Fighting whom? A critical approach to marketing communication of skin whitening product in Taiwan

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the discursive formation of non-multimodal and multimodal text for promoting skin whitening products from 2006 to 2020. Text types include advertorial articles, product naming, graphic adverts, and commercial films. It is found that the fighting metaphor treating melanin or blackness as a target to expel, suppress, or eliminate is predominant in both written and visual texts. Throughout the analysis, the results suggest that the skin-whitening discourses intersect and promote the unequal power relations of the macro-structures of gender, class, and race. Following the findings, concerns about the application of fighting metaphor and rhetoric of skin whitening products in globalized society are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual communication
• marketing communication
• fighting metaphor
• localization and globalization
• critical analysis
• branding

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).