Introduction
Advertising is a crucial part of the marketing strategy of any company. Its objectives include promoting products, targeting a specific audience, raising clients’ awareness of the brand, and increasing sales (Elfhariyanti et al. 134). This essay aims to analyze the Garnier Fructis shampoo advertisement shown in fig. 1 and discuss its target audience, elements including visuals and language, explicit and implicit messages, as well as cultural impact.
Product Description and Target Audience
The Garnier Fructis fortifying shampoo is a care product designed to clean one’s hair. As can be seen in fig. 1, the ad poster depicts a young woman with long, silky hair who holds a green bottle of shampoo with her fists. The product’s slogan is “the strength to shine,” and the promised effect of the shampoo is to “save up to 1500 strands per month” (“Garnier Fructis”). The target audience of this advertisement includes women aged between 15 and 50 years, namely those that seek to reduce hair shedding and strengthen their hair.
Visuals
This advertisement uses visual elements to appeal to the audience’s emotions. The character in the poster is a young woman that embodies the main standards of beauty in modern American society. She has a well-defined oval face, clear, fair skin, and long smooth brown hair with silky structure and significant volume that many women strive to have. Furthermore, she is wearing subtle makeup that enhances her natural beauty without being too prominent, which corresponds to modern fashion trends. Some females with less voluminous hair or hair loss problems might feel insecure about themselves upon seeing this image. In other words, this ad uses pathos to appeal to its target audience and promote its product.
Another key element in the poster is the shampoo bottle. The model demonstrates it to the viewers as she holds it between her fists. This position aims to visualize and emphasize the shampoo’s ability to strengthen hair. In this regard, the brand uses graphics to create the link between this Garnier Fructis product and strength, appealing to women’s emotions and desire to improve their appearance. Furthermore, the green color of the product and text can be associated with healthy and safe ecological ingredients of the shampoo. This belief is reinforced by the use of the blue sky as the background for the image, which further highlights how natural and healthy the product is.
Language
The use of language in this advertisement appeals to the audience’s insecurities, fears, and needs. In particular, it offers women an opportunity to “save up to 1500 strands per month” (“Garnier Fructis”). Thus, hair shedding is considered an adverse phenomenon even though this process is natural and caused by various factors. Furthermore, the ad promotes the idea of “stronger, fuller-looking hair,” which portrays women with thin hair as not so good-looking (“Garnier Fructis”). Such a narrative is wrong since hair structure is majorly affected by genetics, ethnicity, and other factors beyond one’s control (Koch et al. 1). Therefore, the use of pathos allows the advertisers to convince women to buy this product and improve their hair’s looks.
Furthermore, the logos approach is utilized to present arguments that seem reasonable and factual to the audience. Such words as “breakthrough innovation,” “fortified fruit science,” and the “Fall Fight System” imply that the product’s efficiency is proven and evidence-based, making some people believe in its quality (“Garnier Fructis”). This message is supported by the list of shampoo ingredients such as caffeine, fruit vitamins, and fortifying biotin (“Garnier Fructis”). Nevertheless, a critical approach to these statements can reveal the unsubstantiated nature of the product’s ability to strengthen hair.
Explicit and Implicit Messages
The Garnier Fructis advertisement explicitly aims to sell its fortifying shampoo. At the same time, it conveys several implicit messages, such as the importance of female beauty and the link between women’s hair strength and confidence. Overall, hair product ads often promote ideas that address people’s insecurities and offer a solution to the problem. The Garnier Fructis shampoo uses a combination of language and graphic elements to support its messages.
Cultural Impact
The cultural impact of this ad should be analyzed with regard to its main ideas. The Garnier Fructis poster emphasizes the product’s benefits for the target audience, supporting a common belief about the importance of female physical beauty. According to Elfhariyanti et al., “shampoo advertisements have different ways to construe beauty standard in society through the visual and linguistic elements” (134). Therefore, this advertisement promotes the harmful idea of emphasizing women’s appearance and linking it to confidence and strength while ignoring inner characteristics.
Conclusion
To conclude, the Garnier Fructis shampoo advertisement uses several graphic and linguistic elements to convey explicit and implicit messages and persuade clients to buy its product. In particular, it appeals to its target audience’s feelings and desire to improve their appearance, which is common for care product advertising. At a broader level, such an approach influences society as a whole by emphasizing certain ideas and shaping people’s way of thinking.
Works Cited
“Garnier Fructis.”Jenpatryn.
Elfhariyanti, Annisa A., et al. “A Multimodality Analysis: Construing Beauty Standard in Shampoo Advertisement.” Pioneer: Journal of Language and Literature, vol. 13, no. 1, 2021, pp. 134-147. Open Journal Systems, doi:10.36841/pioneer.v13i1.935.
Koch, Sandra L., et al. “The Biology of Human Hair: A Multidisciplinary Review.” American Journal of Human Biology, vol. 32, no. 2, 2019, e23316. Wiley Online Library, doi:10.1002/ajhb.23316.