Reflection of Changes in Social Gender on Advertisements: A Semiotic View on Advertisements for Women

Advertisements are in a mutual interaction with cultural and social structures of societies in which they are produced. Social values and assumptions are reflected in advertisements and they are reproduced and reinforced through them. Therefore, besides actively affecting context of advertisements, social gender codes are influenced by them. This mutual interaction creates a significant discussion topic. In this context, based on the continuous changes in social understandings of gender roles, advertisements aim at creating a reflection of this process and results of it. The goal of this study is to present society’s understanding of gender and the image of woman in scope of the changes in recent years and to analyze its reflections on advertisements for women. For this reason, commercial films of cosmetic brands whose target audience is women are chosen with purposive sampling method and they are analyzed through semiotic analysis method. At the end of the research, it is seen that changes in the aspects and values attributed to woman in society are reflected on advertising messages. It is determined through different researches that, until recently the image of women were represented generally through the roles of ‘traditional woman, mother, wife, sexual object’; but it has turned into ‘powerful and independent woman’ image in parallel with social changes. It is observed that messages about this image have been delivered with the emphasis on ‘change’ in these advertisements. It can be said that the message of ‘women have the power of breaking the rules’ is the basic highlight of analyzed commercial films