Week 4: Media, ideology, and hegemony: media meanings

L’Oréal’s newest advertising campaign: “Never your fault” involves feminism, analyzing the relationship between the ideas and values ​​conveyed in the campaign and the commercial interests of the sponsoring company.

Paris L’Oréal campaign ‘Never Your Fault’

Early this year, Paris L’Oréal released their campaign ‘ Never Your Fault’ and released a movie for International Women’s Day. for its Stand Up against street harassment training program during International Anti Street Harassment Week. Since L’Oreal is the world’s leading beauty brand, most of its advertising/ campaigns are about beauty/female empowerment, which is fascinating to study.

Let’s start with the relationship between the ideas and values conveyed in this campaign.  According to the Delphine Viguier-Hovasse, Global President of L’Oréal Paris(2023). The main idea of this campaign is to shift the mindset on sexual harassment by sending a message to women that “It’s never your fault, your clothes, nor your make-up.” Besides the Moive, L’Oréal has also provided a program to train people on how to react safely when experiencing or witnessing it, based on the 5D’s methodology created by Right To Be, an international NGO expert in the fight against harassment of all forms(L’Oréal Paris 2023). These activities of the event embody the main values of supporting women, breaking society’s accusations against victims, and promoting a more positive and correct understanding of sexual harassment. More importantly, this campaign expresses the key values of L’Oréal Paris and breaks down the barriers that prevent women from safeguarding their self-worth. It also conveys that the brand will not support things that are against its values, such as street harassment, etc.

The campaign demonstrates the brand’s commitment to promoting social values such as inclusivity, equity, and respect. Such a concept not only helps build a positive image of the brand but is also closely linked to the advocacy of social justice. In the current environment that emphasizes social responsibility, these values can enhance the public’s favorability and trust in the brand. However, these activities seem to express the brand’s support for women’s rights. They are arguably propaganda methods based on corporate commercial interests. This is the so-called “popular feminism.”

Popular Feminism

Sarah Banet-Weiser (2019) explains that feminism has gradually been packaged by the media and businesses into a commodity or concept that can be sold, and popular feminism is often a kind of corporate feminism that is also based on a capitalist framework. Such as feminist campaigns by celebrities such as Taylor Swift and Emma Watson,.etc.

Just like L’Oréal Paris, they use female empowerment as a marketing theme to enhance their brand image, but behind it is capitalist logic, aiming to attract consumers and increase attention and sales. This includes their different activities entitled “Empowering the Community”. “Promoting social inclusion of women through inclusive purchasing” “It’s never your fault” and so on. These events are carefully planned by marketers to support the company’s business interests. Take the “Never Your Fault” campaign as an example, which is specifically targeted at the female group. L’Oréal Paris specifically chose to launch this campaign during International Women’s Day and International Anti-Street Harassment Week to maximize brand exposure to target customers (women).

As a brand with international influence, L’Oreal has indeed made certain contributions in promoting feminism. However, its “Never Your Fault” campaign is nominally aimed at changing the minds of others, but in fact, it only targets individuals for propaganda. As Sarah Banet-Weiser points out, this approach ignores the collective and intersectional politics of feminism and therefore fails to truly promote political change (2019). The training program provided by L’Oréal at this event was limited to individual-level participation and was unable to form effective collective action. In the end, the values ​​and concepts advocated by this event became one-sided and became popular feminism dominated by business, unable to truly change the social structure.

If even big influencer brands representing women rely solely on popular feminism, is feminism slowly progressing, or is it stagnating?

Reference:

• University of Oxford (2019) Sarah Banet-Weiser: Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/empowered-popular-feminism-and-popular-misogyny
• L’Oréal Paris 2023, “Never Your Fault”: L’Oréal Paris Launches Stand Up Street Harassment Training on Roblox, viewed 31 October 2024, https://www.loreal.com/en/news/commitments/l-oreal-paris-stand-up-contre-le-harcelement-de-rue-en-lancant-sa-formation-sur-roblox/.