- Malcolm Colthard, Advances in Written Text Analysis, 5
I think we can all safely agree that the diet book is usually written with women in mind. After all, it's us that are archetypally associated with the fight for bodily perfection and it was us that were expected to wear the corsets whilst the worst men had to put up with was the cravat! The New Beverly Hills Diet promises "Hamburgers and hip bones...Cheesecake and cheek bones" (3), neither of which are revered masculine features in our society. One edition of The Dunkan Diet shows a sketch of a thin woman in front of the Eiffel Tower, acting assumedly as the epitome of French thiness and elegance that all women are supposed to aspire to. And, of course, thin, smiley women fill the pages of just about every diet book you can find.
Gender marketing is everywhere in the diet book world. However, as I briefly touched upon in my last post, it's particularly interesting to examine the position of the imagined reader in regards to the Deliciously Ella empire. The online world where Ella made her name has completely changed the way in which a reader can be understood. Her books do not so much have an imagined audience as one that is already predefined by the social media community that has amassed for her 'clean' lifestyle. That is to say, that her ideal readers are the ones that already read her blog, tweets and Instagram captions on a regular basis.
Using the analytics tool Klear I was able to find out exactly who Ella's average follower is on Instagram and, therefore, who it is that she's assumedly addressing throughout her cookbooks: A 28-year-old woman, living in the UK or the US and with an average salary of more than $50,000 p/a. Of course, there are some obvious signs that this is who Deliciously Ella Every Day is created for. It uses archetypally feminine colour schemes, shows pictures of Ella cycling and jumping into the sea that just scream “youth” and the recipes are hardly created for someone on minimum wage (a less than 500g pack of chia seeds costs £10 for goodness sake!). However, Ella also employs a range of literary devices throughout the text that speak directly to her young, female audience.
In all of her writing, Ella is basically talking to her peers, since she herself is only 28 and lives in London. This explains her colloquial and friendly approach to writing, which is likely to also appeal to those that know her through informal, social media posts. In the introduction alone the text employs direct address, contractions (“I’ve”, “you’ll, “We’ll”) and colloquial phrases (“crazy, overwhelming task”) all of which create the sense that the reader is having a chat with a friend. On top of this, the book’s demographic of working women is apparent in lines such as “I’ve created this book with busy people in mind” (21) and the branding of her recipes as “healthy eating on-the-go” and “Easy weekday dinners” (5). Deliciously Ella Everyday is also quite clearly written with a female audience in mind, just like pretty much every other diet book under the sun. Not only are the colour scheme and the curly font used at the beginning of each recipe archetypally feminine, but there are no pictures of any men in the entirety of the book. Women? Yes. Dogs? Of course! Men? Certainly not. Solidifying that this is a book written by a woman for women, Ella defines one section of recipes as those perfect “for easy kitchen suppers with girlfriends” (165).
The book is the perfect example of the way in which social media has completely changed not only the way that we read, as discussed in my previous post, but the way that we are written to. Thanks to the internet, Ella Woodward knows exactly who her demographic is, down to the city they live in and the jobs that they do. The already lucrative diet book industry has become even easier to market!
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