An exploration of advertising values and beauty ideals manifest in print advertisements of cosmetic brands: A content analysis of Boots No.7

With the development of business, technology, science and globalization, the cosmetic market all over the world has become larger and potential. The robust growth of the sales of cosmetic in UK cannot be ignored. Advertisements are considerably important for the promotion of products, and advertising values and beauty ideals are two important factors included in the advertisements, especially for the cosmetics advertisements. Many previous studies did researches into advertising values and beauty ideals respectively, but there were few studies aiming to study the interrelationship between advertising values and beauty ideals. Boots No.7 is viewed as the leading cosmetics retailer in UK at present and Boots continues to be the largest advertiser by far. The purpose of this research is to explore the advertising values and beauty ideals separately of the cosmetics advertisements through analysing print advertising of Boots No.7 in the different past periods. In addition, the interrelationship between the advertising values and beauty ideals of Boots No.7 in print advertising will also be explored through comparing the different past periods of Boots No.7. Content analysis is used in this study. Meanwhile, Pollay’s 42 values manifested in advertising and Solomon, Ashmore and Longo’s 8 beauty ideals will be used as standards to identify the print advertisements of advertising values and beauty ideals respectively in the different past periods of Boots No.7. This will be helpful to further examine the consistency of beauty ideals and advertising values of the print cosmetics advertisements, and how they influenced with each other by analysing Boots No.7 during the different past periods. The implications of the findings for understanding advertising values and beauty ideals, and the interrelationship between these two factors in the print advertisements of Boots No.7 are discussed. This contributes to further understand not only the brand Boots No.7 but also the situation of advertising values and beauty ideals in the print advertisements of the cosmetic industry. Meanwhile, some suggestions will also be proposed in this study