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Introduction
This study documents the multimodal analysis of cosmetic surgery advertisements in British clinics. Specifically, flyers from three clinics have been analysed throughout this study. The analysis has considered the textual and visual elements used to pass the messages to the targeted audience. It describes how advert discourses utilize the ideal female body in the leaflets to increase their profits due to increases in cosmetic surgery. The targeted audience is persuaded with the prevalence of the feminine ideology, which in most cases, start from and continue to be enhanced by consuming cosmetic products and services to meet mens expectations. Thus, men define what they believe an ideal female body should be equated to, thus pushing them to fit in the social pressure. It is essential to note that women willingly choose to undergo surgeries, which have diverse consequences. However, it is difficult for them to resist the pressure partly because they are influenced by supermodels, whom they consider their ambassadors when it comes to some product consumption and cultural and social acceptance. Thus, the current research reveals that these ideologies can be studied using multimodal realizations, such as through assessing the hidden messages in text, colour, and images.
Multimodal Analysis of Cosmetic Surgery Advertisements
This chapter describes the background of the multimodal analysis of cosmetic surgery advertisement based on the approach given by British Cosmetic clinics, which major in surgery and body transformations. It delves deep into understanding the concept of advertisement and its application in the cosmetic industry. It also enumerates the research aims, which guide this study. The essence of this section, therefore, is to provide an in-depth understanding of the issue under investigation and to achieve the research objective by providing needed responses to the key explorative problems.
Background
The Concept of Advertisement
Advertising refers to the means of communication in which sellers or businesses lure consumers to use the products or services. Product promotion requires the publicity to create a message that focuses on and inspires the targeted market and pays some defined costs to make their promotions reach the intended people (Hidayat et al., 2020). In the current world, advertising is present in almost every corner of human interaction, particularly in social media and other discourses such as magazines, newspapers, journals, radio, press, mail, events, and peer endorsements (McLoughlin, 2017). The advertising industry comprises several categories of people and organizations working to ensure that their leaflets can reach the intended audience and impact it. There are advertising companies, advert creators, media, editors, visualizers, designers, market researchers, and brand managers (Lee & Lau, 2018). The business that wishes to advertise its services or products have to hire advertising agencies with experience and content to make the advert capture the intended market.
The definitions of advertisement adopted for this study focuses on informing and persuading target customers to buy a particular product or service from a specific organization. This is a general approach to understand the concept of product promotion. Apart from persuading the buyers to purchase a certain item, advertising can also help the seller achieve other outcomes. Firstly, according to Jang and Moutinho (2019), promotions help an organization to generate product demand. In this case, the advertising done pulls the goods and services through different distribution channels and noting the business, which does the selling. In essence, the advert made results in increasing customers demand for the service, product, or idea. This enables the owner of the business to sell products in large volumes to the targeted audience.
Secondly, advertising acts as a way to preview new trends in the product line or industrial standards. A product, service, or concept snapshot enables the seller to motivate its target consumers to obtain the items sold as they would not need to be left behind in what the world finds fashionable at any specific time (Shareef et al., 2017). Businesses offer coupons, trial offers on the new productions, and rebates to acquire new customers and induce those who already exist to try the new products and services.
Thirdly, advertising helps to provide information to the target customers. This is important, especially when a business, which promotes its products, wishes to decode some misleading information in the market. According to Anshari et al. (2019), by advertising, an organization can supply the necessary information to the target buyers to understand some of the concepts about the product or service and know where products are available and can buy them. Information is critical, especially when a service or product line affects human life, such as cosmetic surgery. The next section describes how advertisements are used in the cosmetic industry to provide information and persuade the targeted audience to buy or use certain products.
Advertising in the Cosmetic Industry
Social media platforms and magazines have various contents, which relate to the cosmetic surgery industry. Beauty attracts users from different parts of the world, and they become targets for the manufacturers and sellers of such products. The beauty industrys main contents comprise campaign, advertisement or news about launching a new brand (Ringrow, 2016). Simultaneously, advertising options also vary due to the availability of different platforms. Most of them emphasise the image of customers who undergo surgery to become more perfect than advantages of certain plastic surgery clinic overall. These options are print, TV, radio and Internet advertising, as well as mall boards.
One can note that radio advertising is the most distant in terms of the images and beauty standards use due to its limitations in their visual presentation. In other words, it is easier for a plastic surgery clinic to describe its advantages through radio advertising, rather than to convey the need for changes through a short verbal message. Nevertheless, this type of advertising has its benefits as it is usually short and catchy. Such audio messages are also often repeated and make the listeners remember them, since they hear them several times during driving time , or on the way from home to work and back (Cohen, 2010). Thus, although this type of advertising is not suitable for analysis in this research, it must be considered.
TV advertising has some similarities with radio, but, at the same time, differs in the key ability to spread images. A similar feature is that marketers need to know exactly the demographics of their audience, as well as the time at which the ad is seen and accepted by as many people as possible (Cohen, 2010). Without these elements, even the best commercial is a waste of money. Simultaneously, the advantage of television is that it can broadcast different types of images, such as the results before and after operations, model images of ideal bodies and faces or specialists in the workplace. In other words, TV ads can grab the viewers attention in many ways, without focusing only on the ideals that people should aspire.
Internet advertising has even more options and advantages as it is not limited by time and format. For example, it can be a photo, video, text message with useful information or call to action, which displays clinics services. Simultaneously, the images and messages of advertisements can differ significantly depending on the benefits of clinics, as well as the level of morality and ethics that determines the use of accents. For instance, one clinic may advertise post-trauma rhinoplasty surgery while others focus on womens sexuality according to typical male-centred beliefs. However, most often existing and emerging businesses use social networks to extend their target markets through advertisements and representations of female bodies to create specific narratives about the products and services they offer (Appel et al., 2020). Nevertheless, since Internet advertising has many options, it is difficult to analyse it from a certain perspective, so conclusions can only be drawn from the systematic analysis.
At the same time, such kinds as print advertising and mall boards are suitable options for analysis as they use the visual images that are limited by one moment and, therefore, usually convey the main trend of plastic surgery advertising. According to Cohen (2010), mall boards are a more effective way to advertise because they are visible due to their size and are located in places of consumers concentration. At the same time, print advertising in magazines is the most common type, which has the same message conveying characteristics, namely a vivid visual image and short text message (Cohen, 2010). Consequently, the analysis of print advertising in magazines is most relevant, since it summarises the most common trend in drawing attention to plastic surgery. The main argument for confirming this idea is that print advertising is an effective way of sending the message through visual imagery that also has its limitations, which forces marketers to choose accents.
Cosmetic surgery focuses on enhancing appearance through medical and surgical techniques, and it can be applied to all areas, from head to toe. Even though this invasive physical practice is risky and painful, people are still willing to take this risk and suffer the pain. It is because they desire to modify their body and achieve the dream of a perfect body. The questions are, why do people need to be perfect, and what does perfect mean in their interpretations?
When browsing social networking sites, reading magazines, and watching television, it is unavoidable to be bombarded with zillion female images, mainly young girls with skinny bodies, flawless skin, beautiful faces, or luxurious backgrounds. The television makeover programs, testimonials in beauty magazines, and advertising posters are all highly promoting cosmetic surgery, and social media even directly advocate the fake perfection . Under this circumstance, women feel guilty about every flaw and imperfection on their bodies and arouse a sense of inferiority that they are born to be changed on physical aspects (Brooks, 2017). This circumstance implies that the advertising and media overemphasize the importance of female physical attractiveness in different relationships, create the beauty canon, and naturalize the objectivizing female bodys ideology. Unlike other discourses, cosmetic surgery advertising produces and promotes the ideologies and utilizes them to achieve its economic goals. Under this circumstance, it is crucial to explore how persuasion can be achieved and what underlying ideologies and influential values in the advertisements promote mainstream thoughts. More importantly, it is critical to investigate how influence denaturalises the veiled ideologies and values.
Lirola (2009) revealed the gender inequalities and gender violence through the analysis of the advertisements. It stated that males had a privileged position in society while females were still inferior. Women were defined by physical appearance, and their bodies were utilized as an object to adapt to societys wishes (Lirola, 2009). This mainstream value was promoted by advertisements that are androcentric and male-oriented. After a decade, it is time to re-examine whether the ideology and values that the advertisements are still male-defined, the female self-identification and values conform to societys patriarchal demands or not, and the differences of using the female body images in the advertisements.
The current research focuses on deconstructing the representation of the female body in cosmetic surgery advertisements. Multimodal analysis is adopted to discover how the perfect body is mediated visually and textually, especially in advertisements that strive to persuade the recipients to conduct cosmetic surgery. This study shows how the visual elements are connected with the textual elements and how this combination shares the sexualized female bodys ideologies.
British Cosmetic Surgery Clinics
British cosmetic surgery clinics offer beauty products such as make-ups and body transformations, depending on the needs of the users. In this analysis, three texts from Transform Cosmetic Surgery Clinic are analysed for different aspects of multimodal language use to achieve the intended goal, which is to persuade their targets to use the products the organization offer. The analyses present an in-depth understanding of how the advertising company uses different approaches to communicate the intended message to the target customers.
Aims of the Research
This study aims to investigate how cosmetic surgery companies use both verbal and visual features in advertisements to persuade women to undergo plastic surgery, and deconstruct the ideology of beauty in society.
Literature Review
The Concept of Multimodal Discourse Analysis
Three different approaches exist and can be used to conduct multimodal discourse analysis. The first is the social semiotic modality formulated by Jewitt (2013). This particular viewpoint focuses on using choices to make meaning of any discourse. The second point of view is MDAs use, developed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2001), following Hallidays model (1967). The perspectives mentioned above differ in their particular stress on the sign-maker. The third technique is the multimodal interactional analysis, which according to Jewitt (2013), addresses a dimension of the social semiotic that conventional multimodal analysis does not seem to commonly address and focus on how multimodal texts are interfaced with and mediated by people (p. 33). More focus is placed on MDA, which defines the goal of the current research.
One of the multimodal discourses that have existed for several years is Barthes (1977) in Rhetoric of the Image, where he reviewed the link between image and language as tools for expressing meaning. MDA raised several concerns regarding its application in academia. However, despite such criticisms, multimodal discourse continues to be used in vast academic fields. In its prosperity in academia, this analysis is used in two ways: multimodal metaphor and systematic functional linguistic (SFL). The multimodal metaphor approach studies the discourse using the cognitive perspective. On the other hand, SFL interprets the functional link between language and social structure. Apart from the two scholars mentioned above, other researchers have contributed tremendously to the growth and stabilization of MDA, such as Martinec (2000) and OHalloran (2004), who discussed the aspect of systemic function. Still, other studies have continued to find how different disciplines can contribute to understanding the multimodal discourse analysis. For instance, digital technology was adopted in 2002 and resulted from annotation and analogue of complex MDA (LeVine & Scollon, 2004). The main aim of the efforts put in this area results from the need to understand different aspects used in the advertisement, such as in cosmetic surgery.
The logico-semantic expansive relations, projections, and representation, which results from language grammar, can also link the multimodal texts visual and verbal aspects. The shift to social expositions within linguistics transposed the attention of how the use of language shapes. This turn to social approach agrees with the theory formulated by Halliday on the social functions of textual language. Metafunctions appear to be higher-order constructs of meaning instead of being particular to a single language (Ledin & Machin, 2019). On the other hand, metafunctions can be viewed as meaning potential, which refers to the implied meaning or action resulting from any specific set of modal resources. Halliday refers to this as every semiotic fulfils a function of ideation, which represents the internal and external sides of the world, and serves the interpersonal function, which enacts social interactions and relations (as cited in Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, p. 15). This implies that any particular text has an element that coherently interrelates with each other. These specific features link with the relevant environment, which accomplishes textual function.
Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) went further to study and develop concepts that could also help understand MDA. According to them, one can visually realize ideation, textual, and interpersonal functions using composition, which comprises information value and salience, the modality of vectors, and framing. Van Leewen (2005) and Maier et al. (2007) opined that both verbal and visual modes function together, except that most of the time, either of the modes extends or elaborate its meaning. Lemke (1989) reiterated that ideational metafunction offers textual dimension and has features of verbal and visual symbols that can be decoded through multimodal transitivity. On the other hand, interpersonal metafunction provides facet to words, conveying, and interacting with the intended audience (Lemke, 1989). Furthermore, the textual metafunction comprises the interrelatedness and linkage between written words visual and verbal components. Thus, there is a need to understand how to construct models that describe images in relation to the text.
There have been efforts to connect images and text to make a better judgment of the visual elements. Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) came up with a model describing the semiotic pictorial resources and how they are used. Consequently, this resulted in the formulation of the systematic functional grammar framework and adopting a visual design grammar (Kress & Leeuwen, 2006). According to the concept, the visual structures are viewed as linguistic components. The various segment of this model presents a specific function, which interprets unique experiences and creates social interactions. For example, in communication achieved through visual representations, one has to choose between different interpretations and, at the same time, express the diverse social interactions using variations of colour or the structure used to compose the image.
Multimodality considers both communication and representation to comprise more than any language offers by being more attentive to different communication methods such as gaze, colour, pictures, posture, composition, and topography. It asserts that these components lead to the transfer and generation of meaning when they are combined. Each component has a meaning potential, which defines its propensity to transfer meaning. The full denotation of any element can be realized only when it exists in its entirety. MDAs purpose is to know textual meaning and power based on how they activate different modes, including verbal, aural, and visual (OHalloran, 2004). It is possible to systematically deconstruct texts using semiotic analysis with MDA, which has been used to analyse several domains, including magazine covers, movies, online advertisement, motion pictures, commercials, surgical websites, and books.
Research Questions
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How do the companies use idealized female body image to achieve economic goals?
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Are the ideologies of beauty still male-defined?
Methodology
This section provides the methodology used to gather data utilized in the project. In this multimodal discourse analysis, samples of three articles from the British Cosmetic Surgery Clinic are examined, because of the regions known cosmetic industry. The texts were taken from one of the British cosmetic surgery organization known as Transform Cosmetic Surgery Clinic, which is renowned in entire Britain for offering high cosmetic surgery services and treatments. The three advertisements from the Transform Cosmetic Surgery Clinic were selected for this study because they are considered aggressive in terms of publicity.
Advertisement is a multimodal discourse, which contains pictures and texts. These elements are considered interrelated in terms of creating meaning to the flyer. A poster can also be used to send messages to the intended audience. However, poster advertising is mostly a one-way communication tool used by several companies to pass the intended idea. In particular, this is possible because the bodies that are embedded within the signs are often representational. The images used in the posters can help the audience to understand the messages that the advertisers are trying to pass since the pictures create an emotional appeal. However, when catchy words accompany the images, they often engage the readers more than plain posters.
Since advertisements that use text to accompany visual images tend to engage the audience more, this project uses multimodal analysis to decode how the adverts verbal and visual components work together. In particular, the approach used in this analysis considers visual and textual characteristics. The three main elements of visual characteristics include the following:
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Prominence: describes the interactions of several factors (such as image, letter size, choice of colour, placement) and concerns the size of the pictures comparing with the written text
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Frame: describes whether the elements appear in the text are placed together or apart.
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Information value: describes the placement of the texts within the advert. For example, left to right, centre to margin, and top to bottom.
The analysis was followed by talking about colour schemes and the subjects gaze and positions. For instance, in the advertisement used in this project, all the women are tanned and young, which indicates the characteristic of the intended audience of these texts. The women in the images wear very few clothes, which partially reveal their breasts through the low neckline. The private sphere is represented by ones body and the openly displayed sexuality, which is a significant aspect of the younger population. Modernity has used feminist nakedness until transforming it in practice at the same time codified and considered in terms of money or commercialisation.
As for the textual characteristic, the verbal components found in the text may enhance the visual aspects of advertising the messages. Companies tend to incorporate texts to promote themselves beyond the visual representation of the product they sell. The words enable businesses to brand themselves in ways that integrate and socialize with the intended audience. Terms such as transform , enhance , suit up , and experts have been used to send specific messages to the target population. These words are written in large letters, hence easy to ready, and integrate well with the images. This makes it easy for the viewers and readers to understand the intended message. This aims of this section is to explain the transitivity patterns that develops from the textual to the visual elements in the text. It will analyse in stylistic and description and transitivity structure and verbo-visual coherence.
Visual Grammar
Visual grammar was proposed in 1996 by Kress and van Leeuwen based on the findings from semiotic school, which was mainly concerned with illustrating linguistic written words. Halliday (1967) saw language as a depiction of semiotic mode represented by ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions. Kress and van Leeuwen built their theory by redefining the words used by Halliday, such that they called them representational, interactive, and compositional metafunctions, respectively. In this new definition, representational connotation focuses on how pictures created in any particular piece represents the participants used in the image. It is split into the narrative and conceptual representations, according to the Transitivity framework developed by Halliday. Narrative representation gives extensive actions and events, change processes, and transitory spatial arrangements.
Interactive meaning concerns the social links between interactants and evaluative orientations that actors or reactors adopt towards one another and to the area symbolized by the text. Its discernment relies mainly on attitude, modality, contact, and social distance. Social distance describes the links between the viewer and the producer of the image and the represented participant as a frame size function. Attitude categorizes image into objective and subjective, thus deeming them naturally neutral. Contact describes the demand relation between the represented and the targeted audience and then conveys the intended meaning through offers and demands following Hallidays four speech acts. Lastly, modality emanates from linguistics and describes the credibility of statements concerning the world and explores its markers roles, such as colour differences, saturation, and differentiation.
On the other hand, compositional meaning associates the interactive and representational pictorial meaning using framing, value, and salience. The value of information mainly deals with the placement of components and their attached trusts. The information can be arranged in different layouts based on the designers understanding of culture and the target audience. Salience describes the factors considered in the hierarchy of placing various elements based on their sizes, focus sharpness, and total contrast. Lastly, framing refers to the link between connectedness degree and differentiation. However, it is critical to understand that framing and salience offer practical know-how for image interpretation, though it can result in over-interpretation since the researcher can be subjected to unusual decisive meanings. Citation
Multimodal Analysis of Three British Cosmetic Surgery Clinic and Discussion
Text 1. Transform the way you look, love the way you feel (source). The current research is based on British cosmetic surgery clinics and beauty magazines to expose the narrative around lean bodies resulting from clinical interventions. In this study, three images from Transform , a top cosmetic surgery clinic in Britain, are analysed. Each of the images from the firm presents unique messages to the intended targets. The advertisements discuss major visual and linguistic features of the magazines to help decode and understand the meanings hidden in the flyers multimodal texts. The leaflets are produced to convince the women to consider using cosmetic surgery to transform their bodies and become monuments of beauty in their society, even though the advertisement primary goal is to make the clinics generate profit.
The perspectives taken in this study to decode texts written and visualized helps to understand social practice and behaviour. According to Van Leeuwen, (2008), Social life can be seen as networks of diverse social practices, including economic, political, cultural, familiar practices and so on. Social practices are more-or-less stable forms of social activity which always, or almost always, include discourse (p. 23). Regarding cosmetic surgery, the social practices persuade the viewers of advertisements to feel inadequate to meet the normal standard, thus desire to modify some parts of their bodies to be as that of their idols, yet without considering possible consequences of their actions.
Visual Features
The different visual elements that help in constructing meaning in the pictures clarified using visual grammar, which uses frames, prominence, and information value to explain each element in the advert. After analysing these features, the significant features used to represent hidden meanings such as colour and gaze are considered. Each of these elements exists in the pictures and serves different purposes based on the designs used.
Text 2. Transform yourself (source). Prominence describes the combination of text and image and other attributes related to their specific features such as the relative size of the texts and image, colour, and placement within the flyer. Frame indicates whether texts and images are placed together at the same point or separated in distinct places. This is an important aspect of understanding the relationship between the two elements and their effects on the targeted audience.
Frames form an important aspect of multimodal textual composition, mainly because they point out various text elements. All the texts analysed in this research are placed in different parts of the flyers. In Text 1, for instance, the words written to accompany the image illustrate the main goal of the advert. These include the emphasis on transform and love , which immediately captures the eye and mind of the viewer, especially women, who process the information to mean that they will love themselves after transforming their bodies through cosmetic surgery
In Text 2, the words are placed at the right and left and top and bottom of the flyers. The text on the left is distinct Transform , which is pushed to the side of the back, thus making her curve at the back more pronounced. The texts on the right are diverse. First, the most notable one is yourself , transform , placed at the upper part of the woman, and constitutes a trajectory that links the ladys beautifully curved breasts with the rest of the body. One can easily identify that the theme is Transform Yourself , which combines the text on the left and that on the right, making the audience scan through the body when reading the texts. There are writings at the top of the advert and the lower part, however, they are not visible at first glance. Moreover, the words are written in both horizontal and vertical orientations, making the viewer glance at the cleavage in a different direction, hence looking directly at the womans breasts, which is focal of the flyer.
Text 3 is a bit different from the first two, particularly with respect to the orientation and placement. There is no particular textual orientation on either the left or right or top or bottom. However, the placement of the words Enhance your Confidence. Transform yourself is made through the body as this gives the viewer a closer look at the body of the person in the flyer, hence contemplating the meaning of those words and seeing their evidence on the image.
Colour Scheme
Colour is an essential element in multimodal analysis because it presents a vast amount of information. All the women are tanned, which creates a more fulfilling and pleasing to the viewer, mainly because it removes biases. Bright colours are used in Text 1 while black in Text 2 and 3. Using these two colours accompanied by their smiles represent the vibrancy and universality resulting from cosmetic surgery. Moreover, the black colour symbolizes the authority and strength these women possess to speak about and defend cosmetic surgery. Blue and its various shades dominate the background used in two of the three texts analysed, representing royalty and power. According to Kress and Van Leeuwen (2002) and Van Leeuwen (2011), colours can highlight different features of the participants in an adve
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