A Political World: Brands and the Representation of Migrant Women in Advertising

Today’s marketplace offers various opportunities for global brands to showcase their identity and values following the trend of taking stances on social and political injustice issues. The activist messages, thus, appear in the marketing strategies of the brands through advertising to place themselves in the partisan topics. Immigration has been an emerging point in this day and age with the discussions on the issue globally due to the changing policies and increasing number of people migrating. Prior studies investigated the representation of immigrants in different media mediums, such as newspapers, which suggested common discourses associated with the immigrants: victims and threats. In relation to these depictions, Western society is also suggested to be attributed to responsibility towards the immigrants who are in worse conditions. Although the invisibility or the superficiality of women as immigrants is lightly acknowledged in a few studies, there has not been an extensive exploration. Therefore, this research discovers how marketing exploits immigrants within their representation of (women) migrants through advertising. The intersectionality between immigration and feminism also pinpoints to gendered dimensions of immigration messages. In light of this purpose, the research examines ten digital audio-visual commercials retrieved from YouTube, through a critical discourse analysis driven by social semiotic analysis. With the intersemiotic translation, the research analyzes both the visual representations and audio elements. During the analysis, the theoretical literature is considered, as well as the specific observations deriving from the data with the context-boundedness. The findings indicate that the immigrants’ visibility changes due to gender with less visibility or stereotypical roles (e.g. maternal) attributed to women characters. Although the migration becomes more feminized with more women migrating, marketing does not allocate a space for independent women stories as much as their counterparts, and this approach silences their experiences. Furthermore, immigrants’ visibility through empathy and hospitality is targeted for the Western audience to take responsibility based on the vulnerable images of immigrants, while the threat notion is aimed to be overcome with humor and irony by illustrating the immigrants with potential. The results also revealed that the brands mostly abstain from taking rigid stances and prefer to showcase themselves as inclusive and diverse without stressing the discussions around immigrants. The research concludes that marketing exploits immigrants to display a better image for the brands by contributing to the othering of immigrants, since neither all actors are involved, nor the immigrants are given an opportunity to tell their own stories. Accordingly, the research emphasizes the need of building regulated approaches in depicting immigrants in advertising due to ethicality.