Thursday, 5 May 2011

Gender

Men are from Mars women are from Venus! This has been drilled into our heads for years, but is it true? I mean it is widely known that men generally like football, beer and women whereas women don't like anything. Only kidding. The similarities between the two genders have become apparent more so than 1920 where women cleaned, cooked and looked after the children while the man worked. An interesting talk from my all-time favourite website discusses the end of gender advertising.

Adverts and marketing still use male or female orientated advertising because quite simply a male clothes store would only advertise to men, surely?! The concept of gender advertising in todays media is for example a male clothes store advertising to women because they want the wives, girlfriends, sisters, mothers to want their male counterparts to wear the clothes. The problem is getting the right balance of not having an overly masculine advert to put off women but not being to feminine to put off men. This lynx advert is obviously targeted at men but with fancy dresses, nice shoes, giggling women etc. the female interest has been accounted for. 

I have found an interesting forum where a man has arisen the touchy subject of sexism in advertising saying if many adverts were reversed there would be a lot more criticism (not that there already isn't). Personally I think that oversensitive people who complain far too much need to see the funny side of many adverts but I sort of have to agree with him even though his argument is massively futile.