C H A P T E R 7
Gender and Advertising
How Gender Shapes Meaning
The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, “It’s a girl.”
—Shirley Chisholm
Men are dogs and women are cats. Women are from Venus and men are from Mars. Writers, filmmakers, psychologists, and advertisers all have used the idea that men and women are different to develop stories, create conflict, and provide persuasive imagery. Not only do advertisers view men and women differently, but men and women also bring different perspectives to advertising. Thus, we can assume that men and women create dif-ferent meanings from the advertisements they see. Gender roles in our society have changed dramatically since
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Once the meaning from an advertisement has been determined, men and women differ in how that meaning is used. These different decision-making processes are related to whether the process is linear or more nonlinear in nature. Men process messages and make decisions more quickly than women do, perhaps because men focus on the primary mes-sage of a given advertisement and take in little other information during the process. This is due to the observation that men have a linear thinking and reasoning style, and men tend to have a more task-oriented focus than women have. Women, on the other hand, process the information in an advertisement quickly and from many levels and sources, including music, visuals, voice-over, and text. Women also tend to evaluate and weigh the various sources to process the message and determine what steps to take next. Women’s reasoning processes are less task-oriented and more compartmentalized than men’s are. Women’s decision-making processes are characterized as being incremental reasoning processes, where each piece of information builds on the previous information that is taken in. This non-linear approach to reasoning allows women to think in terms of interrelated factors, not straight lines. The observation that women evaluate multiple sources supports this reason-ing style (Fisher, 1999).
Women and men respond to entirely different stimuli when viewing and evaluating advertising messages (Popcorn & Marigold,
Since the emergence of advertising in American culture one thing that has remained constant is the visible truth that men and women are portrayed differently. In consideration to the evolution of man kind gender roles have evolved immensely throughout time, although advertisements have not kept up with this process of evolution. Companies to this day use their tactics and skills to reach out to specific genders such as pretty fonts with a stylish message, while advertisements towards men portray the character as strong and intimidating. The typical viewer can easily spot the difference in the portrayal of genders. Men are portrayed this way because the viewers look up to these characters, they want to be
What is it that drives commercials towards their target audience? Commercials can be for a certain age, race, and sometimes even a certain gender. Pop culture has influenced the minority groups and shed light to women 's rights or so it was thought. Lisa Shaffer a fellow student feels otherwise and believes that Pop culture has only defended traditional values and does little to challenge those who already have power . Commercials bring in gender norms and in Steve Craig’s article, “Men’s Men and Women’s Women” he speaks on four particular TV ads directed towards a particular gender. What is interesting is it shows a false image of the opposite sex to the audience being portrayed toward their preferences. It is the image the audience wants to see that appeals to them. This is all in an attempt to sell their products and take advantage of our desires and anxieties. Craig shows commercials brings gender norms that produce the ideas of what a man’s man and a woman’s woman which is why he would agree with Shaffer because it promotes an old way of thinking.
Large advertising agencies have evolved pseudo-scientific methods through experience, research and intuition that yield a demographic profile of the target audience, who are the most important predictors of purchasing behavior.
Contemporary visual media contributes to the social construction of gender in that the way that men and women are portrayed in advertising is vastly different.
What is it that drives commercials towards their target audience? Commercials can be aimed toward certain age, race, along with certain gender groups. Pop culture has influenced minority groups and shed light on women 's rights or so it may seem. Lisa Shaffer a fellow student feels otherwise and believes that Pop culture has only defended traditional values and does little to challenge those who already have power . Commercials bring in gender norms and in Steve Craig’s article, “Men’s Men and Women’s Women” he speaks on four particular TV ads directed towards male and female audiences. Interestingly enough these tv ads deliver a false image of the opposite sex to the audience catering to their preferences. It is the image of what the audience wants to see that appeals to them. This is all in an attempt to sell products and take advantage of our desires and anxieties. Craig shows how commercials bring gender norms that produce the stigmas of a man’s man and a woman’s woman, which makes it apparent that he would agree with Shaffer because it promotes an old way of thinking.
It is estimated that Americans watch 4,000 to 5,000 advertisements each day. All of these advertisements fall into our basic appeals and affect us in many different ways. Advertisements also can apply to us based on gender, for example, manly commercials contain things like sports. Advertisements that apply to women usually contain people shopping, or women with a lot of makeup.
"The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: 'It's a girl.'"
In the short article by Steve Craig, Men’s Men and Women’s Womens, the author gives an important special to how television commercials portray gender to different audiences. He describes how an advertisers creates their attractive advertisement to appeal either male or females consumers.An advertisement that targets a specific gender to give interest to the gender to consume their product. Secondly, specific advertisement are played at select times to be seen by a specific set of people. But most importantly television programming is gendered by creating advertisements with considering their target audience needs and to give pleasure to their fantasies. I agree with this type of method to attract society to make money.
• The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: It's a girl.
An important question is whether gender differences affected the processing and evaluation of marketing communications. Comparative advertising to encourage a higher level of brand evaluation among participants, but not in women. Conversely, for women, attention -gaining compare appealed encourage relevant ads manipulation intention inference. In the process leading to these gender differences to evaluate the results. For men, the appeal results in a more favorable comparative advertising and brand evaluation and higher purchase intention. For women, by contrast manipulation intention to bring the appeal has had a negative view of increased advertising and brand evaluation, and to reduce the purchase intention. Thus gender plays in response to certain types of attraction while in another reaction is not very significant role.
These roles for females represent what the advertisement industry believe buyers deem as the real world. As Goffman asked," What messages about women have been given to society through magazine
In Craig's article, the author explores how advertising views men and women as separate consumer markets and appeals to both of them at separate times. Gender roles are heavily influential when creating commericials for each respective market. Craig details this through an analysis of beer ads
On television commercials, billboards, the radio, public transportation advertisements, planes, the internet, and almost everywhere people go there is always directed broadcasting of advertisements for companies to sell their product; a product that is never promoted for all of the general public to use, but instead to emphasize on specific categories of consumption . Whether it may be categorized in the decadent, the money saving, health, cleaning, cooking, automotive, or whatever sub category it may be; and bigger roles that play in to commercialism are gender roles . Men and women have very different lifestyles, what they buy, do, consume, and produce. As stated in Gender Role Behaviors and Attitudes, “Popular conceptions of femininity
Women depend on the left hemisphere, which responds better to audio stimuli. Practically, this means women respond in a positive manner to sounds. Television and magazine medium reach more of the female population than radio. This means several things. First, for women, information should be written or spoken whenever possible. Also, the ad industry has come up with many techniques to increase the effect of visual ads. The left hemisphere breaks visual images up into parts while the right sees images more holistically. This means that ads for women should be more detailed and provide more complete information (Prakash, 1992). Women (because of their
The roles of males and females in society have significantly changed, as opposed to the predominant roles in our history. In the modern culture of today, women have begun to break out of the mold that which society has placed her in. This much can’t be said when it comes to modern gender representation in mass media advertising. It can be safe to state that woman are seen as sexual, fragile, exotic—whereas men are portrayed as tough, in control, and aggressive. This trend can be one seen as an inhibitor to the advancement of our culture, because especially for women, it is hard to pull away from the stereotypes that are continuously represented. As examples of the given trend, the following