The future is female: Femvertising and attitude formation towards beauty brands

Many beauty brands make use ‘femvertising’ which has piqued the interest of South Africa Generation Y and Generation Z female consumers. Femvertising has been studied quantitatively; however, limited research has been conducted from a qualitative perspective, and within the South African context, on the influence of femvertising on attitudes to beauty brands. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the influence of femvertising on attitude formation towards beauty brands among South African Generation Y and Generation Z female consumers. Understanding this influence proves essential to marketers as Generation Y and Generation Z female consumers are becoming the largest, most powerful consumers of beauty brands. This study was conducted using a descriptive, qualitative approach. Three group interviews were conducted, during which questions were posed about femvertising and the ‘attitude towards the advertisement’ model. The findings were analysed using deductive content analysis, which indicated that femvertising does influence Generation Y and Generation Z women’s judgements about beauty advertisements, which in turn influence their beliefs, feelings and attitudes towards beauty advertisements and beauty brands. Advertisers can use femvertising to increase awareness, interest about beauty brands and stimulate positive emotions that will lead to positive attitudes towards femvertising advertisements and beauty brands.


INTRODUCTION & BACKGROUND
The 21 st century has brought about a number of significant changes in the social acknowledgement and perception of feminism. Although the empowerment of women and gender equality has improved over time, gender biases and stereotypes are still implemented and portrayed in the media (Grau & Zotos 2016:762). Subsequently, femaleempowered brands and organisations have taken a stand against the stereotypical portrayal of women in the media and in advertising; and this has given rise to feminist advertising, termed 'femvertising' (Drake 2017:593). Femvertising has grown due to social media which is commonly used by Generation Y, those born between 1980 and 1995, and Generation Z women, those born between 1995 and 2015. In South Africa, Generation Y and Generation Z women in tend to be more open-minded and highly opinionated, and prefer beauty brands that reflect their strong feminist views (Gil 2018). Hence it is imperative that marketers consider Generation Y and Generation Z consumers' attitudes towards femvertising and beauty brands, as they are becoming better educated, and are entering the workforce, potentially making them one of the largest and most powerful consumer groups, with high disposable income (Gil 2018;Potgieter & Doubell 2018:69). This study therefore aims to explore the influence of femvertising on South African Generation Y and Generation Z women's attitude formation towards beauty brands.
This article contributes to the body of South African femvertising knowledge by providing a foundation for beauty brand marketers to improve their advertising appeal to the feminist consumer -a market currently presenting significant growth. The article starts with the specific research questions and objectives of the study, followed by a review of literature on feminism, femvertising and attitude. The research process is then outlined and the findings are presented. Subsequently the recommendations and managerial implications are discussed and the limitations of the study are highlighted.

PROBLEM STATEMENT
Despite the aforementioned, few previous studies aim to explore the influence of the specific antecedents of attitude. Moreover, most of the previous studies have been quantitative in nature, and their results do not provide sufficient in-depth information that would help researchers and marketers to understand the influence of femvertising on attitude. What is more, there is a lack of research on femvertising in South Africa. Due to the recent increasing number of women's empowerment and feminist movements, and the push for gender equality in South Africa, it is deemed necessary to gain insights into feminism and its impact on advertising in South Africa. Therefore, the paucity of qualitative research on understanding the influence of the antecedents of consumer attitudes on femvertising reinforces the need for this study.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
The research objectives formulated to guide the research are provided below.
1. To explore the influence of femvertising on judgements about beauty advertisements.
2. To discover how judgements about femvertising influence beliefs about beauty advertisements.
3. To understand the influence of femvertising on feelings about beauty advertisements.

4.
To discover how feelings about femvertising influence attitudes to beauty advertisements.
5. To explore how attitudes to beauty advertisements influence attitudes to beauty brands.

Feminism
The term 'feminism' refers to equality of the sexes (Angelique & Culley 2003:190;Johnson 2007:3). Since the 19 th century, feminism has experienced significant changes. These have been used to classify the movement into four 'waves', which are presented in Table 1

Second wave
• Took place between 1960 and 1980.
• Addressed social issues such as discrimination, workplace equality, gender norms, and sexual and reproductive rights. • The media and advertising portrayed women only as mothers and housewives.
Phillips and Cree (2014:11) Rampton (2015) Third wave • Took place between the 1980s and the early 2000s • Emphasised on equal rights and opportunities to women of colour as well as women in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities. • Beauty standards, gender roles, and gender norms were challenged by women. • Emphasises on female racial and transgenderism issues, rape, domestic violence, and the abuse of women. • Social media is used where women express their views and opinions, for example, the #MeToo movement.
Rampton (2015) Edwards-Levy (2018) Great strides were made towards accepting feminism in nations such as the United States of America and Europe, where feminism is far more advanced than in emerging nations.
Feminism has only quite recently become openly accepted in emerging nations such as South Africa and is discussed in detail in section 4.2 below.

Feminism in South Africa
South Africa has been known to be a patriarchal nation due to the norms, customs, and

Femvertising
'Femvertising' is defined as advertising that portrays the empowerment of women through the use of pro-female messages, talents, and personalities (Drake 2017:593 Despite this, femvertising has still been found to be successful. A study conducted by SheKnows Media (Skey 2016) proved that most Generation Y women are more likely to recall a brand with an empowering advertisement, and close to 50 per cent of women switched between brands when advertisements depicted women as strong and empowered.
Moreover, femvertising is 80 per cent more likely to be shared, liked, and commented on in social media, especially among Generation Y and Generation Z women (Sylvendhal 2017).
Previous studies have aimed to examine the influence of femvertising on consumer behaviour and are presented in Table 2.

Drake (2017)
The impact of female empowerment in advertising (femvertising)

Quantitative Attitudes
Purchase intention

Emotional connection
The female respondents who were exposed to femvertising had higher ad opinions, enhanced purchase intentions, emotional connections, and brand favourability. However, there was little to no influence on their perceptions of gender stereotypes. Respondents felt indifferent to gender portrayal in ads, as they are accustomed to the contemporary view of women's roles in society, and are thus not offended.

Rodrigues (2016)
#Femvertising: Empowering women through the hashtag? A comparative analysis of consumers' reaction to feminist advertising on Twitter.
Qualitative Perception

Self-identification
Attitude It was found that women who were exposed to femvertising messages had a positive attitude to the campaigns, and were most likely to praise the brand for its initiative, positively identify with the brand, and share the campaign.
The previous studies presented in Table 1 have explored numerous impacts of femvertising on multiple constructs, including attitude in general; however, few of them aim to explore the influence of the specific antecedents of attitude. Moreover, most of these studies have been quantitative in nature and there is a lack of research on femvertising and attitudes in emerging markets and specifically in South Africa. The 'attitude' construct is explored in detail below.

Attitude
'Attitude' is defined as a learned predisposition to behave in consistently favourable or unfavourable ways towards a given object and is a driver of behavioural intention ( Attitudes are formed in multiple ways, however, for the purpose of the current study, the 'tricomponent attitude' model and the 'attitude towards the advertisement' model will be discussed.

Tricomponent attitude model
The

Conative
The conative component of attitude refers to the likelihood that an individual will behave in a particular way towards a given attitude object (

Attitude to the advertisement model
'Attitude towards the advertisement' is defined as a predisposition to respond in a consistently favourable or unfavourable way to a given advertising stimulus during certain   To explore the above-mentioned influence in more detail in South Africa, he research process presented in section 4 outlines the way in which the study was conducted.

RESEARCH PROCESS
The six steps proposed by Berndt and Petzer (2011) were used to guide the research process for the current study.

5.1
Step 1: Defining the research problem and research objectives The research problems, research objectives have been proposed in sections 2 and 3.

5.2
Step 2: Selecting the research design A descriptive, quantitative research design was followed due to the exploratory nature of the topic. Using an interpretivist approach, the researcher aimed to gather an in-depth understanding of femvertising in South Africa by exploring varying opinions presented by participants. To gauge participants' opinions, group interviews were conducted. Group interviews are similar to focus groups, however comprise a smaller number of participants, usually between two and four participants (Frey & Fontana 1991:177). Having fewer participants allows the researcher to gain in-depth, rich data yet still obtaining shared views from the group on the research topic (Krueger & Casey, 2014:56).
Despite the advantages associated with group interviews, there are some ethical issues which include providing consent, good conduct as well as maintaining confidentiality and anonymity (Sim & Waterfield, 2019:3036). To obtain consent, the researcher provided participants with an explanatory statement, highlighting what is required from the participants as well as a consent form to read and sign. The researcher then briefed the group about the conduct of the group interviews which related to being willing to share their own opinions as well as respecting other's opinions. To maintain confidentiality and anonymity all participants were referred to as participant 1, participant 2 and so on. Despite the email addresses that were obtained by the researcher in order to communicate with potential participants, no identifiable data was used in the group interview.

5.3
Step 3: Planning the sample A two-stage sampling process was followed, using non-probability sampling techniques. In the first stage, the participants were purposefully selected from the target population to ensure the participants represent the target population of the study. Purposive sampling was selected due to the nature of study, which required a specific group of participants who met certain inclusion criteria (Sharma, 2017:751). The inclusion criteria applied to the sample participants of this study was a) the participant had to be between the ages of 18 and 40 (the age range for Generation Y and Z consumers) as this is the focus of the study, and b) considered herself as a feminist.
The second stage in the sampling process consisted of snowball sampling. Snowball sampling was used as it was difficult to obtain participants who met the inclusion criteria

Step 4: Collecting the data
To commence data collection, the researcher approached potential participants at the University of Johannesburg and asked them whether they were between the ages of 18 and 40 and whether they considered themselves as feminists. Those who met the inclusion criteria were then provided with the explanatory statement to read. Participants' email addresses were obtained and were emailed about the meeting place and time of group interviews which took place at a central, public location convenient to the researcher and the participants. Once in the venue, participants were then provided with a consent form to read and sign and the researcher discussed the conduct or 'ground rules' for the group interview.
Participants were then shown two examples of femvertising campaigns to facilitate the discussion including the Dove Real Beauty campaign (Bahadur, 2014) and the Always Ultra #LikeAGirl campaign (Keffler, 2017). The group interviews were guided by five broad ideas deduced from the literature on femvertising and attitude formation. These included Femvertising's effect on participants' 1) opinions; 2) beliefs; 3) feelings and 4) attitudes towards beauty advertisements; and 5) attitudes towards beauty brands. The group interviews were audio and video-recorded to gather rich data. In order to maintain trustworthiness the researcher used Lincoln and Guba's criteria which was applied to the study as follows: An in-depth description of the data collection process was provided to ensure integrity of the study.
An audit trail was also created to analyse narratives provided by the participants, to prove the anticipated themes.
Shortcomings of the study were recognised in section 6; limitations of the study. Dependability Data collection process (Shenton, 2004:70) Reflective journal (Shenton, 2004:72) A comprehensive description of the research design was provided, detailing the data collection process.
A reflective journal was compiled after the data collection process to evaluate the success of the overall process.

Step 5: Analysing the data
To analyse the data collected from the group interviews, deductive content analysis was used. Hashemnezhad (2015:60) posits that deductive content analysis is commonly used when the purpose of the study is to test a particular theory which is grounded in previous knowledge. Furthermore, deductive content analysis is used to explore existing phenomena in new contexts (Elo & Kyngäs, 2008:111). In relation to this study, the Aad theory, an existing theory, was used to determine attitudes in a new context; femvertising. To conduct deductive content analysis Naupess (2019:2061) suggests starting with specific observations and objectives, which are then analysed and interpreted into a more general observation to draw conclusions. As with the current study, the ideas presented in the Aad model guided the research objectives which were analysed to provide an overall view of feminists' attitudes towards femvertising.
The steps proposed by Erlingsson and Brysiewicz (2017:95) were used to deductively analyse the data.
Step one included familiarisation with the data and using the hermeneutic spiral, in which the researcher read and re-read the transcribed interviews and made notes of their initial impressions. The researcher checked and compared participants' perspectives on the overall research topic. Once the researcher became familiar with the data, step two was to divide the text into meaning units and then condense the meaning units. To do this, the researcher identified meaningful statements in line with the research questions, which were used as meaning units. This assisted the researcher in completing step three, formulating codes. The researcher created codes that best described the meaning units, using one label to assist in identifying connections between them. Once the codes were created, the researcher developed categories and themes pertaining to the research objectives (step four).

5.6
Step 6: Presenting the research report The research report includes presenting the findings of the data analysis. The findings of this study are presented in section 6 below. Each research objective is addressed with its relevant finding and a brief discussion.

KEY FINDINGS AND MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS
To commence the group interviews, the researcher posed a number of general questions about feminism to gauge how female Generation Y and Generation Z consumers felt about the topic. In general, it was discovered that the women from these generational cohorts believed that feminism is about equality between men and women, women's empowerment, and eliminating gender stereotypes. The definitions of feminism obtained from participants prove the definitions of feminism as provided by Angelique and Culley (2003:190) and The second part of the focus group related to femvertising and attitude specifically. To present this section, a discussion of the overall findings is provided with respect to each objective.

RO1: To explore the influence of femvertising on judgements about beauty advertisements.
It was discovered that femvertising did indeed influence participants' judgements about beauty advertisements. However, there were mixed findings about how femvertising influences participants' judgements. A few participants felt that, although advertisers are trying to incorporate more feminists in their advertisements, they tend to include either the 'extreme activist', or a beautiful person, both extremes being non-inclusive of a 'regular girl'.
These participants felt that few or no advertisements included the 'average woman' to whom they could relate. This finding is line with results presented by Wang (2018:59) who conducted a content analysis on femvertising campaigns and found that many of these advertisements included women in their advertisements who had an unattainable self-image for the 'everyday feminist'. From the current study it was also discovered that women in these advertisements tend to be portrayed as angry and aggressive, and that some advertisements are facilitated by men who do not fully understand feminism, which suggests that femvertising had a negative impact on their judgements about the beauty advertisements. Some excerpts from the interviews are presented below: '…my judgement is that these ads are not inclusive […]  '…the definition of beauty from back then has expanded now because now they are using all types of women…now everyone can be beautiful…my judgement towards these ads [is] positive because now it resonates with everyone, and they feel like they are beautiful and included in the brand…' Overall it was discovered that there were mixed findings in relation to the type of influence of femvertising on judgements. In order to have a positive judgement towards an advertisement, average women and feminists need to be part of the advertisement in order to resonate with the feminist consumer.

RO2: To discover how judgements about femvertising influence beliefs about beauty advertisements.
The majority of participants mentioned that the way they judge the advertisement does influence their beliefs. It was again reaffirmed that having women in an advertisement to which participants could relate and with whom they resonate positively influences their beliefs about the advertisement. Some participants mentioned that they can relate to celebrities who are feminists, and others mentioned that having 'normal, everyday women' would increase the believability of the advertisement because participants can relate to them. Results from a content analysis conducted by Wang (2018:59) support this finding as many femvertising campaigns either use celebrities or 'average women' as they are more appealing to feminists. Moreover, findings from the current study show that participants' beliefs about these advertisements would include its sincerity, and therefore be more positive. Femvertising was also said to motivate participants to want to purchase the brands in the advertisements, especially when feminists are part of the advertisement and women aspire to be like them, which is in line with findings by Drake (2017:597) yet contradict findings by Kapoor and Munjal (2019:150). One participant also mentioned that femvertising is breaking down the gender stereotypes associated with women's roles in society and giving rise to what the 'new feminist' is all about which confirms findings by Akestam et al. Overall it was discovered that femvertising does have a significant influence on feelings about beauty advertisements. In general, positive feelings such as pride, trust, confidence, inclusivity, and excitement were aroused when being exposed to femvertising.

RO4: To discover how feelings about femvertising influence attitudes to beauty advertisements.
All participants mentioned that the type of feelings they have about the advertisement would influence their overall attitude to the advertisement. For participants who have experienced positive feelings when being exposed to the advertisements, it was affirmed that their attitude to the advertisement would also be positive which is supported by Kapoor and In general, feelings about femvertising, whether positive or negative, were discovered to influence the attitude to beauty brands significantly.

RO5: To explore how attitudes to beauty advertisements influence attitudes to beauty brands.
Some participants mentioned that having a positive feeling about an advertisement creates a positive attitude to the advertisement and, in turn, leads them to having a positive attitude to the brand. This finding was supported by Rodrigues (2016) and De Meulenaer Dens, De Pelsmacker and Eisend (2018:907). These participants felt that the way the message is portrayed in the beauty advertisement would determine whether they have a positive attitude to the brand. It was discovered, furthermore, that consistency between the beauty advertisement, the message conveyed, and the beauty brand was key in influencing the overall attitude to the brand which was proven by Abitbol and Sternadori (2016:131). One participant reaffirmed that if she perceived the woman in the advertisement to be a feminist to whom she could relate, she would have a positive attitude to the brand. The participants also affirmed that, if they have a positive attitude to the brand, they would be more likely to trial and purchase the brand; some would recommend the brand and others would be willing to stand by the brand. Participants mentioned that they would be willing to share reviews of the advertisement or the brand through social media. Moreover, having a positive attitude to the advertisement leads to potential brand loyalty and helps brands remain top-of-mind.

LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY
Although this study contributes to understanding the influence of femvertising on attitudes to beauty brands, as with all research, it is not without its limitations. The methodology for this study followed a deductive, qualitative approach and, as such, the findings cannot be generalised to the greater population. Future research can, however, use the findings from this study to inform quantitative studies that can investigate further the relationships between each construct and then be replicated in the greater South African population. This study, moreover, was limited to female Generation Y and Generation Z consumers. Future studies can explore the influence of femvertising using older generational cohorts to provide valuable insights into generational targeting and ways to advertise to them. Future research can also be conducted into various other industries to get the male feminist's opinion about femvertising. In addition, due to the numerous segments in the beauty and personal care industry, future studies could be replicated in particular segments to discover whether the influence of femvertising differs between segments.

RECOMMENDATIONS FROM THE STUDY
The findings of this study can be used to assist marketers and advertisers in understanding how female Generation Y and Generation Z consumers identify themselves as feminists in order to improve their targeting. Advertisers can use femvertising to increase awareness of and interest in their advertisements and beauty brands, as it was discovered that having a positive attitude leads feminist consumers to share content on social media and share recommendations with their friends.
Currently many femvertising campaigns use aspirational women in their advertisements; advertisers should also include more 'average, everyday women' in their femvertising campaigns. Through these advertisements, advertisers should also focus on evoking positive feelings in feminists, such as pride, confidence, inclusivity, trust, and excitement, as it was suggested that having an emotional attachment to an advertisement impacts positively on the brand.
Advertisers should also ensure that the advertisements they create for beauty brands are centred on creating positive attitudes through the messages conveyed, the women used in the advertisements, and the feelings they evoke. If all of those aspects are positive and consistent, then feminists from the Generation Y and Z cohorts will most likely have a positive attitude to beauty advertisements and brands.

CONCLUSION
This aim of this study was to explore the influence of femvertising on attitudes to beauty advertisements and beauty brands. The findings from the study show that, overall, femvertising positively influences Generation Y and Generation Z women's judgements, beliefs and feelings which, in turn, positively influence their attitudes to beauty advertisements and beauty brands. Advertisers can therefore use the findings from this study as a foundation for creating femvertising campaigns to stimulate trial, increase purchases, generate recommendations, and enhance brand loyalty.