Just buy it: Nike advertising aimed at Glamour readers: A critical feminist analysis

Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science, 2001 by Arsenault, Darin J, Fawzy, Tamer

Glamour is edited for the contemporary American woman. It informs her of the trends, recommends how she can adapt them to her needs and motivates her to take action. Over half of Glamour's editorial content focuses on fashion, beauty, and health as well as coverage of personal relationships, career, travel, food and entertainment.

Data Collection

Data in the form of Nike advertisements was collected from Glamour magazine for the year 1999, and this year was chosen solely because of convenience. Every issue of Glamour for 1999 was reviewed for Nike advertisements. Issues were checked with the publication schedule of Conde Nast Publications as reported by Katz and Katz (1997) to ascertain that all issues were accounted for. The authors browsed page by page in each issue until an advertisement was located or the issue was exhausted. Issues that did not hold a Nike advertisement were checked by the other author to be sure that an advertisement was not missed by accident, or because pages were missing. Issues with missing pages were cross-checked by one author by checking another repository source for parallel issues and browsing those issues for content. Certain criteria, per Boston, Chambers, Canetto, and Slinkard (2000), was determined a priori, in that (1) advertisements were at least one-half page in size; (2) advertisements with more than one person had a clearly identifiable number of people; and (3) advertisements had recognizable human figures and features were clear enough to code. However, this third Boston et al. criterion was dropped when it was realized that there was a large proportion of Nike advertisements without human figures, and the inclusion of this criterion may not be representative of Nike content. One final criterion was added, however, during selection of artifacts: the Nike advertisement must be solely representative of Nike, and not of a joint venture with another company. For example, it was noticed that some Nike advertisements were found in Lady Footlocker content. Hence, these advertisements were dropped from the sample. The net result was a total of five advertisements, each of which ranged between two and four pages.

Results

This section refers to a description of the data as well as the basic findings of the rhetorical analysis. For convenience, the study authors chronologically labeled each of the five advertisements A, B, C, D, or E based on their order of appearance in Glamour. Advertisement A runs three pages, and it depicts three distinct pages of a well-worn photograph album. The first page of the ad contains a color photograph of a young girl from the waist up wearing a red and black jersey and a red baseball cap, and her baseball mitt is hugged to her torso as if she is about to throw a ball. There is text below this photograph. The second page displays a photograph album page with a flower in the upper left-hand corner, the Nike swoosh with the slogan "Just Do It" in the bottom left-hand corner, and text in between. The third page is a photograph of an attractive young woman with brown hair and red lips wearing a green windbreaker with the Nike logo, yet no text.