November 2010 – Changyong Lee

Gender Oriented Marketing

Since the advent of advertisement for children’s toys, gender focused marketing has been easy to observe for those who look for it. And over time, gender focus has been beginning to be concentrated more and more.

Research shows that there is overwhelmingly high amount of home/family related toys marketed for girls and conversely high amount of action/automobile related toys made for boys. Obviously toy producing companies would prefer to make and sell toys that they are confident that girls and boys would like to buy, and thus in exception to gender-neutral toys, toy companies try to tailor to either girls’ or boys’ preferences. This causes the dichotomy in the toy market for a girl’s or a boy’s toy.

The toy companies don’t stop at only making their toys to fit either a gir’s or a boy’s preferences in time. Eventually the companies started to focus on and emphasize the femaleness and maleness of toys to further make their toys desireable. What once was a fabric doll for girls are now plastic ‘barbie’ or ‘bratz’ and what was once fire trucks and sports cars for boys are now tanks and destructive robots. Instead of fitting to the gender category of toys, the toy companies inevitably made the gap even larger by giving emphasis to gender traits.

To go beyond the scope of toys for children, gender based marketing is evident in ‘toys’ for adults as well with visible exaggeration of gender traits to be shown in advertisement for cars, make up, clothing, music, film, and other products.

One easy step to kill: Texting

In my 20 years life, I have watched various kinds of TV commercials from different parts of the world. However, there are only a few that I can actually remember vividly. Heineken was one, and here is another that I would like to introduce.

This is a public service advertisement that is not promoting any fancy expensive goods or luxurious services. In fact, they are demoting a certain common act that many may not see as being illegal and dangerous; text messaging on a mobile phone while driving. The advertisement primarily uses a “shock factor” by providing the audience with explicit graphic visual stimuli that depicts the possible negative consequence for text messaging while driving to try to deter such acts from happening.

The progression of this advertisement shows an ‘if-then’ progression where in the beginning it shows a female driver text messaging on her phone (the ‘if’). Then the driver’s lack of attention on the road due to text messaging leads to a horrific accident occurring killing many and injuring others (the ‘then’). The ‘if-then’ progression is a typical progression used in messages that have the objective of trying to educate the general public of possible dangers to certain non-harmful seeing acts. After the audience views the advertisement, the message will (hopefully) be encoded in their mind as ‘if I text message while driving, then it could lead to an accident’. With this new embedded idea the future driver will hopefully decide against using their mobile phone while driving and contribute to making the roads a safer place for both the driver him or herself and other drivers on the road.