Achievement in Chinese society
By measuring my intervention, I tested the hypothesis that the situation of body-shaming in China can be improved by increasing the diversity of model body in the advertisements. Broadly translated feedback indicates that my stakeholders’ body confidence raised from 54.3 to 67.5 percent after my intervention.
It is worth to mention a touching moment during the interview, one of my stakeholders (Xinyu Tang) told me that when she saw a body similar to herself in a picture, she suddenly realized that she does not think that kind of body is not good which remind she should not lack confidence with herself. I am glad to see these little changes which can confirm the positive implications of improving Chinese young women’s body acceptance in this way.
New knowledge I Learnt
I learned new understandings as a result that the key to help Chinese young women achieve self-acceptance is changing their views from negative to positive of bodies beyond the homogeneous representations which not only need displaying more inclusive model bodies but also expressing positive emotion towards beauty of different natural bodies through advertisements.
Challenge
There is value in this learning which has primarily focus on helping young people in China who have been body-shamed, but nonetheless recognized limitations. Firstly, due to the limitation of methodological, I do not have enough research about how visual advertising works which would help me to make more targeted visual designs. Secondly, compare with Chinese population my participants are still narrow. In the future, I need collect more data of a wider sample size. Thirdly, I cannot make a reality campaign to testing practically for logistical reasons which limited me to get more feedback from random samples.
Future plan
Therefore, future work needs to build on these findings. I am planning to contact localization Chinese lingerie brands directly and present my learning results, making an attempt to find a way to change the negative body-shaming situation after I return back to China.
I’m going to look for models on social networks who are real consumers of the brand. When shooting pictures, focus on life situations as background, for example, in the gym, jogging, on vacation, or meeting with friends to make images more resonate with young Women in China.