KELLOGG’S PEP CEREAL

ORIGINAL ADVERTISEMENT:

This 1930s Kellogg’s PEP Cereal advertisement is problematic for its reliance upon exploiting misogynistic gender stereotypes to market their product. This advertisement provides an underlying message based on the intersections of gender, ability, social class, and race.

Gender is an important component in this ad, as the role of women in society was vastly different prior to the 60s, 70s, and 80s. At this time, women were the face of domesticity, tasked solely with the role of mother and housekeeper. Married middle class white women didn’t begin to become associated with the work force at all until the post-WWII era (Nicholson, 2010). A strong reliance upon gender stereotypes only emphasizes the reduction of a women’s worth to her ability to perform household tasks. Namely, this ad targets women, suggesting that a good wife can “cook, clean and dust” and would get her husband Kellogg’s PEP so he too can have “zip and sparkle”. Gender stereotypes are used here as a vessel to limit the worth of women to nothing more than the ability to be a housewife.

Another issue with this ad is its use of social class and race to sell success in the form of a white man and women. By using only white characters, this ad only speaks to the normalities of middle class white folk and plays off their privilege of only having to worry about household chores to sell a product. While this advert doesn’t explicitly promote the idea that success comes from being white, the blatant lack of representation for people of color inadvertently promotes the lifestyle of white people as admirable. While ads are intended to target widespread audiences to sell a product, the sole representation of a specific social class and race makes it non-universal.

Ultimately, Kellogg’s took a misguided approach towards marketing ideals which have little to do with their product.

JAMMED ADVERTISEMENT:

To highlight the absurd nature of the ad, I changed nearly all of the original text. For the largest photo showing the husband and wife as well as the first panel, I wanted to take things to an extreme. By highlighting the wife as someone seen only for her ability to “cook, clean, and dust”, I wanted to emphasize the backhanded compliment from the original ad’s slogan “so the harder a wife works, the cuter she looks”. I left the wife’s comment in the first panel as is, because I felt that it helps to show how unrelated the product is within context. With these changes, I really wanted to show how the female character is presented as limited in her abilities, just because of her gender.

In this jammed version, I attempt to further highlight the underlying assumptions of the ad by demonstrating how the lack of representation for people of color and understanding of different social-economic classes makes the original so one-sided. By changing the text in the second and third panel, I wanted to show how the ad’s central concerns surrounding household chores not only demonstrates privilege, but also how Kellogg’s is promoting a “white lifestyle” as successful. In the third panel, I explicitly changed the text to read “we’re so completely blinded by our own privilege” to emphasize this. I wanted to show the pure ignorance of other races or social classes by the couple to be a reflection of Kellogg’s small minded ad.

For the final panel, I really just wanted to drive home the point that by becoming so engrossed with your own problems you forget to see things from the perspective of others. By keeping the original references back to Kellogg’s Pep cereal and the use of vitamins B and D, I wanted to show how Kellogg’s is more concerned with marketing their product than their reinforcement of harmful stereotypes and biases.

REFERENCES

Nicholson, L. (2010). Feminism in “waves”: Useful metaphor or not? New Politics 12(4). (can be downloaded from http://newpol.org/content/feminism-waves-useful-metaphor-or-not.)

Retro Musing. (n.d.). KELLOGG’S “PEP” ~ BREAKFAST CEREAL ADVERTS [1939]. Retrieved from: https://www.ghostofthedoll.co.uk/retromusings/vitamins-for-pep/