Framing The Mother as Primary Caregiver: A Preliminary Entman Framing Analysis of Promina's Official Social Media Advertising Captions

Abstract

Advertising does not merely promote products; it also reproduces social meanings about gender and family roles. Promina, a leading Indonesian complementary baby-food brand, consistently addresses caregivers through its official social media advertising. This study presents a preliminary qualitative analysis of how Promina's official TikTok account (@bayisehatpromina) frames the mother's role in child-rearing, applying Robert N. Entman's (1993) four-dimensional framing model: problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and treatment recommendation. Due to platform access constraints at the time of data collection, the analysis is based on the verified textual captions of four official Promina promotional posts, rather than a full multimodal (audio-visual) sample. Findings indicate a consistent pattern across all four captions: the advertisements address the caregiving audience exclusively as “Moms,” position the child's nutritional exploration and development as an implicit problem requiring active maternal facilitation, evaluate active, resourceful, exploration-oriented mothering positively, and recommend Promina products as the primary treatment. No caption in the sample referenced fathers or shared parenting. These findings resonate with a broader body of research on infant-feeding marketing, which has similarly found that formula and baby-food advertising tends to address mothers as the default responsible party (Chen et al., 2015; Godlee et al., 2019) and to mobilize maternal affect and identity in digital marketing (Bayard & Rippey, 2022). Given the small sample size (n = 4) and the text-only nature of the data, the findings are illustrative rather than generalizable, and are presented as a first phase of a larger planned study incorporating a larger, multimodal (visual and textual) sample across platforms.