Case 1 Chinese Vipshop Commercial A

discount brands, covering clothing, shoes, beauty, home, and so on. In 2013, Vipshop became the highest-valued e-commerce company in China, with a broad customer base and considerable influence over China's market (Shao, 2013). The chosen Vipshop advertisement broadcasted in 2016 consists of the following scenes: a young woman is lying in bed and doing online shopping (Figure 7-1); she tries her new dress and makes a purchase through Vipshop again (Figure 7-2); the woman puts on her new clothes and goes out with her female friends (Figure 7-3); a man buys a bag on Vipshop and gifts it to the woman, who happily tries the new handbag, and continues to visit Vipshop with her male partner (Figure 7-4); a group of women are online shopping in the office together (Figure 7-5).

These series of scenes covers all perspectives of a female consumer's daily life - waking up in the morning, lying in bed, and shopping using laptop - and thus presents the beginning of the day for the young woman. The next scene emphasises the woman's body when she is trying the new dress, and places the woman in the position of being gazed at. Then, the woman goes outside with friends wearing her new clothes, which seems to imply that one of the aims of her purchasing is to acquire recognition from other women to get gratification and a sense of achievement.

In the family scene, the love of the man for the woman is expressed in the form of material and spiritual supports. This kind of support, on the one hand, is represented through the behaviour of consumption, as the man bought a new handbag for the woman; on the other hand, it is represented through technical guidance: the woman needed the man's suggestions and advice when she was doing the online shopping. Thus, the female character has been trapped in a role needed to be supported and supervised by the male character. Additionally, looking from the gender display (man sits in the middle while woman stands beside him) and the woman's body language (showing the husband her dress), the Vipshop advert has further strengthened the patriarchy gender roles. As Goffman (1979) points out, advertisers use the positions and the sizes of men and women as strategies to express the essential relationship

between genders, conveying the ideas such as woman needs the advice and protections from the man. In a sense, the intention of the Vipshop advert is consistent with the heterosexual patriarchy society, which could also be seen in the second Vipshop case advert.

The female Vipshop advertising characters are not portrayed as positive images in the workplace neither. In the next scene, several female figures gather around a computer screen discussing consumption. We can suppose that these women are in white-collar jobs and are doing shopping during working hours, judging from the location, the surrounding and their dressings. At this moment, the self-identification of these women does not come from their occupations and other social positions, but from the consistency of assimilation of the female characters accomplished through consumption.

This advertisement also selectively represents the main purposes of the female characters' consuming behaviours, including: deriving pleasure from consumption; accessing recognition and popularity among female friends; certifying love through the male partner's support. At the end of this advertisement, subtitles show the message 'Vipshop, 4pm every day', which implies that consumer behaviours are unavoidable and necessary in a female consumer's daily life. At this point, Vipshop has become a gendered symbol which is trying to diversify and differentiate the female audience (which is encouraged to take this symbol as one of the essential elements for the confirmation of their social identities) and the male audience (represented by the male character in this advertisement as playing the role of intellect and authority).

It is worth noting that the male character does not directly participate in consumption activities in this commercial. But according to the commodity classification and the business orientation of Vipshop, this brand does not only target at female consumers but sells a large number of products designed for men. In the chosen commercial case,

however, the male character does not appear as a shopper but is constructed as a guiding role providing authoritative suggestions, gazing at the female chaacter and supporting her material requirements, which can be seen from the gender settings in the case study advertisement.

As shown in Figure 7-4, it is not difficult to determine that this commercial represents two kinds of gender position settings. In the first role, the man is sitting on the sofa while the woman is standing by and showing her new handbag to him. In the second setting, the woman points out some products that she is interested in, and asks for pieces of advice from the man. Through these two kinds of role settings, the traditional gender relationship is once again represented on the screen, in which the voice is controlled by the male character. If the stereotyped representation of the female character is not evident enough in commercial A, commercial B further reinforces the stereotype of patriarchy gender settings on the television screen.

Figure 7- 2 Vipshop advert A scene 2

Figure 7- 4 Vipshop advert A scene 4

Figure 7- 5 Vipshop advert A scene 5

7.2.2 Case 2 Chinese Vipshop Commercial B: the Emphasis of Gender Difference