Session 14: 'Stay Unfair. Stay Beautiful.'

Thousands of years ago, Egyptians used wall paintings and papyrus to write messages to communicate with each other. These mediums of communication were also used for sales messages. This form of marketing communication is known as advertising. The main purpose of advertising is to encourage, persuade and manipulate the people into taking a certain action. Advertising is the industry of our time. Also known as “the only true new art form”, it increasingly influences our lives. Although advertising charms many people into buying the products or availing certain services, however, it leads to a negative impact on the lives of many by ideological manipulation, encouraging consumerism and aggressive behavior. 

A major hidden effect of advertising, which people generally find hard to spot, is the presence of imperialist mindset. This concept can be explained clearly with the help of the example of Sunlight Soap. Modern day advertising began because of the Sunlight Soap, the first product of Lever Brothers. The brilliant invention used in addition to the tactfully handled marketing strategies, was the first soap to be given a brand name. The producers of the soap knew which audience to target. They played to the insecurities of the women in Britain and increased their sales. Not only this, Sunlight Soap was also exported to different continents all over the world due its rapidly gaining fame. In a short period of time, Lever Brothers established a monopoly in Congo, Africa. Slowly imperialism started to set in. 

Imperialism is basically the disparate human relationship based on the ideas of mastery and ascendancy. In this case, the white has established supremacy over the slave labor of Africa, which was the black. Sunlight Soap gradually spread to all the British colonies, especially where white dominance was observed. Imperialist tendencies in the colonies were combined with the sale of Sunlight Soap as an attempt by the British Empire to “remove the darkness” from their colonial subjects. The black community in its effort to be like the ‘superior’ class, spent excessive amounts of money on these products. The spread for imperialist powers was fueled by the need for raw materials. This fuels into big Western capitalism and leads to a large scale flow of wealth from the East to the West, just as in colonialism. Modern day fairness creams sold widely in the subcontinent are a reflection of early advertising. These advertisements are not satisfying consumer needs, they are trying to change who the consumers are. Like mice trapped on a running wheel, consumers are caught chasing after a durable satisfaction they cannot even achieve. Even though the era of colonialism is thought to be finished, the presence of these advertisements just reinforces the colonial mind-set. 

Nandita Das, a leading Indian actress and director has started a campaign ‘Dark is Beautiful’ in India, where majority of the population is obsessed with having a fair complexion. This also reflects a form of ideological hegemony eventually leading to problems such as consumerism in the society.