Effect on Marketing when Women are excluded

Effect on Marketing when Women are excluded from AdvertisementEffect on Marketing when Women are excluded from Advertisement

Whenever you turn on the television, it is there. When you are in the doctor's office staring into a magazine, it is staring right back at you. In fact, in today's society, it is assaulting you in sight and sound, no matter where you are or what you are doing. Yes, I am talking about advertising. It is what drives our consumer culture onward. Ads are everywhere, pitching an extensive array of useless products in an equally extensive variety of ways. Advertisers play on several different tactics to get people interested in their products; they humor, self-esteem, peer pressure and many other things, but the one tactic that is most popular and the most effective is using sex in advertising. This is effective because it plays upon the biological needs of every single human being.

No matter what the product, from shampoo to beer, the tactics are all the same. Get a beautiful person in there and maybe, just maybe, the audience will be tricked into thinking that maybe they can be/have that beautiful person. The use of these models and how they are posed is actually a very precise art, starting with human biology and the nature of sex. On the cover of almost every magazine in the grocery store there is a gorgeous model or actor staring at you with that ever so seductive "come hither stare." The thing that most people do not realize that, for the most part, the appeal of that look is generated on a computer. 

According to Richard F. Taflinger, PhD, "Sex is the second strongest of the psychological appeals, right behind self-preservation. Its strength is biological and instinctive, the genetic imperative of reproduction," He also point out, though, that gender also play a huge role in the effectiveness of the advertising. 

By showing women in a false state of arousal, advertisers are able to associate their products with pleasure and instinctual survival. By showing a woman in a state of arousal, this is giving a man the "good to go" signal; so advertising is ultimately easier and more effective on men. They are receptive to the immediacy of image, and to the immediacy of the advertising campaign itself. 

Women, on the other hand, have a different biological prerogative which makes it more difficult to sell to them. Women instinctively think in the long run. They naturally look for someone who can provide for their offspring, so factors of wealth, power and intelligence quickly come into play and spoil the immediacy of the add.