A sibling/classmate/friend with opposite sex was my, and would be everyone’s biggest enemy of their childhood. As time passes, we don’t really remember any reasonable explanation for why we behaved so in the past (at least in the male perspective 🙂 ). A human being with different sex was no longer the devils filled with hatred, but just another person who you see on a street, a companion who you work with, a lover who you fall in love with, and a husband/wife who you live with for the rest of your life.
With more realistic perspective, a.k.a marketer’s point of view, gender demographic is a huge and essential group which shares so many different values, characteristics and beliefs. In order to succeed in marketing gender groups and thus generate profit, knowing what they want is crucial. Louis Vuitton did not become the top fashion house by appealing blinging and elegant hand bags to men, and Heineken don’t want any woman carrying a keg of beer with her when she does shopping either. Many firms, especially when the companies are gender-sensitive, spend much time on analyzing such information and have successfully developed marketing strategies.
Nike, a multi-national company that carries from clothes to sports equipments, brought up a new campaign “The Men vs Women Challenge”. It’s a form of a race held by Nike, and to win the race, men and women basically accumulate their running distance that’s been recorded on their iPods (or other electronic device if applicable) and compare each other’s accumulation after certain time period passes. To be able to participate, a pair of Nike running shoes that’s connectible to iPods, iPods with special applications installed, and general interest in running/jogging are needed, and it won’t be really effective at all if a person misses any of those requirements.
As soon as I watched it, I recalled my childhood memories where girls were enemies, and this instinct-like feelings strangely made me become egoistic, passionate, and willing to win over (thus “destroy”) the female group, and this wouldn’t be just the case for me. Both gender groups will get aroused and therefore gain interest on the campaign. This is a humongous success for the Nike Corporation because they will be capable of grabbing two demographic groups with an effort for one. I myself have to admit that I was intrigued by the commercial despite the fact that I don’t have any of the requirements listed above. My old, childish, and insignificant memories, small excitements in my childhood, now re-emerged in the new century and it is now blended into a Nike’s innovative marketing strategy.
