FINAL PROJECT

Joy video - - Smart video - - Axion video -

In this article, dishwashing soaps will be scrutinized, all of their stereotypes will be pointed out and their commonalities will be examined.

The three dishwashing brands featured here are: Joy, Smart and Axion.

Joy

Joy exhibits a comical and musical style. It provides emphasis on the longevity of their product. As seen in the video and along with Joy’s other advertisements, Michael V dances and sings around women as to why they should use Joy and as to how wrong they are for not using it.

Smart

Unlike Joy’s approach, Smart establishes a serious mood wherein Mr. Smart compares two products and points out that his brand has the upper hand. It provides emphasis on the quality of the product and like Joy, all of Mr. Smart’s audience are women - from the audience and the ones participating in his experiment.

Axion

Unlike the aforementioned brands, Axion does an entirely different approach. Their videos mainly consists of a background voice, a very messy sink full of filthy dishes, and a woman doing the chore of washing them. Axion’s advertisements are straightforward. It directly gives emphasis to their strong quality and that claim is repetitively shown by washing away filthy dish dirt like a “Grease Stripper”.

One common stereotype among all three is the promotion of patriarchy. In Joy and Smart, all the audience were women. In Axion, the hand portrayed was of a woman. The main agent for proliferating patriarchy is the “star” of the show: In Joy, there is Michael V. In Smart, there is Mr. Smart. In Axion, the background voice is from a man. It is because of these agents that the status of women in society are constantly being pushed back and degraded. All of their advertisements consists of a fairly simple pattern - have a woman do the chores, and have a man tell them what to do. Michael V., Mr. Smart and Axion’s background voice were telling their female characters what to do.

It is because of these low-key social conditionings that our patriarchal society keeps on getting passed unto generations and the value of patriarchy is constantly ingrained into our culture.

Imposition of Gender Roles

Most subjects in the dishwashing advertisements are women and housewives, only a few are men. In almost every dishwashing commercial, we see a mother getting worried about their dirty plates at home, and here comes Michael V. to free the mother of her dilemma. FGender role contains a list of attitudes and behaviors considered to be appropriate or acceptable for people based on their biological sex. To put it simply, gender roles generally center on the concept of femininity (this refers to the qualities the society regards as characteristic of women) and masculinity (this pertains to the attributes the society holds to belong to men.) This system of policing people based on their genitals is firmly embedded in our partiarchal society which dates back to the Spanish colonization era.

wutt

Asa ani hoi wapakoi I ama 21st century crammer

PERRR IKAY REPRAHSE ANI

Crispaul: akoy rephrase, tiwasa imng 21st century toper

Ctian: gege

Crispaul: naa mn guroy chat box diris gmail no ngnung dri jd gachat

2per: ty bai lablab

2per: noh? Asa na

Ctian: unsaon pol i open daw

Cpaul: kita ka anang mga nawng nato sa babaw christian, pislita ang message

2per: sos citan weak compsci ka? sos

Ctian way gc? So tagsa tagsa? Sorri ngud per

Cpaul: kanang tupad sa nawng ni salie. Kanang walay picture mao na ang gc

2per: buhat sakos paper buhaton koni in 30 min

2per: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaa

Ctian: Pol addi lng nya if naa kay ma add

Patriarchy, by definition, is a system in which the father or the eldest male is the head of the family thus, symbolizes power and domination ( Medina, 2015). The father is known to be the “Haligi ng Tahanan” while the mother is known to be  “Ilaw ng Tahanan.” The Haligi ng Tahanan is the one responsible for sustaining the needs of the family. It is the duty of the father to look for a job to earn money for the basic needs of the family just like food, clothing and house. On the other hand, the Ilaw ng Tahanan has a responsibility of  taking care of the children and the house. The mother should only stay in the house and should not look for job or money because it is not her responsibility.

In connection to this, most of the Philippine advertisements especially dishwashing ads centered their main character to a woman instead of man. This is because the as Ilaw ng Tahanan the mother is responsible for washing the dishes We can observe in the advertisements that the man like Michael V performs as the expert who promotes the product of the dishwashing soap while the woman is just the user of the product. This symbolizes that the man is superior.

Filipino Practicality and the Sachet Economy

The Philippine market heavily invests on sachets because of the mentality that follows Filipinos as “practical”. Being budget-wise people, Pinoys tend to buy products which typically has lesser price. When we say “budget-wise”, it describes Pinoys to prefer short-term consumable products rather than long-term, sachets rather than bottles respectively; Making Philippines the only country where sachets are heavily patronized. Advertisements also flash their competitive prices to appeal to the consumers’ interests which only follows their so called practicality.

That is why in advertisements, the price is always flagged just like in the videos above. Other countries centers their advertisements on the quality of the products itself, unlike the trend happening in the Philippines.

Sachets are less expensive that is why Filipino people prefers to buy these sachet products rather than the bottled products. Philippine super markets, focused more on sachet products because this is their largest market.

With this, we can observe that Philippine advertisements focused more on sachet version of the products rather than its bottled version. In the advertisement of Joy, Axion and Smart, we can see that they promote the sachet version of the product because it is much cheaper and the consumers prefers cheaper products thus they can earn more because of larger market.

// chan tabangan tika

// 4 mins nlng bai

Bisag mka publish lng jud

STATISTICS NI NA PART : // c/o Rosal should be inserted after Christian’s work

Now, what does it have to say about Filipinos in general? Is practicality already  established as Filipinos’ way of living? Or is it rather forced due to the Philippine’s economic  incapabilities to meet the demands and secure the well-being of its people especially those who have been part in the subsistence incidence, the proportion of families among Filipinos whose income fall below the food threshold such as farmers, fishermen and laborers.

According to the latest United Nation estimates, Philippines currently has an approximate population of 107, 799, 715 as of April 24 this year and marked about 106, 512, 074 last year. Based on the Philippine Statistics Authority report in the first semester of 2018 released on April 10, 2019,  21.0 percent were the registered proportion of Poor Filipinos. With this, Php 7,337 is the average required for a group of five to meet their month to month essential sustenance that ought to fulfill the nourishing prerequisites set by the Food and Nutrition Research Institute. There is also what we call the poverty threshold or the amount needed to support the family’s basic food and non-food needs which is no less than Php 10, 481 on average (Philippine Statistics Authority, 2019).

These numbers speak highly of the Filipinos’ current condition who continues to strive economically in fact, these are 10.9 percent higher than the food and poverty threshold of the first semester of 2015. On the other hand, 16.1 percent of Filipino families have only been accepting income below the poverty line (poverty incidence) with 6.2 percent of subsistence incidence or the proportion of Filipino families who are  food poor (Philippine Statistics Authority, 2019).

These figures resonates so loudly that you can hear people’s cry over hunger and social crisis and the government can’t barely hear them. And their plight have only gotten worse with the emergence of the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) Act which took effect on January 1, 2018. It comes with 5 packages: TRAIN, TRABAHO, MINING AND SIN TAXES, PROPERTY VALUATION and CAPITAL INCOME and FINANCIAL TAXES.

Train: This has two package which is Package 1A that lowers personal income taxes (PIT), estate and donor’s taxes and expand the value-added tax (VAT) base thus increasing the price for products such as sugar-sweetened beverages and petroleum by 6 percent. Package 1B on the other hand, also called the Tax Amnesty Bill, it removes the bank secrecy law, automatic exchange  information and three other types of amnesties.

Trabaho: This package lowers the corporate income tax (CIT) rate to 20% by 2029 for most of the businesses. It exempts Filipinos with income Php 250, 000 and below.

Mining and Sin Taxes:  It increases the excises tax on alcoholic beverages and tobacco products to help raise fund for Universal Health Care (UHC).

Property valuation and taxes: This package promotes reform on property valuation system. It widens the tax based used by national and local government for property and property-related taxes.  

Capital income and financial taxes: By the name itself, it suggests a reform on the capital income and taxation on finances.

As you can see, the TRAIN Act is anti-poor and pro capitalist. If you notice in the package 2, it exempts people with income less than or equal to 250, 000 but increases the prices of the commodities. With that poor people who by default do not pay any tax because of having low income will only feel the changes concerning the increase of the price of our commodities. Thus, this law will only worsen the plight and strengthen the poverty-driven problems and issue since the income and wealth is unevenly distributed with the upper class, the middle class and just causes a huge poverty for the majority of those that are below the poverty line with varying degrees of vulnerability.

And since majority of the Filipino people belong to the Middle Class, Working Class and peasantry, Filipinos are forced to be practical in all possible ways to they can to somehow address these unfortunate situation that they are in due to these anti-poor laws such as the TRAIN Law.

More tax cuts for the rich and well-to-do family, and the poor masses will forever carry the burden which was given to them the moment TRAIN were signed into law.

CONCLUSION:

We have talked about quite a number of different stereotypes created from different advertisements by different products. Sometimes, we might ask ourselves why are we talking about these stereotypes? Why do we really need to tackle and observe these from different ads?

Even if we are computer science students, we are still Filipinos, and that is something with us since the day we were born. Those stereotypes in the advertisements, despite these being not noticeable, could greatly impact our society.

The first stereotype we have observed from all those dishwashing commercials is that all models they have who do the washing of dishes are women and people from the lower class to middle class. No one said or created a rule that men and rich people cannot do dishwashing. This means that these advertisements are assuming that in most households, wives are the ones who do the chores. This strengthens a patriarchal type of society. Men will continue to think they are superior than women. Men will keep underestimating the capabilities of women. This kind of thinking could make children(girls) unable to discover their full capability. They will be deprived to do something else and discover what they really want or what they are good at. We all know of some women who are better than men at something. And if we continue this patriarchal society, these women who were supposed to excel in a particular career will be deprived of it and this country will lose or fail to find the finest people for a profession. The same thing will happen to those in highest class in the society. They will continue to think that they are the ones who are doing a part in our country and neglect the efforts of the lowest class i.e. fthe farmers.

The second stereotype we have observed from the dishwashing advertisements is that all advertisements somehow prioritize persuading the people by showing that they are cheaper than the other products. They try to persuade everyone that their product will last longer at cheaper price, thereby, buying their product will save much money than buying other products. This mindset has already affected the society. The presence of sachets in almost every product sold here in the Philippines. Shampoos, detergents, dishwashing liquids, etc. all have a sachet type in our country but not in other well-developed countries. We tried to observe some dishwashing advertisements made by companies from other countries. Based on their ads, they focused more the quality of their product. Their persuade people to buy their products by saying that their product makes one’s dishes cleaner than other products. This stereotype might make other countries underestimate the Philippines. We all wanted equality with people around the world, but it would be hard to attain with this stereotype passed on from generation to generation.