Targeting Gender in Advertising

Today's session focused on how advertisers target males and females to create a successful and memorable advert. Altogether, there were three experiments that involved us viewing a number of different adverts - the first section not relating to any particular gender, the second focusing on males and the third on females. The first experiment contained a variety of adverts which included cars, perfume, money, alcoholic drinks and flavoured. At this point, we did not know how we would be using the examples and probably did not take too much notice of the specific products being shown. On completion we were asked to write down the advert we remembered most clearly - in my case the Cravendale Strawberry Milk advert stuck in my mind. It was interesting to see, when comparing the results with others in the class that not everyone chose the same advert. In some cases a certain advert will be more memorable to males than females due to content, contrasting in the advert, colour, humour and other specific factors. The key factor involved in advertising is that not everyone remembers the same thing. There are many variables used in advertising to create a memorable image including celebrity endorsement such as the perfume adverts featured below. It may be that an advert may not be so successful if the product is not associated with a celebrity. It has been recognised that men prefer advets that contain some type of humour making the advert more memorable generally following a trent of using more pictures than text and darker colours. Women prefer and are more likely to respond to an advert that allows them to answer a question themselves whereas men prefer to jump to an answer.

"The issue is much more fundamental than the usual myopic media one about where the ads appear: It's about recognising women [and men]'s different appraoch" (Financial Times, June 29 2001)

The article taken from the WARC database: Message order effects and gender differences in advertising persuasion is a valuable source of information showing extensive research into the effectiveness of advertising position with relation to primacy and recency when comparing gender differences in behaviour. The study explains that depending on the type of processing involved, females will exhibit more primacy effects than recency effects, whereas males will exhibit more recency effects than primacy effects. A primacy effect can be defined as "a greater persuasion of the initial communication", implying that it is better to be first in line when putting across an argument. A recency effect occurs "when the final communication has the greater consequence on persuasion", or that it is better to be last when putting an argument across. There are many psychological processes and factors influencing primacy and recency effects including: interest or motivation in the subject, overall involvement and attitude strength. It has been recognised that primacy tends to occur when there is a high level of interest in a product encouraging consumers to process the information effectively. Recency effects can be observed if the end product does not promote interest or create any motivational aids allowing the consumers attention to drift away from the advertisement. It is highly likely that when interest and motivation is shown in a subject, the primacy effect will occur due to the central processing of information, whereas if information is processed peripherally, interest and motivation will be low and so as a consequence, the recency effect will be present.