The Background of the Study

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CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

Chapter one contains the background of the study that explains the detail about social pictorial of beauty in advertising campaign, what the subjects of this present research are, and, in a brief explanation, what theories are employed. The background of study also provides the reasoning of why the research is worthy to conduct. Furthermore, this chapter explicates the topic of the research, problems to discuss, the goals of the study, and the organization of the thesis.

1.1 The Background of the Study

Born naturally as man and woman is a faith that human being are blessed with. As time goes by, society constructs the paradigm that woman are interconnected with beauty. Lakoff and Scherr as cited on Rondilla 2012: 12 share their point of view that ―the desire for beauty, or at least for attractiveness, possesses every woman to consider her looks as a vital part of herself‖. As the result, it shapes women to love to keep themselves up with beauty, do some treatments in order to make them more beautiful, apply some products on their face and body, and do anything else to beautify them. In higher level, the beauty of women is even contested through the international well-known contest called the Miss Universe. As posted on www.misuniverse.cominfohistory this worldwide beauty contest has been established since 1952, and since then, this beauty contest makes ―countless young women around the world vying to become a part of Miss Universe history‖ official website of Miss Universe. The procedures to join this contest are not easy but many young women still willingly join this beauty contest. From the previous example, it can be concluded that women always want to look beautiful and be recognized as beautiful in their surroundings, by the people around them. In line with those facts, the demand for beauty products is increasing. The beauty cosmetic companies are keen to take advantage of this situation by providing and introducing the upgraded products as well as doing promotion to make their products accepted in the targeted market. Through the existence of media, the cosmetic companies are trying to introduce their goods and services, in the form of advertising campaign. As a survey conducts by Kissmetric, a blog about analytics, marketing and testing, on their webpage https:blog.kissmetrics.comtop-ad-spenders, three brands of cosmetics companies including Proctor Gamble CO PG, – with their products like Olay and Covergirl – Johnson Johnson – with their product Aveeno – and L‘Oreal – with their products like L‟Oreal Paris, Garnier, Maybelline New York, and Lancôme – spend most cost on advertising to boost their brand. The products that they launched through advertising campaign in media are no longer solely sold as the product itself. Unknowingly, it is also granted with information, ideology and properties capable of effectively conveying implicit and explicit meaning to the target audience. In advertising campaign, the uses of language or graphical material like motion or motionless pictures images are as the strategy to market their products, which become the aid to contribute to how they construct their identity Goddard, as cited in de Cort: 118. In brief, the language use, especially in the advertising campaign, becomes the advertising producers instrument to bring up the sentiment and trigger the desire to buy and use the products. Thus, a significant meaning of the speaker‘s utterances can be strongly enhanced by multiple semiotic resources like language, visual images, sound, space, color, etc. This study is aimed at finding out the concept of ideal beauty on the selected advertising campaigns from different well-known brands such as L‘Oreal, Estee Lauder, Garnier, Shiseido, Fit Me and Olay. Those advertising campaigns are published in Marie Claire Magazine March 2015 edition, read and taken online from http:www.magastack.comissue5725-marie-claire-usa-march- 2015 accessed on 19 February 2015. The face treatment product advertising campaigns are served in an interesting appearance, both in their visualization and wordings. A specific discourse is found in those beauty product advertising campaigns, which is used to construct woman‘s beauty for their targeted market. To help finding out the concept of ideal beauty on the selected advertising campaigns, three methods, including Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis of O‘Halloran 2008, enhanced by Generic Structure Potential of print advertisement by Cheon g 2004 that rooted from Hasan‘s 1996 theory of Generic Structure Potential of print advertisement, Systemic Functional Linguistic especially the Transitivity and Mood Analysis of Halliday 1994, and Intersemiotic Texture of O‘Halloran 2008, are employed. Multimodal Discourse Analysis is used because this study works with print advertising campaigns which employ more than one mode of meaning working in one context, while Systemic Functional Linguistic especially the Transitivity and Mood analysis help the analysis of linguistic elements in print advertising campaign, and finally Intersemiotic Texture support the analysis to find the relationship between the visual and linguistic elements use in the advertising campaigns to reveal the meaning of it through interpretation. From all reasons and background mentioned above, this study is worth to conduct because it presents a fresh and deeper look on how to work with Systemic Functional- Multimodal Discourse Analysis based on Kay L. O‘Halloran‘s 2008 frame work. Hopefully, this study will be able to gain people‘s understanding on how to study print advertising campaign by using Systemic Functional- Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach, and further will help them developing their way of thinking and criticizing advertising campaigns.

1.2 Research Topic