Make it happen: A study of verbal and non-verbal signs representing feminism in an English language advertisement in ESL setting

Abstract

Advertisements are a powerful medium of communication because they often embed social messages in a few words or visuals. One such advertisement is the focus of the current study: Maybelline’s Make It Happen advertisement which conveys strong feministic values via the use of verbal and nonverbal signs. Being a product of mainly women’s interest, the advertisers bank upon the prevalent geopolitics to convey a dominant ideology: Women are equal competitors to men, and they can achieve this without having to forego all that they identify with their ‘being’. The study set out to (1) identify verbal and nonverbal signs in the Maybelline Make it Happen advertisement and (2) examine how the verbal and nonverbal signs present feminism values. The study uses a qualitative method and two theories in analyzing the data: Semiotic Theory by Saussure as cited by Daniel (2002), and Theory of Feminism by Abramovitz (1996). The finding shows that the verbal signs in this advertisement typically use motivating sentences which represent feminism values, while the nonverbal signs use colors, body language, outfits of the models, and the circumstance around the models, all of which play an important role in portraying feminism values.