Marketing is sometimes a difficult task even without your audience constantly changing.
Men and women have come a long way from the 1950’s – the depiction of June and Ward Cleaver was erased from our memories years ago. Marketing isn’t what it used to be.
While gender marketing may not be obsolete, there are three important reasons why using gender marketing can actually do more harm than good for your business.
The Negative Aspect
Gender marketing has earned itself a negative reputation to many of the people who view these extremely stereotypical and biased commercials.
Remember advertisements like that? Well, not too many of us from the millennial generation do because they’re extremely condescending towards women and insinuate that men don’t cook in the kitchen.
People no longer prefer to be stereotyped because there are so many people that no longer fit the mold of a stereotype. Gender marketing is a form of marketing that is dead, or at least it should be.
The reason that gender marketing is the worst way to target an audience is because there is no way to know if your female audience is feminine or your male targets are masculine. If your products or services are strictly created for females or males, such as tampons or jock straps, then yes, gender marketing may be more appropriate. If you’re selling self-help books or used vehicles, avoiding referencing to one particular gender can be more beneficial to your target audience.
- Ignorance
While gender marketing has earned a bad reputation, many advertisers still use this method today. The truth is, it’s not made as blatant as it once was but it is still noticeable to those it offends.
Not only is it an ignorant form of marketing but it can simply be untrue.
When a baby is born, gender marketing begins in its simplest form. It starts with picking colors, blue or pink, based on your baby’s sex.
As you get older, the advertisements still continue and base your toy choices, body wash and even the car you drive – all based on your gender.
- Stereotypes
Not only can gender marketing be offensive to your audience, male or female, but it doesn’t promote equality between sexes. When running a business, your target audience is important to clarify, but it’s also crucial not to exclude the ‘exceptions’.
For example, obviously not all women enjoy sports, but the number of women who do is growing and if you’re marketing a new football you’ve created, advertising only to men can reduce sales and make women feel like they’re not worthy of your product.
Switch the roles – if you’ve started a business that is reinventing kitchen appliances, marketing to only women is entirely inappropriate. There are no barriers between men and women in the kitchen and it’s certainly not up to your business to place any.
- Negative Emotions
One of the biggest reasons why gender marketing is inappropriate is for moral reasons. Regardless of whether you’re starting up a new business or on your way to running a corporation, many forms of gender marketing use negative emotions to feed off of the audience and sell products.
Feeding off of negative emotions, such as makeup companies telling their audience that they need their products to stay pretty all day long. Women may not immediately feel inclined to buy the makeup product, but it certainly makes them wonder if they would be prettier with it.
Even products as simple as Halloween costumes, stating ‘sexy police officer’ or ‘sexy Eskimo’ use negative emotions to sell themselves. Will the consumer not be sexy if they buy an outfit that is labeled ‘Batgirl’?
Though gender marketing is still very much apparent today, it’s a negative medium used to sell products and should slowly be eliminated.