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The Beauty Industry

    Though dated, a 1992 study by Soloman et. al. discusses the importance of fashion and beauty editors in creating culture, calling them “symbolic encoders” and “cultural gatekeepers” (p. 24). Researchers worked with 18 editors from popular magazines such as Glamour and Elle as they made choices on pairing certain (female) models with certain products in advertisements. The results confirmed researchers “beauty match-up hypothesis” in which they speculated that high priced, high fashion products like Chanel No. 5 would be given a model who adheres to a hegemonic standard of what they called classic beauty: female, physically flawless, caucasian (p. 25). For the purposes of my research, I’m interested in this study for what it has to say about about fashion and beauty editors and choice. Insofar as it is true that media shapes culture, the people in editorial positions are cultural gatekeepers. If they are adhering to hegemonic norms (such as in the Chanel No. 5 example above), they make the point that the fashion and beauty industry is perpetuating narratives that are rooted in patriarchy, white supremacy and misogyny.

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The Role of Social Media

    In 2018, Schwemmer and Ziewiecki did a study in which they conducted an automated content analysis of nearly 140,000 YouTube videos and quantified those videos for product promotion. They found the particularly in the beauty and fashion sector, “influencers” play a large role in product promotion and advertising. They discussed the implications of that finding, such as the struggle for viewers to differentiated between commercial and noncommercial platforms like YouTube. Similarly, they discuss how much more impactful influencer marketing can be, because unlike traditional marketing, influencers seem trustworthy. Insofar as they chat casually about their personal lives, the audience (often young, female) feels as though they have a bond/friendship with that person (p. 10). Since Glossier launched with an enormous web of “micro-influencers” across media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Twitter- an analysis of influencer marketing and its effects will be crucial to my analysis of the brand. Moreover, influencer marketing doesn’t work in a vacuum. Noting the literature above, these influencers exist within an industry coping with a number of identity and justice issues. By promoting products by brands that adhere to hegemonic norms, they are assenting to a cultural mode that may not be in the best interest of viewers or the influencers themselves.

 

Marketing In Conversation

    In June 2018, Marketing Week interviewed Glossier’s president and chief operating officer Henry Davis to talk about the brand’s marketing strategy. In the interview, Davis said their marketing strategy is different than traditional marketing because rather than being secretive and manipulating the customer into buying products, it’s all about their direct-to-consumer style. It’s about being in constant conversation with customers (generally via social media), asking and answering their questions and creating products based on those answers. I was shocked to find a quote from Davis in which he reflects on a question the brand asked its followers: “What celebrity would play a [facial] cleanser in a film?” The answer: Emma Stone and Eddie Redmayne by a landslide. As the article states, “both actors have milky white skin.” From that answer, the brand created what is still their one and only facial only cleanser, Milky Jelly.

 

Hegemony, Empowerment and Agency

   Sumi Kim's 2008 study on feminist discourse and hegemony in mass media suggests that while media has made shifts to incorporate and even celebrate the feminist narrative, it continues to maintain its roots in hegemony. My study uses Kim's definition of feminist theory as "Feminist scholarship treats gender, sexuality, and the experience of women as a primary category of societal organization and focuses on the construction of gender roles in society and how it holds certain power establishments in place. One feminist concern is the media portrayal of women. It is argued that women’s position as oppressed in patriarchal capitalism has been reproduced and maintained by the aid of ideological practice via media. (p. 392)" 

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In a 2018 critical discourse analysis by Søren Vigild Poulson, Poulson analyzed the polysemic meaning in Dove’s Supreme Cream Oil Body Wash ad contest on Instagram. He discusses how, in some ways, participants of the contest were exploited insofar as they promoted Dove on their personal social media accounts for free. The contest was also for women only. On the other side of the coin, there was a narrative of empowerment and authenticity as the women had a choice about whether to participate, they had creative control of their advertisement and ad campaign used “real women” instead of models. His findings were that while many women were encouraged to participate in many different ways, the company was still in charge of who would be seen and who would not. Moreover, the woman who finally won the ad contest was “young, thin and white” which suggested the contest “did at times function hegemonically” (p 19). Glossier runs a similar marketing strategy in which they reward women who post about their products by featuring those posts on their Instagram account. This study will provide a model against which I can compare the images Glossier chooses to repost.

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Gill (2008) does a critical analysis of women’s representation in contemporary advertising. She makes the case that women’s sexual agency in advertising is perhaps not empowering as intended but rather a “technology of discipline and regulation (p. 1).” Since Glossier frequently depicts womxn fully or partially nude on their Instagram page, but generally only when they are reposting selfies the womxn have taken themselves (agency), this analysis is a critical piece of understanding such posts through a poststructuralist lens.