Gender

Boys V Girls, Blue V Pink, Barbie V Action Man. Schiebe Condry (1984) examined advertisements according to product type and found major gender differences in the values promoted. Generally women were hit with adverts for beauty and youth and men with ambition and physical strength.

There is a difference between men and women, some say we are from different planets? Men are form mars and women are from Venus apparently. Interestingly if you look into this saying; Mars was the Ancient Greek God of War, symbol of power and strength, Venus was the Goddess of beauty and love. Relate this to products on the market today; we have a chocolate bar called “Mars” incredibly masculine chocolate bar, and a female shaver under the name of “Venus” which gives you silky smooth legs making you feel like a goddess...how symbolic and obvious can it get!?
How to impress a woman:
• Cuddles
• Respect
• Complements
• Kisses
• Comfort
• Protection
• Caressing
• Stroking
• Loving
• Teasing
• Supporting
• Holding
• Wine and dine
• Gifts
• Go to the ends of the earth

How to impress a man:
• Show up naked
• Bring food

But surely in the day and age where we have the metro sexual man, conjunctional roles in the house hold and the stay at home dads, this stereotype can’t still be held as the biblical rule book of marketing to genders?
The Marketer Magazine in April 2010 displayed the Do’s and Don’ts for marketing to men;

“Embrace male complexity: there’s more to men than the traditional stereotypes suggest.
Think multiple Platforms: the male market is particularly multimedia consuming, from online games to iPhone apps.
Emphasise product attributes: whether or not men make purchasing decisions on emotional basis, they will expect to be given full product specifications before making the choice.”

The last point is a perfect link to the fact that men think differently when consuming. Their brains are wired to only partially digest information, pay less attention to pictures and long copy but look for the most direct clarified message. It is also reported that men like humour in their adverts and respond better to the cruder and more aggressive humour. This is reflected in one of the Marketers “Don’ts” for marketing to men which says:

“Don’t take it too seriously: a sense of humour will definitely help when trying to appeal to the male market. It’s okay to indulge a men’s sense of masculinity, from using sex as a marketing pull to blokeish behaviour.”

Where as in comparison women like to look into detail, respond to images, fit storylines to the images and products that advertisers use.

This following clip by Mark Gungor in one of his seminars, comically explains the differences between the male and female brain...







Try it for yourself, BBC have an online test that will determine how male or female your brain is, www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind



My results showed that my brain is predominantly female, but more male than the alverage woman's brain. Go on have a go! The break down of your results are really interesting.



Another way of testing your male/female brain is to look at this picture of a room below for about 30 seconds, then turn away form the screen and list as many things you remember about it as possible.

Results generally show that men remember the big pictures, details such as location of objects (special awareness) and larger objects. Women on the other hand recalled the smaller intimate details like colours of flowers or carpet or pictures and even often go as far to say the picture may be a wife or husband etc, (creating storylines and depth to items).