Ray Smuts
FEMINISTS ARE outraged by a new South African wine marketing campaign depicting a sultry barefoot Oriental lass wearing skimpy shorts while leaning on a carved stool.
The black and white photograph, one of several entitled Take a New Look at South African Wines and featuring what is said to be a R2,5 million solid gold magnum wine bottle with the words Simply Liquid Gold below, is one of several in a campaign launched recently in Hong Kong.
What further infuriates the 'anti-faction' is that the campaign is targeted at expatriates and Asian males, aimed at boosting South African wine sales in Hong Kong where market share doubled last year over 1998 despite a 60% import duty on all wines.
A spokesman for the South African consulate in Hong Kong, responsible for running the campaign on behalf of a network of South African wine exporters, says: Gold has a very positive connotation for the local community. It conveys a sense of history, heritage and value, all of which apply to premier South African wines.
One complainant, a Cape Town consultant, says she is offended by the model's slightly protruding posterior and that she finds her posture and the bottle's juxtaposition suggestive, to say the least.
She expresses dismay that the South African wine industry should resort to this type of advertising in these times. South Africans are a talented bunch who surely could be more imaginative than this.
Another complainant,
professing that she, too, finds the advertisement astonishingly offensive, says:Don't these advertisers know that elsewhere in the world wine drinking is associated with refined taste and civilisation?
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