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continue to drop gender stereotypes into ads because they fail to see that these stereotypes are, by and large, outdated and untrue, if they ever were true!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 :)
Hello again, it has been a busy week so I had time to blog just once... Sorry for that, I'm trying to be more active this week hehe.
Well this time I have some more interesting info about Cosmo, but now we are not talking about the magazine anymore. We are talking about yogurt. Yeah, you read right, yogurt.
But let's think this first, before I tell what this is all about. If you think Apple, Samsung, Nokia and Philips – all of these brands have built an image of being reputable manufacturers of electrics. This brand image is attached to the company and affects their future operations as well.
If one of these manufacturers decide to enter a totally diverse field, let’s say, perfumes, would it be appropriate? Most certainly not! That's why we are talking about yogurt, because in 1999 Cosmopolitan introduced its own line of low-fat yogurt. The brand failed badly since the customers were reluctant to accept a yogurt linked to a female magazine.
Source: https://www.brandillymc.com/wp-content/plugins/rss-poster/cache/7cead_5-cosmopolitan.jpg
To wrap up, brands must not be treated as mere products or items of physical value. They have an intrinsic value that completes the whole brand personality. Companies must align their branding efforts according to the expectations of their customers.
According to marketing myth, as many as 80% of new products introduced each year fail. That's quite sad, because many of these products can't make themself known abroad before the lifespan is already about to end. Most of these products stay in their home coutry because there isn't resources and courage to test, how the product would make it in a different culture. Maybe in Asia those Cosmopolitan yogurts could have been a huge success? Who knows.
But just thinking, what would Apple perfume smell like? Maybe like..... apple? Haha. :D
We'll see again! :)
Heidi
So let's start this blog now.
This is my first time blogging ever, so let see how this is going to work. :D
We are having this course, international marketing, at school, and im goin to share here my thoughts and ideas about things that are related in marketing and things that interest me.
Well... I have been spending like two hours by now searching articles... and yeah finally i found something that really interests me!
This article i just read was about Cosmopolitan magazine, and it says that "Cosmopolitan magazine has reached what appears to be a milestone: 100,000 paid digital subscriptions. The Hearst Magazines title seems to have beaten other brands to the mark, reinforcing the idea that digital will be a big platform for Cosmopolitan. But it's also a good sign for magazines' digital ambitions in general."
According to the article Cosmopolitan is also getting more money for digital subscriptions than it gets in print. Cosmo's website offers print-only subscriptions for $15 per year, or $12 a year for a three-year commitment. Its digital-only subscriptions for the iPad and Zinio, by comparison, command $19.99 per year. IPad subscriptions are also available monthly for $1.99 -- equivalent to $23.88 annually. Fire and Nook subscriptions are available monthly only, at $1.99 a month.
(Source: http://adage.com/article/media/cosmopolitan-100-000-paid-digital-subscriptions/233142/ )
I think this is really good thing for Cosmo and for other magazines that people have find them virtually too. It's quite a big amount to have 100 000 readers, and the best thing in my opinion is that people all over the world can read what is said in Cosmo. It's quite an inportant "rule book" for women, u know. ;)
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.
