Gender,Power,&Culture Essay - Gendered Products PDF

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Prof. Angela Aujla

An essay based around Gendered Products. ...

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Gendered Products Gender, Power and Culture Angela Aujla October 31, 2015 Pages: 16

Introduction:

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In marketing there has always been a push to advertise products to select gender: the pink aisle for girl toys or clothes and the blue aisle for boys products. This can be seen in not just retailers and products in Canada, but across the world. Companies are using their products to reinforce gender stereotypes on society. By doing this, what are companies actually selling to consumers? The visual literacy that is conveyed through these products is to persuade buyers to get a particular product. Yet, what makes cereal, cigarettes, alcohol or any other product male or female? Products are gender targeted by using particular language, fonts, colours, symbols, and characters that relay feminine or masculine images. The ultimate goal of this targeting is to get customers to purchase based off their gender and ensures that the company will make profit.

Language: In any marketing situation language is selected very carefully to ensure that the product is as consumable as possible. When marketing to specific genders companies use slogans and language that are marketed to appeal to men or women. They use this rhetoric to sell their products. A great example of a company targeting women and men using language for a product is Unilever, who own Dove. This brand makes many cleansing products such as hand soap, shower products and facial wipes, carrying both a female line and a men's line. In the past, Dove has used slogans such as “You’re more beautiful than you think” and “Real Beauty” when launching new advertisements for their female lines. These slogans feature language that is reassuring and applicable to all women. By a company reassuring women and complimenting them they are more likely to buy the product over another. “Made for men,” is the slogan for the men’s line that Dove makes. Their bottle is also grey to differ from the female white. It states simply that this

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product is for men and only a male product. By promoting that it is “made for men” it makes men who do not use it feel emasculated. This language tries to ensure that the consumer chose this over the female line or another product. Gendered gearing can be found in more markets than just hygiene products though. The alcohol industry regularly creates products that are geared to certain genders. One brand, Skinnygirl, carries wine and cocktails that are targeted to women. Just the name of the brand tells you they advertise to sell females their drink, particularly ones who are watching their figures. They advertise that they are the “Margarita you can trust” because they are lower in calories than a traditional version of the drink. Not only does this slogan promote the beverage, it undermines all the women who do not consume this, implying they aren’t “skinny”. The opposite can be seen with Mike’s Hard Lemonade, a cooler that targets a masculine buyer with their slogan “Liquid gladiators in a sea of wussy drinks”. Therefore, if you do not drink this particular beverage, it implies that you are a “wussy”. These are not the only brands that are using language to convince consumers to buy their products, it is a common tactic for companies to use.

Symbols, Fonts, and Colours: Not only does the language that companies use to promote their products matter, they also use the packaging that the product is sold in. The symbols, fonts and colours chosen play a major role in the image that the company is creating. Cursive scripts can be seen as feminine because of the curvy and smooth characteristics yet big and bold fonts can be read visually as masculine because they appear strong. One everyday example would be something as basic as cereal. The brand Vector could be eaten by anyone but is marketed towards masculine consumers based on the fonts and symbols found

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on its advertisements. Not only can you see men working out in the ads but the logo features a bright white font that is bold and capitalized on a navy blue background, a colour commonly used to represent males. They create the image of what you might look like if you eat this brand of cereal. A very similar feminine version of this would be Special K, a cereal that is typically targeted to women as a health and weightloss cereal. The logo that Special K uses is also bold but not as squared as Vector. The font features more curves to create a more feminine product. The advertisement displays a thin woman wearing jeans displaying to the consumer that they may look like this if they eat Special K. Through the stylization of their packaging, food brands support the reinforcement of gender stereotypes in our society. Cigarette companies can also be seen to direct their brands to select genders which is interesting because they are not allowed to advertise anymore. The most well known and consumed cigarette brand in the world, Marlboro, has many offshoots of their brand but the most popular type is their Marlboro Reds. Marlboro Reds do a number of things to market themselves as a male oriented cigarette. From the basic and bold font to the classic rooftop shaped red outline, these cigarettes are marketed towards the everyday working man. In contrast to this, Vogue cigarettes have all of the characteristics of a feminine cigarette brand. From their slim and slender shape to the colour of the thin, cursive styled logo Vogue cigarettes exemplify a whole host of female stereotypes. Although not commonly used anymore, women in the early 1900's used long, slim cigarette holders to prevent stains on their fingers. By marketing long, slim cigarettes to women, these cigarette companies are continuing to reinforce traditional gender roles on our society through the shape of cigarettes. Men historically also used cigarette holders, yet they were rarely made to be longer than four inches. With more masculine brands of cigarettes, they are never slim and always feature a very thick and shorter shape than female

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geared cigarette brands.

Characters: Companies often use characters in their products and ads to direct people to their product based on their gender. Alcohol brands are notorious for this as can be seen with characters they have created such as the Dos Equis guy or Captain Morgan. In the case of Dos Equis, the company named their character "the most interesting man in the world" which goes on to imply that by drinking their beer, people can achieve a lifestyle like this character. He is a bearded, stoic looking character of old age yet has numerous women with him throughout their commercials. Captain Morgan do a very similar thing with their character by portraying him as a classic pirate character, which women are not commonly known for. Even the Captains stance is dominant with one leg up on a barrel. These brands direct their market primarily to men and instill the idea that you can be more manly if you drink their product. In all reality, drinking these products does nothing more than give you a buzz, not a beard. In the case of shampoo and body wash, Old Spice shows the use of characters in an interesting way. One ad that Old Spice has used contains the phrase "smell like a man, man" which is their way of trying to emasculate men. They sell their product by telling men that if they don't use Old Spice, they are less manly and thus inferior to the muscular character used in these ads. The use of characters such as the Old Spice guy or the Dos Equis guy damages our society's perception of men and forces them into a fixed idea of what being a man means. One interesting thing that can be noted is products geared towards women typically don't contain specific characters. This could be for any number of reasons, but male characters in products always seem to have to take on a role of hyper masculinity.

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Even Marlboro cigarettes have used characters to market their brand towards men. Old Marlboro ads often featured a mustached cowboy character that looked like a working man. By using a cowboy, Marlboro instill stereotypes on men that smoke to choose their brand because other hard working men smoke Marlboro. They want men to choose their brand so they can try to be like their cowboy character and become more masculine. Ads like these damage men's perception of gender and reinforce the idea that if you aren't doing physical labour, you can't be a man.

Effects on Consumers: By marketing products to specific genders there is obviously going to be an effect on the consumer. Trying to cash in on someone’s gender is not always accurate, especially in this day and age when gender has become such a fluid concept. Not only is it not always accurate, it also teaches children and youth what it means to be a certain gender. If we say that girls can only play with dolls it puts a gender stereotype on a child and it may or may not be correct. It is necessary to teach children to be themselves and gendered products can have a negative effect causing children to follow society’s norms. By creating gendered products we continue to let anatomy become destiny as we teach men and women how they should look, smell, or what they should consume.

Conclusion: There is a lot more to be read from advertisements than just the images they display on the outside. Reading deeper into visuals found on products we can see that language, font, colour, symbols and characters all play a part in what is actually displayed. Companies reinforce gender stereotypes by using them within their products. Although gendered products may allow companies to bank on consumers genders, it continues to push stereotypes into a society that is

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ever changing.

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