It makes sense to deliver the truths. Frida Mom and its advertising message to empowered mothers
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The media-driven image of an ideal mother has, among other things, brought about the concept of “commodified motherhood” (Pugh 2005; Krzyżanovska 2020) which has sustained the idea that one can become a good mother by consuming commodities designed especially for the well-being of their offspring. As a result, advertising targeted at new mothers has traditionally shown happy and content mother figures who have no doubts about their parenting and whose only concern is to take care of their new-born baby. However, the growing power of social networking in the 2010s gave rise to alternative voices in which real mothers started sharing their real-life experience, including the dark side of becoming a new mom such as clogged breasts or postpartum recovery. Owing to these voices, the normative of a perfect mother established in the public discourse in the last century has been challenged and questioned (O'Donohoe et al. 2014). O’Reilly (2006) terms this confrontation and opposing view as “empowered mothering”, which can be nowadays traced in marketing strategies of numerous companies. Frida Mom, a company that offers products for labor, delivery and after-delivery period, is one of those whose commercials and tutorial videos speak openly about what a woman has to deal with when becoming a new parent. Its marketing strategy endeavors to reconstruct the public image of a new mother and to address issues that might still be considered taboo in society. Following the theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis (Kress 2010), the objective of the paper is to analyze how the identity of a new mother is reconstructed in Frida Mom's official youtube videos and web page. The paper focuses on which taboo topics are discussed, how these are visualized and talked about, and how this strategy makes sense to a broader public. |
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