The body positivity fallacy in advertising campaigns

In the age of social media, we blame algorithms for creating echo chambers—that is, a narrowing of topics and opinions that limits our broader, more diverse understanding of the world. This phenomenon can ultimately lead to us becoming ignorant of our surroundings. But that isn't necessarily the fault of the algorithms.

Echo chambers form throughout our lives, shaped by the phases we go through: the group of friends in school and college, the profession we choose, the institution we work for. If we aren't careful, we become addicted to viewing the world through the spherical lens of the bubble we inhabit—especially when we consider our civic and professional roles.

For communication professionals, we are living through a transition to a so-called post-advertising era, where we see our work associated with a purpose greater than simply selling and promoting products. This encourages a shift in positioning that must permeate every point, from the supply chain to the message delivered in the media.

With greater access to and proximity with brands, also provided by social media, it has become easier to hold these companies accountable and respond to how they position themselves and operate—hence the increased concern among brands to be more activist and have a clear stance. More than just offering quality products and/or attractive prices, brands now need to have a purpose and an identity that the consumer can identify with. Consequently, the act of consumption becomes political and, ideally, conscious.

But to what extent should we expect or demand that brands, retail establishments, and consumer goods companies take a stand and adopt a political and social position? To what extent is this type of posturing effective, and when does it become a marketing strategy that exploits and appropriates political discourses and movements that may have even been anti-capitalist in their origin? This is what journalist Amanda Mull discusses in her provocative piece “Body positivity is a scam”.

Mull highlights how the topic of body positivity (a positive outlook on one's own body and that of others) became a theme for campaigns by brands like Dove which has been leaning into this narrative since 2004, eventually launching a video in 2014 that went viral. In this short film, women reflected on how the female body and beauty represented in the media are, in fact, the result of photo manipulation.

While the case study diagnoses the fact (and the problem) that women rarely feel good about themselves (or, more specifically, rarely feel beautiful), the subversive message the brand uses as a marketing strategy ends up being, for that very reason, not subversive at all, according to Mull. While women at the time felt more aware and perhaps even relieved to know that the women in commercials and magazines weren't "real," ten years later we are living through an epidemic of Instagram accounts with photos edited on the Facetune app.

After the video went viral, some feminist websites took a critical stance on the campaign, while Dove continued to create new advertising projects, such as the one where they invited women to enter through the door that best described their self-perception: beautiful or average. Then came the viral video of women describing themselves to a forensic sketch artist and women describing others.

Because they were surprising, these campaigns quickly gained traction among the public and other brands that adopted the format for themselves. For Mull, however, this didn't happen because there was a genuine wave of reflection on this problem among the people who, after all, make money producing things that make these same women feel bad about themselves. It happened because brands realized that by running campaigns with the "real beauty" theme, without Photoshop, they gained greater exposure for less investment.

But where did the movement of body positivityoriginally come from? According to Mull, it dates back to the 1960s, when some subcultures began to stage anti-discrimination and anti-capitalist protests against the diet industry. Back then, it was considered subversive to love yourself when you have a body that is constantly vilified and discriminated against by the prevailing culture, which seems to take a morbid pleasure in pointing out flaws rather than reinforcing qualities.

Today, however, Mull understands that body positivity abandoned its radical and practical side in favor of a purely aesthetic inspiration, as if it were a problem easily solved by those looking to sell something: “Brands used to think you should feel a certain way about yourself, and now they’ve decided that’s no longer appropriate for their goals. How you talk about yourself must change, even if nothing has changed substantially to make the way you feel actually change as well.”

In other words, in this discourse of body positivity championed by brands, it is as if self-perception and the ability to love oneself and recognize one's own beauty were something purely internal, unrelated to the circumstances of our existence. It seems, then, that these brands are trying to absolve themselves of the responsibility for having contributed to creating a context of oppression against those who are different and promoting unattainable ideals.

Here in Brazil, for example, a recent Skol campaigneven pointed to a history of sexist posters and the objectification of blonde women compared to beer. As a way to overcome this history and shift their positioning, the brand invited female illustrators to create new posters for Skol.

However, for Mull, when brands feature plus-size models or those with varying skin tones, or decide to highlight cellulite and stretch marks on female bodies, these companies are only reinforcing the idea that the problem is all in our heads and that if we just look at it from another angle, everything gets better. But that’s not really how it works.

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“There is nothing that capitalism cannot turn into a business opportunity, but for this to be a useful marketing tool, body positivity had to be stripped of fat and political activism, sanitized, and very neatly repackaged into something that begins and ends with images. So now, when we talk about the way we speak about our bodies, it is intrinsically related to the idea of who is beautiful and who is not, as if personal beauty were a mandatory requirement to fulfill our lives.”

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For Mull, the moment advertising agencies and brands hire a modeling agency in search of a more diverse cast, it’s as if that alone were enough to make them feel like “heroes,” while the logic of their business operations remains the same: “The body positivity in 2018 has positioned itself right on the line between aesthetics and politics, but no one is going to touch that. What brands and people are least willing to talk about is how having a different body—regardless of whether it is fat, trans, disabled, or a combination of these—impacts a person’s life, how these external conditions affect one’s sense of self-worth, and how corporate interests have long benefited from and sustained structural forces that created inequality.”

In the author’s words, when advertising starts including these new forms of representation in its casting and messaging, it isn't actually doing anything real to alleviate the problem that makes people feel bad about themselves. Even so, Mull observes that brands continue to take credit as if they were above the rest for having "woken up" to the cause—and meanwhile, in the sales department, nothing has changed.

“Instead, media friendly to the idea of body positivity as we know it places the burden on people living in marginalized bodies and inverts the criticism directed at them, which is essentially the same thing that clothing, lingerie, or cosmetic brands have required of us for so long. This time, however, they tell these people they shouldn't be ashamed of their bodies, based on the premise that nothing was ever wrong with them, as if these companies claiming to lead this ‘movement’ hadn't been selling insecurities for all these years.”

For Mull, one of the major problems with this type of advertising approach is that it is never truly deep or reflective about how we reached the point of hating our bodies, hating what is different, and dreaming of unattainable ideals. These messages do not invite reflection on how all these developments are a social construct that becomes tangible in the lives of marginalized people.

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“Women are not taken seriously when they report sexual harassment. Fat people are denied medical treatment due to their weight. Black people are more likely to suffer state violence. Trans people are murdered at much higher rates than the general population. Having certain types of bodies makes you more susceptible to dying a premature, unnecessary, and painful death, for which you will be blamed before your body is even cold. So, I don’t know why it is so confusing and surprising that most people in the world who have these types of bodies don’t feel very good about themselves.”

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In this sense, as much as there is more visibility surrounding these advertising messages, nothing has really changed about how people feel about themselves. In reality, for Mull, this type of positioning has only made people feel even more guilty for not being able to love themselves when everything around them screams: you need to love yourself, we accept you as you are, why don’t you love yourself?

Mull, however, is a lone voice in this struggle to demystify a movement that, after all, is sustained by corporate interests and, therefore, has much greater power and visibility than opposing voices—which are perhaps more faithful to the context, precisely because they live it in their daily lives. Furthermore, not everyone is willing to confront this context head-on.

Sometimes, people just want to buy a soap that works, clothes that fit, and not think too much about their own bodies. But they also don’t want to have a job offer denied because of their appearance or medical treatment denied because of their weight.

To achieve this, however, Mull does not believe the movement starts with the way brands have been handlingbody positivity in their campaigns: it’s not as if starting to love yourself will make the whole world change and make people finally accept what is different. It is a much more structural change than a self-help process that internalizes the fallacy of meritocracy into the human psyche.

While agencies and companies have started hiring, for example, diversity consultants and specialists to assist them with their positioning and transition, there are also those who argue that it is still better to have these market agents speaking out and promoting a shift in perspective regarding the world and diversity, rather than continuing to follow the old logic.

Regardless of whether these discourses are driven by the market and corporate interests, there is also the "better late than never" perspective. What Mull does in criticizing this new advertising wave is to emphasize that, more than just making beautiful ads, it is important to acknowledge historical mistakes and the responsibility these brands bear for having contributed to the formation of this structural context, thereby planning a deeper and more genuine turning point than one simply based on aesthetics, imagery, and media messaging.

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