Scholarly Research and the Future of Body Aesthetics in the Sport Marketing Literature

Academy of Marketing Science Review,  2008  by S, George,  Konstantinakos, Pantelis D

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

George S. Spais is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Marketing at University of Peloponnese, Department of Sport Management, Lysandrou 3 str. 23100 Sparti, Greece, tel.0030-27310-89.664, gspais@uop.gr

Scholarly Research and the Future of "Perceived Body Aesthetics"

in the Sport Marketing Literature

INTRODUCTION

The cultural implications of body aesthetics are prominent in every culture and have a strong influence on the way men and women are perceived. Across the world, different cultural perceptions uphold an ideal of beauty that is linked to sexual appeal and social status. In this paper, we will outline some socio-cultural behavioral descriptors that influence perceived body aesthetics. In particular, we will focus on providing a better understanding of the construct of perceived body aesthetics in the marketing literature. This discussion will incorporate a series of empirical evidence that will confirm the need of reframing the construct of body aesthetics and to confirm that body ideals are different among cultures. We will try to understand that body image concerns from the standpoint of perceived body aesthetics, rather than body aesthetics, may be a more productive and inclusive approach to the study of socially and culturally diverse young customers of sporting goods. The discussion will end with interesting implications for policy-makers and sport marketing scholars.

Body dissatisfaction is important because of its established association (e.g., Silverstein and Perlik 1995) with depression, low self-esteem, and disordered eating. Much of the research on body dissatisfaction and particularly research on disordered eating, has focused on the effect of the extremely slender ideal female body types found in Western Europe and North America. By the late 1960s, the voluptuous "sweater girls" of the 1940s and 1950s had been replaced by very slender, almost boy-like, fashion models (Lamb et al. 1993). Objective measures of cultural beauty ideals such as Playboy centerfolds and beauty pageant winners have confirmed this trend (Garner et al. 1980; Morris, Cooper and Cooper 1989; Wiseman et al. 1992). As many authors have noted (e.g. Garner et al. 1980; Rodin, Silberstein and Striegel-Moore 1984), for most women this extremely slender body type is both unhealthy and unobtainable. It is thus not surprising that adoption of the thin body ideal has been paralleled by women's decreasing satisfaction with their bodies (Feingold and Mazzella 1998). As Brumberg (1997) and many others have noted, it seems paradoxical that at the very time when social changes have greatly increased available roles and opportunities for women, social expectations of female body types have become increasingly rigid and unrealistic, deviations from these expectations have produced increasingly negative social reactions and self-evaluations, and large numbers, probably the majority, of young Western women have learned to judge their bodies by unhealthy, unrealistic, and unobtainable standards.

The rapid decline of socialism and the adoption of market economies have produced enormous social and political changes in Eastern Europe. Some authors have argued that the socialist system, with its emphases on egalitarianism, rejection of traditional views of femininity, and lack of objectification of female bodies, protected women from excessive concerns with physical appearance, the tyranny of the thin body ideal, and disordered eating (Catina, Boyadjieva and Bergner 1996; Catina and Joja 2001; Silverstein and Perlik, 1995). Even if this assessment is correct, these protections were lost with the decline of the socialist system and the development of market economies. It seems very likely that the loss of these protections, combined with the enormous social and economic stresses associated with the rapid introduction of Western values and the rapidly changing roles of women, have contributed to the marked increase in body dissatisfaction and disordered eating in eastern Europe (Bilukha and Utermohlen 2002; Catina and Joja 2001; Papezova 2002; Rathner 2001). New visual media and technologies, infotainment, virtual reality, corporate image-projection, video games, internet voyeurism and many other developments all in their own ways reinforced the importance of appearances in things and attractiveness in persons. Institutions that have traditionally aimed to subordinate appearances, such as the church and the university, are scrambling to adapt to a generation with historically unprecedented visual receptivity.

We believe that we need to look critically at lookism. In our society, aesthetic capital, like other kinds of capital, is unequally distributed. Due to our increasing sensitivity to discrimination, it is gaining status as a discussable issue in public policy, which we will review in the Discussion section.

Consumer Researcher and the Body

The strong silence in the field of consumer behavior concerning the body, (despite the historical role the body has played in marketing practice), is contrasted by the impressive force with which it consumes the attention of scholars in various other fields; cultural studies, social history, literary criticism, phenomenology, feminism, postmodernism and post-structuralism, and media studies (Bordo 1003; Featherstone 1991; Foucault 1979). Although there are no specific causallinks between these various academic discourses, there seem to be many common philosophical threads running through them. One has to wonder why, lately, so much attention has been directed towards the body and consumer culture in these disciplines, for in the popular mind, this is not the stuff that these disciplines are made of. One possible reason is the realization that consumer culture cannot be separated from the broader manifestations of culture at large and, in fact, is integral to it. There has been a growing tendency in recent years to unite high and low cultures, and to regard everyday practices that circumscribe the low culture as providing a key to a true and complete understanding of the culture in its entirety. In this regard, the burgeoning literature on "human body," originally the site of low culture, has become central to postmodernist, poststructuralist, and feminist discourses on the mind-body relationship and to the cultural constructions of human body (Frank 1990).