The Beauty Discourse Impacts upon Consumer’s Behavior

Abstract

This article, through a review of various theories and relevant researches, purports to conduct an analysis on how beauty discourse impact consumer’s behavior. Due to a continuous growth and fierce competition between medical healthcare business and the beauty industry nowadays in Thailand, this has led to a creation of beauty discourse which effectively sets up today’s mainstream social values. From the study, it is revealed that consumers are influenced by these discourses unknowingly, leading them into discursive practices. Beauty discourse, with its rhetoric powers, affects people’s perception, ways of thinking, and their behaviors with regards to beauty. From an individual discursive practice which intermingles with the perceptions towards mainstream beauty, the role of such discourse has employed certain concepts, which have primary notions on social construction of reality and representation, to frame a reality based on the manufacturer’s point of view. This is done in order to induce consumers to want to buy unnecessary products or buy certain products in excessive quantity. Also, it changes people’s perceptions and ways of lives, rendering them to actually believe that what is said in the commercial is a fact. Women are enticed with numerous beauty discourses which make them believe that they have a complete control over their bodies and minds. Repetitive discourses are made with regard to a notion of ‘perfection and beauty’, which arouses women to stay with the concept of an ideal beauty. Nonetheless, it is discovered that such discourses have only focused on just one side of the story without mentioning any danger or side effects that could have come from the use of such products. Accordingly, the study into such issue is essential and considerably effective in order to prevent consumers’ being lured into a trap of mainstream social values.