womens role in the household economy by their wise choice of this cost-effective and efficient product. The private sphere of home was also underlined by the ads for Radion which defined women as proper wives and mothers whose free time saved by the product is invested in the care of the home and its members. Conversely, ads for Lux brought an alternative to the domesticity-laden messages of the two previous products. They showed new women as independent and self-indulgent individuals. By comparing social groups at whom the ads and their communicative methods were directed, it can be concluded that the ads for the Jelen soap was designed to target low classes, including rural population, the Radion detergent ads were aimed at bourgeois families whose prerogative was family happiness rather than saving, while the Lux soap ads were intended for consumers of higher financial standing by their very promotion of the product for expensive clothing materials.
In the turning point of advertising, that of shifting to an organized field of market studies and laying the foundation of todays persuasion practices, Schicht’s advertising machinery reflected the general Western European industrialisation and consumption trends in the interwar period but was also adapted to the local circumstances, its particular social, economic, and political characteristics.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
207165
URI
Publication date:
20.12.2011.
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