Gender stereotypes, the right way to segment...?

Here I am again...



I has been thinking of gender stereotypes this morning. And that's because I found this interesting column about the subject.

Well it made me think so much that I tried to find something else related to the same subject. I searched in Finnish and in English, and I found many texts written by European parliament.

Parliament criticise gender stereotypes in marketing, because they are often very extravagant. In advertising can stereoptypes easily turn racist and discriminative even if they are meant to be funny. That's because you usually have to overdone the wanted situation in advertisement so the watcher understands what it is all about.

...And too often you have to notice, that these gender stereotypes are all wrong.

Susan Dobscha writes in her column in Advertising Age that marketers are constantly conflating the separate constructs of sex, gender and sexuality. They assume female means feminine means heterosexual or male means masculine means heterosexual. They assume all women are feminine and would like a pink car. They assume women’s hands are daintier and would need an anatomically correct pen, and they assume women want to dress up as slutty versions of virtually anything for Halloween.
Marketers continue to drop gender stereotypes into ads because they fail to see that these stereotypes are, by and large, outdated and untrue, if they ever were true! While there are women who prefer pink, and it has become the official color of breast cancer, the NFL has since created more realistic jerseys for its female clientele.

Marketers ignore the diversity of preferences among women because they have long used male and female as catchall categories for segmentation. While fashion marketers have further segmented the consumer using additional demographic categories, such as age and income, other industries have not followed suit. The automobile industry habitually misfires when it tries to use sex as a demographic category, but does much better when it uses lifestyle and social-class classifications.


In the picture on the left you can see these stereotypes so well. The colour of woman is pink, and the color of man is blue. Marketers use this kind of lists when they are thinking what kind of tools or cars or clothes etc women and man are willing to buy. Or as well, what kind of ads will have the best affection to each gender.


I guess it's more about having the guts than thoughtlessness. It's the easiest way to segment to think like "well there are men and there are women". Maybe someday marketing will focus on more in the buying behaviour than in self-evidence demographic categories. Maybe.... or maybe we will always have the pink version of everything, because, hey, all women like PINK.



 Sources: http://www.marketingmag.ca/news/marketer-news/column-why-do-marketers-keep-getting-women-so-wrong-68304

http://mymemory.translated.net/t/Finnish/English/sukupuolistereotypioihin


See ya again,
Heidi :)