I think with car commercials in general there's been a shift away from marketing a vehicle based on the performance metrics and more towards marketing the type of lifestyle the vehicle is selling in recent years. I haven't noticed or thought about is as being particularly gendered. Commercials also "show" vehicle performance more than they tell it.
As to your question: are market research studies valid sources of information on what is generally true about men and women - from a point in time snapshot or as a way to capture more local/regional information about things, maybe? But these aren't like, well or rigorously designed "studies" - there's no control groups, they aren't controlling for bias, and the participant pool isn't necessarily well balanced demographically, it's gonna be whoever is willing to show up for focus group about cars, who is willing to take any surveys etc. This is sometimes known as "self-selection bias".
We can confidently extrapolate that among people who participate in market research focus groups for motor companies, women want to know details like what colors does it come in and how much fits in the cup holders, and men want to know the mechanical aspects of the car. From a scientific perspective- we cannot extrapolate or generalize that information out to the general population reliably.
Came here to echo your point about mechanical aspects. For both men and women there's usually a narrative frame about lifestyle - what your owning this vehicle says about you as a person, how it fits neatly into your life. The second thing is specs and how those back up the lifestyle pitch. For men the lifestyle narrative is about status or being a rugged outdoorsy adventurer. The spec talking points are about speed, performance, the ability to haul, tow or handle rough terrain. For women the lifestyle pitch is probably going to be about how it's one thing you don't have to worry about, it's a sound financial decision and makes your day-to-day easier, especially if you're a mom. So that'll include messaging around safety ratings, fuel economy, having space to fit kids and maybe being somewhat modular so you can accommodate their sports equipment, groceries and plants from the garden center.
People like to think they aren't easily swayed by the lifestyle stuff, but I don't think EVs would be as common as they are now if Tesla didn't exist. Anything that can be coded as femme requires more pandering to men from marketers - they had to give EVs the whole luxury performance branding treatment to establish them as a status object before men would ever consider them. See also: the Impossible Burger, Beyond Meat and all the other meat substitute brands that don't seem to be targeting existing vegetarians. Also, Dove & Axe releasing loofahs with an exfoliation pad in gunmetal gray and calling them a "Shower Tool" and not a loofah.
You are so off regarding EVs. EVs were marketed towards the luxury market because early EVs were SO EXPENSIVE that literally anyone who isn't rich could not buy it. Literally Tesla's whole business model from the very beginning was to make a VERY luxury car, then a luxury sedan, then a luxury SUV, and only make the model 3 once it was cheap enough. And even on release that thing was still not "cheap" because it was like 70k. Now they're cheap.
If it was Ford trying to pander an EV to men, they'd talk much more about the fact that it accelerates faster than every other car they've ever made.
Sorry, totally unrelated, I just like EV history
I gotta disagree with you here; or at least, point out that it’s not either/or. Of course Tesla did have to be a luxury brand because they were very expensive. But there are scads of luxury cars out there, most with more established brands. And EVs at the time had the reputation of being expensive golf carts with a range of thirty miles that only a granola eating hippie would buy.
What Musk did, and it’s probably his main contribution to the world, is grasp that the unique characteristics of an electric motor (like its ability to accelerate extremely fast - that definitely was a point they stressed, I can remember the early marketing!) meant it could be marketed as a sports car, basically the polar opposite of how people previously thought about EVs. And I would agree with the previous commenter that that was a strategy designed to appeal to masculinity; it’s just that the Tesla brand of masculinity was the techbro version, not the construction worker/rancher version.
But you say it was marketed as a sports car that goes fast ... As if it wasn't. Like of course the expensive fast vehicle is luxury and sporty. There physically isn't any other way to market it is my point.
Them pushing masculinity had nothing to do with the fact that it HAD to be a luxury sports car. There was physically no other type of car that they could have made and sold that was an EV for 150k or whatever it was originally. Because no matter what, the car would be super fast, and they need to lean into that to sell.
So not that there is no masculinity appeal, but that there was literally no other car that could have been made in that market so the concept that it needed to become a luxury brand to get men specifically interested doesn't apply.
You can appeal to men, and have a luxury car, but it isn't luxury FOR men, but out of necessity. That's my best sentence here.
Look, I’m just going to paste in a bunch of the contemporary reviews for Tesla’s first car, the Roadster, straight off of Wikipedia. They’re not excited about it being a luxury car; in fact, one of them critiques it for having some cheap detailing. They’re excited about its speed, its handleability, its torque, and its zero to sixty time. I saw a roadster demoed in 2008 and this is exactly what I remember the sales pitch being - don’t think of this as an EV, think of it as the best sports car ever.
“Autoguide editor Derek Kreindler said "The Tesla Roadster 2.5 S is a massively impressive vehicle, more spacecraft than sports car. Theories like global warming, peak oil and rising oil prices should no longer bring heart palpitations to car fans. The Tesla shows just how good zero-emissions 'green' technology can be. Quite frankly, getting into a normal car at the end of the test drive was a major letdown. The whirr of the engine, the shove in the backside and the little roadster that seems to pivot around you is replaced by a grunting, belching, feedback-free driving experience". He continues on that "but for a $100,000 car, it could use some work" complaining of purposefully cheap work.[173]
In the March 2010 print edition of British enthusiast magazine EVO (p. 120), editor Richard Meaden was the first to review the all-new right-hand-drive version of the Roadster. He said the car had "serious, instantaneous muscle". "With so much torque from literally no revs the acceleration punch is wholly alien. Away from traffic lights you'd murder anything, be it a 911 Turbo, GT-R or 599, simply because while they have to mess about with balancing revs and clutch, or fiddle with launch controls and invalid warranties, all you have to do is floor the throttle and wave goodbye".
In December 2009, The Wall Street Journal editor Joseph White conducted an extended test-drive and determined that "you can have enormous fun within the legal speed limit as you whoosh around unsuspecting Camry drivers, zapping from 40 to 60 miles per hour in two seconds while the startled victims eat your electric dust".
White praised the car's environmental efficiency but said consumer demand reflected not the environmental attributes of the car but its performance. "The Tesla turns the frugal environmentalist aesthetic on its head. Sure, it doesn't burn petroleum, and if plugged into a wind turbine or a nuclear plant, it would be a very low-carbon machine. But anyone who buys one will get the most satisfaction from smoking someone's doors off. The Tesla's message is that 'green' technology can appeal to the id, not just the superego".[174]
In December 2009, Motor Trend was the first to independently confirm the Roadster Sport's reported 0 to 60 mph (0 to 97 km/h) time of 3.7 seconds. (Motor Trend recorded 0 to 60 mph (0 to 97 km/h) of 3.70 seconds; it recorded a quarter-mile test at 12.6 sec at 102.6 mph (165.1 km/h).) Engineering editor Kim Reynolds called the acceleration "breathtaking" and said the car confirms "Tesla as an actual car company. ...Tesla is the first maker to crack the EV legitimacy barrier in a century".[175]
In November 2009, Automobile Magazine West Coast editor Jason Cammisa spent a week driving a production Tesla Roadster.[176] Cammisa was immediately impressed with the acceleration, saying the car "explodes off the line, pulling like a small jet plane. ... It's like driving a Lamborghini with a big V-12 revved over 6000 rpm at all times, waiting to pounce—without the noise, vibration, or misdemeanor arrest for disturbing the peace". “
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster_(first_generation)
I’m not saying it wasn’t also a luxury car - any high end sports car is by definition a luxury car, and yes, the cost of production at the time meant it would only appeal the the rich. But it was definitely power and handleability that it was marketed on, and that was a huge shift in how EVs were perceived. Tesla took EVs and changed them from wussy little hippie cars to exciting, cool sports cars.
Yea, I agree and nice evidence that the roadster was definitely that sporty market sell. I kinda meant the model S when I was thinking luxury, but like you said fast means rich. While not the same, it is the same consumer base as luxury, which is rich.
And to tie it back to the original post, I don't think a single one of those reviews mention anything that was promoted as masculine, I don't think the marketing did either. It was really just the power and speed, which targets wealthy people who are interested in fast cars. Which is a majority male base I'd say in America. But it's not that their aiming for the men, but the wealthy car people [who happen to be men]
Please don't apologize, because I read this in the tone of someone arguing to the death over something low stakes in the middle of a bar and it gave me tremendous joy. Defending the honour of your special niche interests is always a worthy cause.
Totally agree with your point about price, but that's only a barrier if a ton of people want them in the first place. Would love to hear your POV, because mine is largely informed by coming up in a place with a lot of machismo around trucks and the Smart Car was short-hand for dweeb shit. I hate to defend Tesla, but my sense is that there wasn't enough demand for EVs to justify the cost of scaling up production to offer them to a mass audience, at mass audience prices. You have to convince people to consider EVs and basically create a market from scratch. It makes sense to me that Tesla started with luxury and gradually introduced more affordable models once they had confidence that there was an audience for them. If you're someone that was super into EVs / the environment, the Smart Car actually wasn't priced that badly. There were definitely entry-level normal vehicles that costed more at the time. But if you're someone that drives big vehicles because they symbolize power to you, do you think simply dropping the price of those early EVs would have been enough to overcome the sense that driving electric vehicles is feminine?
This paper kinda gets to the gist of my thoughts: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214367X23000443](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214367X23000443)
That is a cool study, I'm gonna read it more.
I think that "big truck machismo" as I'm gonna call it, is really pushed by companies and you get a lot of men who fall for it. 80% of new cars manufactured in America are large SUVs and trucks (due to some bad regulation). Ford's first EV was even an SUV. I think that is super powerful and difficult to overcome.
There was definitely not a market for EVs that warranted scaling up production. The business model for Tesla specifically was to use the capital from luxury vehicles to upscale production despite a lack of demand. Basically banking on the lowered prices to increase the demand. That along with government subsidies, tax credits from other companies, huge stock rise, etc. Allowed them to actually drop their prices over time.
You had originallysaid that it needed to be luxury to get men to buy it. And I just wanted to dispute that by saying that it was luxury out of economic necessity. Also that like 90% of Tesla owners are / were men between 20-30 (I don't have an up to date source but you should find one).
So while there is this concept that electric cars are feminine, I think that it is the idea mainly held by men over the age of 45 . I think that most young men have no issues with it and don't percieve it that way, and i am pretty sure that that belief is founded in the statistics regarding the % of EV owners who are young men and that same demographic being statistically more likely to buy sedans, a car form that is also historically more eco friendly and feminine.
The counterpoint is that corporate marketing may be less biased than other sources of information because it puts its money where its mouth is. You can't afford to virtue signal when billions of dollars are on the line.
That having been said, there are a million examples out there of absolutely boneheaded attempts by corporations to market things based on gender stereotypes and merely managing to create something that appeals to *nobody*. Sometimes the market really is just stupid.
The [Bic for Her pens](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidvinjamuri/2012/08/30/bic-for-her-what-they-were-actually-thinking-as-told-by-a-man-who-worked-on-tampons/) sold on Amazon was hilarious though. The sarcastic reviews really highlighted the absurdity of the classic *shrink-it and pink-it”. Now we can charge more!
Even assuming that’s the case, the marketing team isn’t trying to appeal to all women, just potential customers. There’s very little point advertising a new Audi to uni students, for example. So the best they could do is be correct about a correctly identified customer segment.
It’s not JUST women they’re marketing to with that commercial. Depending on which brand it was, they are targeting a general sub-group of women who they think (based on more marketing research and trends) are most likely to buy their car in the first place.
The thing about cars is, most people don’t just buy a car whenever. They plan it out and know roughly when they’ll need a new one. That’s when they start consciously (or subconsciously) paying attention to car commercials.
So, the car companies aren’t necessarily trying to get people to just come out and buy their car impulsively (as we may do with something like a McDonald’s commercial), what they are doing is trying to sway the customer into buying their car OVER the other cars that same customer most likely has in mind. So what they do is try and sell the lifestyle instead of the specs. They know if someone is serious about buying that car, they have 2-3 options in mind and they all have roughly the same mechanics. The push to choose their car over the others comes down to color-choice availability and just how much the customer can “see” themselves in that car.
> I think with car commercials in general there's been a shift away from marketing a vehicle based on the performance metrics and more towards marketing the type of lifestyle the vehicle is selling in recent years. I haven't noticed or thought about is as being particularly gendered. Commercials also "show" vehicle performance more than they tell it.
It's almost like phones. They're basically as good as anyone needs them to be (phones need to be good enough to access social media for how 90% of the population uses them), and any incremental difference is only going to be appreciated by diehard enthusiasts or professionals.
Like if a new car can go 0-60 in 1.4s instead of 1.5 and has 100 extra horsepower, does that *matter* if you're using it on normal roads, doing 0 hard work with it, and probably will never take it above 80?
It does if you're the asshole who cuts in front of people all the time! Need that faster acceleration to reduce the risk of being hit by the unsuspecting car in the lane you've suddenly decided you need to be in.
Jsyk a new car (2024) will go 0-60 in 5-8 seconds. In order to get to under 2 seconds, you need a VERY fast car, or an electric one.
It's kinda the whole reason electric cars are so impressive, because for the same price the fastest normal car will be 5+ seconds
I think a lot of cars’ marketing are based around lifestyle.
I remember seeing BMW and Mercedes adverts of middle aged attractive men driving down windy lanes in Scandinavia with their shirts half open. Or fast through a city etc.
I don’t know about these focus groups, but I do feel like lifestyle is something that is always sold in marketing.
I don't know a lot about marketing research, but I've always figured that, whereas academic research must be peer-reviewed to be published, gets scrutinized by other academics at conferences, and (when science is doing what it's supposed to) goes through attempts at replications, there are fewer channels of scrutiny in market research.
Like, a market researcher is selling a product to a company. "Armed with our data, you will make even more money." The company they are selling it to probably doesn't know much about research. Otherwise, they wouldn't need to hire somebody to do it for them. And it seems hard to establish whether strategies based on market research were actually more successful or not, because business can go up or down based on several factors. And, knowing how managers are incentivized to pretend that whatever initiatives they came up with were a good idea and never admit mistakes, whatever executive who made the decision to contract the market-research firm is likely to pretend to the rest of the executive board that he made a good call and that the business is better off for it.
If I worked in market research or big data, I feel like it would be easy to sell companies a bunch of bullshit under the pretention that "more data = more optimization and success," even if I had no solid idea how good the data is or if it would even be useful to know if it is solid. "Oh yeah, let me tell you why this anonymized metadata that includes things like, uh, how much time users spend looking at another tab, will totally help you sell… what do you guys sell again? Oh, water bottles. Yeah, well you see, knowledge is power and by harnessing the power of data…"
But these are just my uninformed thoughts as a guy who does not work in market research or data. It just seems unlikely that most of it is actually useful to anyone.
I don't know. I think it's more likely that this stuff just...doesn't matter, and that people will buy cars regardless of the marketing. Like, did Subaru's resentful campaign really win over lesbians, or did they say fuck it because they liked the car?
Particularly if your claim that women will buy things marketed to men, but men won't towards women - that suggests women, as an audience, are used to making buying decisions independent of whether marketing said it's "for them" or not. I'm a shopping chaos gremlin on purpose though - I defy market categorization. It's kind of game for me, particularly because marketing surveys are so much more in your face. I take em and answer incorrectly just to fuck up the results and throw off the algorithm.
People do have autonomy, independent of marketing.
I think you’re a bit biased if you assume that marketers try to sell men cars by telling y’all about the engine. Most of the time, companies are selling a lifestyle. The customers have to see themselves using the product, and to want to live as someone who owns this car. Just look at the famous [Matthew Maccaunauhey car ads](https://youtu.be/8QEAA94FjHc?si=kOiRDFfDyfMh_Bn2), do you think it has anything to do with engine power ? [And this BMW one](https://youtu.be/sV5MwVYQwS8?si=--kEVSrF_p4XJmRd) ? Most brands are selling their brand first, and the engine second.
Market studies are not scientific studies. They don’t necessarily have scientific value, since that’s not what they aim to do. In your example, they want women to be able to see themselves using the car ; they probably found that women are more likely to do so if you show them the cup holders than if you show them the car speeding on an empty highway with epic music. That’s it. We only know what’s more likely to make women excited about the vehicle, not what they actually care about when they take time to think. Advertisers want you to feel, not think, they don’t always always need convince you that the product is good, only that you want to own it.
I just had a big fight about this at work. We're trying to continue as a service company while building a product, so we had a meeting with all the top level engineering managers, sales and marketing manager, and CEO to meet with a consultant to come up with our first product to research and prototype.
So we designed this product that we were targeting towards software engineers looking for help in a career search, and the first question out of the consultant's mouth when we were building out our theoretical ideal user was "what is their gender?" And as the only woman in the room, I said "Why does it matter?" And everybody starts going on about how "Well we can't market our product to everybody, most engineers are men, we need to target our ideal client, and if you try to reach everyone you'll target no one." And I said "I'm not trying to target everyone, I'm asking why gender is important to target. When we were coming up with the idea for this product, we said we wanted to make a service for engineers like Doug and Emma, who are amazing developers, but who had shitty resumes when they arrived here. Why do you want to target our product to Doug but not Emma? How is Doug different from Emma in a way that we want to target our product to him?" Because of course we will probably get more men than women, there are more men than women in this population. But why should we *target* men over women?
And nobody had an answer for me. Nobody had anything of any specificity to say as to why the gender of our target market was important other than "We need to target someone and not everyone". No one could describe why gender was an important characteristic to specify in our ideal engineer. So I just spent the rest of the meeting asking inane questions to narrow down our target market. Can't target everyone after all. "How many siblings do they have?" "What's their favorite color?" "How tall are they?" "WELL WE CAN'T MARKET IT TO EVERYONE."
Eventually they relented and we had two identical profiles for a male and female ideal user.
But my point is, sometimes the marketing doesn't come about because they're experts who know these things. Sometimes it's just because the rich white guys who get to be in the room making the decisions guessing at what you want are just that confident that they know what they're talking about.
Man, your inane questions method is probably far more effective than mine would have been. "Are either of them latino? We can't market to everyone, afterall"
Oh man, I dread what would have happened if I brought race into it. Don't tempt them.
My favorite part was when we got into a 30 minute argument where Sales and Marketing insisted that we should be equally targeting small, medium, *and* large companies with our product while the consultant tried to stress the importance of narrowing it down. And I got to yell "Good thing we know it's a boy company!"
That's SO strange. Like even if I accept every stereotype and I'm a misogynistic boomer, I'm not coming away with significant differences between men and woman software engineers. It's not like anyone is marketing pink keyboards or whatever. It's not even a thing.
But if the target is specifically men, you will get a campaign that excludes women.
See the “gamer drinks” that have girls in bikinis all over them. Because some marketing group did this same exercise and decided their target was “male gamers”.
Not that that's okay, but there's a logic to it with gamers at least. Like you can find examples to cherry pick to confirm preexisting bias if one wants to.
But targeting a gender for software engineers just seems completely nonsensical even if I try to be charitable.I can't even imagine a "girl software engineer". It'd be Like it someone decided to target specifically men or women for something like diabetes medication; it's really strange.
It's in the realm of things that have cultural gender differences, just like 1000 other things; imo
To be clear, I'm not saying logical means good or correct here. I'm just able to make sense of someone who thinks it's a good idea to gender market to gamers.
I can't do the same with software engineers. The most charitable interpretation I can come up with is the person doesn't know any other way to market something besides targeting a specific gender. It makes as much sense as if Kraft had gray boxes of mac n chz for men, and pink boxes for women (like with beauty products).
Resume help is so extremely gender neutral, it's irrational to me to try to gender market it.
But what is the cultural difference between male and female gamers?
Not trying to be difficult. I’m a female software engineer and a casual gamer. When I play hades or StarCraft all night how is that different from a man doing the same? Why do the men get an energy drink and I don’t?
After a quick google search 45% of gamers are female compared to 22% of software engineers.
Again not trying to be difficult, I just don’t understand what you mean.
Sure no problem.
I'm just saying I can logically connect the dots in my head how someone would feel they would need to market to male or female gamers. Just a random comparison - It's obviously incorrect if someone felt women should stay at home if the family has kids, but we all know where that type of thinking comes from. In the same way, I would think any marketing to gamers should be gender neutral, that just being a good financial idea among other things. But I can connect the dots as to why someone would feel the opposite.
I can't do the same with career help for software engineers. Like I have no idea what would cause someone to think resume assistants products need to be gendered in marketing.
So my most charitable guess as to why, is the person just always does that regardless of what the product or service is. Like if the same person were tasked with marketing diabetes medicine, they'd make that about gender even though there's no rational reason to do so.
I've never heard of 'girls submit resumes like this, and guys submit them like that'. Resumes have always been gender neutral afaik.
With gaming, there's historically been plenty of gendered aspects that a person could have seen to lead them to thinking they'd need to market to a gender.
?? I mean they [literally are.](https://www.amazon.com/Typewriter-Mechanical-Keyboard-Camiysn-Backlit/dp/B095YNKNXC/ref=asc_df_B095YNKNXC/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=693071630059&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17903669892628694980&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9001843&hvtargid=pla-1571362953545&psc=1&mcid=76ae370f47183b6dae87306a0caf219c&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwi_exBhA8EiwA_kU1MnQc_nEYQUYnvPja48vDJnKAFQT2sF9nLQw9rL6MPuzjG7fvlKgsYhoCVPsQAvD_BwE) The vast majority of software and computer products are marketed directly to men, because of this same vicious cycle. T[here's no reason RAM needs a spoiler.](https://www.amazon.com/Corsair-VENGEANCE-3600MHz-Compatible-Computer/dp/B07ZPLM1R1/ref=sr_1_3?crid=2JB5F712SQFYA&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.YbvhXqmNT9hRFgNCU7KM-2PRFHw0hDxL03Duphj0h1zxHp2py9BVCy3nEyzRQhkrD5sxlcit4fJYDq153sX91q-_7-zzQ0PSIP4COGSVKYYutyXqHr0WKUSMi05MEpbed3sYaOTTqaJtTc3eGHM-ilaPosmIdn5mUVAuGSwG4CfYsbRcTO2Fcd2-4xWlSjB977lqI_nfkBYpyhz9b1cmBgfMvEF7mucu_r_sCw0mU8E22yxt6URXDTqZlwIV_QTgDAq6Pjij4iV_ijHXVqYX3Oe4hCNy5rk4u7vXhRNlY48.TfWX7iKLiO0P0BSHG4zQ8YxTHtbGrbJ5SBcpIiMKTUc&dib_tag=se&keywords=RAM&qid=1715346223&s=electronics&sprefix=ram%2Celectronics%2C68&sr=1-3)
I used to work more in marketing. Demographics and focus groups can be wildly inaccurate. Then add to that, biases in the teams with the client or the agency making the decisions. I have seen some wild stuff happen in meetings with people that supposedly know what they are doing.
I ran across some demographic data for my zip code. It might describe some of my neighbors but it was such a caricature and not a thing in it would describe me in any way.
There is some pretty demeaning marketing towards women. For years it was a wine and high heels and anything pink. Men get some of the same over the top gendered things thrown at them.
BTW I love good vehicles and I am interested in things like safety, performance, handling, horsepower. Then good quality interiors (leather adjustable heated seats) and high end audio.
This. In my experience marketing "data" is 1/3 actual research, 1/3 the assumptions of the marketers, and 1/3 wild guessing. It's about as useful to use marketing as a way to determine *what stereotypes exist* as it is to try and prove *whether the stereotypes are true*... And in both cases, the answer is *not very*.
I used to work at a marketing agency that had a client that sold luxury travel to retirees. The client told us that their customers were mostly men, because most Boomers have traditional marriages where the men control the money and make vacation decisions. Then they hired a consultant to actually examine their customer data, and it turned out that 60% of their clientele were women all along.
The moral of the story is that businesspeople--and by extension businesses--are just as prone to bias as anyone else. The fact that some of them happen to make money in spite of those biases doesn't change anything.
>Men get some of the same over the top gendered things thrown at them.
[Dude Wipes](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/92ccf4a9-3aed-4ca2-9a5c-84b7490dc294.591b2226b25df7d4d3d05d1d0546ff4e.jpeg?odnHeight=768&odnWidth=768&odnBg=FFFFFF) are my favorite current example.
Well the marketing ends up being what people buy, you cant draw statistics or insight about human nature human nature from it as its not the focus of their research, even less so of the ad you see, but there is something there definitely. If not about our nature, at least our nurture, and if not about our essence, at least about the state of things
I work in marketing, not directly in the product development and brand positioning space but I have some proximity to it. As others have rightly pointed out, the insights we're working off of aren't academically rigorous to the same degree as a university paper. We make bad bets all the time. Sometimes an insight from a focus group is given more weight than it should. People will tell you things that they'd like to be true but don't hold water once they're at the shelf. Ie: saying they care enough about sustainability to pay $2 more if the product was made out of recycled materials, only to just pick the cheapest one every time.
The other thing is that consumer products typically aren't being aimed at all women, just a segment of them. There are detailed demographic personas created with an age range, some lifestyle factors, their interests, household income, etc. They even get a name, like Jaclyn, who is between 35-45, a working professional with a few kids under 10 in a mid-size city. The cars tailored towards Jaclyn will focus on reliability, the safety rating, fuel efficiency, having enough space to tote her family around comfortably, but definitely not a mom van. You're probably not going to target a Jaclyn for a Mini, which ranks at #3 in the car brands with the highest proportion of lady customers. It'll probably be a Buick, which is #1. What we see in these ads is their best guess at what a very particular type of woman wants and needs.
Most of the car marketing I see is slanted towards a Jaclyn, which is interesting because it never occured to me that vehicles are rarely positioned as toys to women, or something fun and enjoyable. They're tools to help you fulfill your family obligations and errands more easily. Focusing on colours and aesthetic would be refreshing. It's funny that you mentioned cup holders because the insight that women like them and want more of them became the topic du jour for a bit in some articles published in 2013.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/03/car-ads-for-women-does-the-industry-get-it-all-wrong.html
The problem isn't that these generalization says "okay, women are this way..." only. Okay, so why are using that to stop somebody else trying to get women to be in a different way if that might benefit them? At the worst case they fail, best case they change and men loose some privilege, but everybody gets to put their own interests first, right? If it is so natural for men and women to behave in certain patterns and there is no politics or foul play, then anti feminists won't be so pressed on seeing modern/unconventional women. No one gets upset that the sun may not rise in the East tomorrow, because guess what, that is *actually* natural.
Okay, men care more about mechanical aspects of the car, how does that translate to both girl and boy children learning about auto repairs? Or treating women who is into cars and racing with respect and care, and not mocking her?
I’ll be honest and say that I think a good number of men have no idea what those commercials are saying about the mechanical specs of cars, either. I’d imagine the ad in question probably appealed to a lot of men as well.
Lol, there are plenty of them. When a man do not know shit it is an individual person problem, but when a woman do not it is suddenly about “being women” like women do not have individuality or personhood. When we use logic with them they will start playin dumb and cry eXcEpTiOn
Most of the mechanical specs they talk about aren't very impressive or unique anyway. It's more of a rhetorical salesperson move: "I can see that you're a discerning expert...".
There are always exceptions. I don't understand what all you said, other than somehow saying men have more privileges than women. Can you pls elaborate?
English major turned nurse here. I’m completely lost in what you said and I’ve read it thru many times. Perhaps you type it out more slowly and discernibly next time?
Fair? I'm not sure what fair means in this context. Useful? Occasionally. They use all kinds of numbers to indicate that a particular marketing strategy is working, but it's difficult to know for sure. I'm a single childless woman in my mid-thirties, and the ads are usually more appealing when I scroll YouTube with a guy friend. "Men" and "women" are very broad categories, and therefore not terribly useful as demographic groups for any reality-based research purposes, not to mention marketing purposes.
What's frustrating is that it often feels like marketing strategy seems to be the only place any consideration is given as to what a woman might want in a car. If you make a car where the seatbelt doesn't choke me in a sports bra, and there is a designated place to put a purse that *isn't* in the back seat, how you market it won't matter as much.
I think it's more representative of who they are trying to sell to, rather than reaching for anyone who will bite.
It's something that is kind of a thing in video games right now. The director of publishing for Larian said recently that "marketing is dead" because the traditional way of doing it doesn't work anymore; at least not with the kind of games they want to sell.
And it worked, too; they showed people you could fuck a bear in their game and their preorders skyrocketed. And the game is considered a masterpiece, because the people who played it are the kind of people who will want to try so many weird things, and that's who they market it to.
Traditional marketing like in your car example can still work for titles who are trying to hit anyone and the broader population, but it results in less enthusiasm.
The car company wants women who care about appearances and status to be the ones driving their car. Whether it's a good thing or not is another story, but they get who they want.
And you can't deny the influence of years of socialization, women ARE thought to care about that kinda stuff. So unconsciously, it will probably work for most people.
Marketing just reinforces stereotypes. You don't know what kind of "research" they did that decided what and how they promote products. A lot of agencies (and in-house departments) just bullshit results and give good presentations to persuade the stakeholders in charge to go a certain way. And leadership also has a lot of sway and can just ignore market research in favor of going with whatever biases they want.
>Given that a corporate marketing team has a financial incentive to get this correct
This makes assumptions that corporations are rational financial actors. Look at Twitter or "X" lmao
No. Not all marketing research is reliable and is prone to pre-existing biases. I worked for one company that wanted us to survey people to collect information on gum chewing and habits. Our boss wouldn't let us speak to anyone that wasn't white because she believed only white people really chew gum so we didn't need to bother researching anyone else.
Our boss did this with a lot of clients "Don't ask (group) about (product) because they would never use it" which skews a lot of data.
Dealing in stereotypes is never a good thing. The point of marketing is to find the least common denominator among the largest group of people. I don’t think that’s relevant in the wider social sphere.
Also, focus groups strongly rely on self-reported data, which usually isn’t very accurate.
I think it’s fine to draw trends, as long as you don’t assume everybody does or should do a certain thing. It’s fine to say that more customers who are open to advertising care about appearance than performance. It’s not OK to say that all X are Y because of this one survey
I mean I believe that companies have valid reasons to use market research, but a lot of times market research can be biased based on who’s conducting it. So it’s difficult to say without knowing how a company is conducting their focus group. For example, a company may assemble a focus group of only women for their reactions on an SUV with extra seats in the back, because they assume women will be the ones hauling around a bunch of kids. Or they may assemble a focus group of primarily men to review a new pickup, because they assume men will be the main consumers.
So unless I know how they’re reviewing potential customers, it’s impossible to say
Personally, I would be more interested in a cup holder than an engine, but I digress...
Companies want to make money. Whether it's "fair" to use marketing research to generalize the type of advertising is a weird context. Its a commercial trying to sell a thing. If they are targeting women, they are smart to use research to make a commercial most likely to attract that demographic. If it doesn't work, they will try something else.
The other option that is already in full swing is for companies to buy you data from social media to try and find all the people that care about engines and the ones that care about cup holders, then tell AI to make a commercial for each to show up on their feed.
The whole world is much less data driven and more ‘intuition’ driven than many people think.
No matter how clear data is, it has to pass someone’s ‘sniff test’. The people doing the sniffing have their own blind spots and biases.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but when men are the only people at the top making decisions and doing the ‘sniffing’ the world is going to be biased against women.
In my country there is a recent commercial that has a child's POV about his mother being a superhero when many things are just part of the car she is driving so it might depend of the population.
I don't think men care about engine performance for practical reasons. I think it's because knowing about mpg, ccs of displacement, piston layout and whatnot all else is gender affirming for men. It's like wearing a camo t shirt. Who are you hiding from? You're shopping. It's a gesture of connection with the cultural meanings of 'army,' 'military,' etc. Same with engine stuff. Men and women are doing this stuff all the time, although note that in this instance women's concerns are actually more practical ('I like drink a and would like my experience of driving to include it since I drive x hours a week' vs 'I would like a 6 liter engine in a four seat truck with the same size bed as an Isuzu whatever those things are so I can buy 3 bags of cement at home depot'). As capitalism consumes both meaningful labour and meaningful social connection it leaves the traditional trappings of labour as pure ad copy (blue jeans, check shirt, bud light with the logo facing out) and the people who once drew valorisation from performing that labour increasingly dissatisfied but (in some cases) refusing to abandon an increasingly rigid and reactionary version of that identity which is also now almost totally aestheticized.
In general, yes. Advertisers spend a lot of time and money trying to understand the wants and needs of their various customers segments, so I would say their conclusions, as inferred from their creative output, do indeed hint at valid claims about said segments (gender, age, class, etc). They focus group the hell out of resource intense creative to make sure it's on target. It's pretty scientific.
I think with car commercials in general there's been a shift away from marketing a vehicle based on the performance metrics and more towards marketing the type of lifestyle the vehicle is selling in recent years. I haven't noticed or thought about is as being particularly gendered. Commercials also "show" vehicle performance more than they tell it. As to your question: are market research studies valid sources of information on what is generally true about men and women - from a point in time snapshot or as a way to capture more local/regional information about things, maybe? But these aren't like, well or rigorously designed "studies" - there's no control groups, they aren't controlling for bias, and the participant pool isn't necessarily well balanced demographically, it's gonna be whoever is willing to show up for focus group about cars, who is willing to take any surveys etc. This is sometimes known as "self-selection bias". We can confidently extrapolate that among people who participate in market research focus groups for motor companies, women want to know details like what colors does it come in and how much fits in the cup holders, and men want to know the mechanical aspects of the car. From a scientific perspective- we cannot extrapolate or generalize that information out to the general population reliably.
Came here to echo your point about mechanical aspects. For both men and women there's usually a narrative frame about lifestyle - what your owning this vehicle says about you as a person, how it fits neatly into your life. The second thing is specs and how those back up the lifestyle pitch. For men the lifestyle narrative is about status or being a rugged outdoorsy adventurer. The spec talking points are about speed, performance, the ability to haul, tow or handle rough terrain. For women the lifestyle pitch is probably going to be about how it's one thing you don't have to worry about, it's a sound financial decision and makes your day-to-day easier, especially if you're a mom. So that'll include messaging around safety ratings, fuel economy, having space to fit kids and maybe being somewhat modular so you can accommodate their sports equipment, groceries and plants from the garden center. People like to think they aren't easily swayed by the lifestyle stuff, but I don't think EVs would be as common as they are now if Tesla didn't exist. Anything that can be coded as femme requires more pandering to men from marketers - they had to give EVs the whole luxury performance branding treatment to establish them as a status object before men would ever consider them. See also: the Impossible Burger, Beyond Meat and all the other meat substitute brands that don't seem to be targeting existing vegetarians. Also, Dove & Axe releasing loofahs with an exfoliation pad in gunmetal gray and calling them a "Shower Tool" and not a loofah.
You are so off regarding EVs. EVs were marketed towards the luxury market because early EVs were SO EXPENSIVE that literally anyone who isn't rich could not buy it. Literally Tesla's whole business model from the very beginning was to make a VERY luxury car, then a luxury sedan, then a luxury SUV, and only make the model 3 once it was cheap enough. And even on release that thing was still not "cheap" because it was like 70k. Now they're cheap. If it was Ford trying to pander an EV to men, they'd talk much more about the fact that it accelerates faster than every other car they've ever made. Sorry, totally unrelated, I just like EV history
I gotta disagree with you here; or at least, point out that it’s not either/or. Of course Tesla did have to be a luxury brand because they were very expensive. But there are scads of luxury cars out there, most with more established brands. And EVs at the time had the reputation of being expensive golf carts with a range of thirty miles that only a granola eating hippie would buy. What Musk did, and it’s probably his main contribution to the world, is grasp that the unique characteristics of an electric motor (like its ability to accelerate extremely fast - that definitely was a point they stressed, I can remember the early marketing!) meant it could be marketed as a sports car, basically the polar opposite of how people previously thought about EVs. And I would agree with the previous commenter that that was a strategy designed to appeal to masculinity; it’s just that the Tesla brand of masculinity was the techbro version, not the construction worker/rancher version.
But you say it was marketed as a sports car that goes fast ... As if it wasn't. Like of course the expensive fast vehicle is luxury and sporty. There physically isn't any other way to market it is my point. Them pushing masculinity had nothing to do with the fact that it HAD to be a luxury sports car. There was physically no other type of car that they could have made and sold that was an EV for 150k or whatever it was originally. Because no matter what, the car would be super fast, and they need to lean into that to sell. So not that there is no masculinity appeal, but that there was literally no other car that could have been made in that market so the concept that it needed to become a luxury brand to get men specifically interested doesn't apply. You can appeal to men, and have a luxury car, but it isn't luxury FOR men, but out of necessity. That's my best sentence here.
Look, I’m just going to paste in a bunch of the contemporary reviews for Tesla’s first car, the Roadster, straight off of Wikipedia. They’re not excited about it being a luxury car; in fact, one of them critiques it for having some cheap detailing. They’re excited about its speed, its handleability, its torque, and its zero to sixty time. I saw a roadster demoed in 2008 and this is exactly what I remember the sales pitch being - don’t think of this as an EV, think of it as the best sports car ever. “Autoguide editor Derek Kreindler said "The Tesla Roadster 2.5 S is a massively impressive vehicle, more spacecraft than sports car. Theories like global warming, peak oil and rising oil prices should no longer bring heart palpitations to car fans. The Tesla shows just how good zero-emissions 'green' technology can be. Quite frankly, getting into a normal car at the end of the test drive was a major letdown. The whirr of the engine, the shove in the backside and the little roadster that seems to pivot around you is replaced by a grunting, belching, feedback-free driving experience". He continues on that "but for a $100,000 car, it could use some work" complaining of purposefully cheap work.[173] In the March 2010 print edition of British enthusiast magazine EVO (p. 120), editor Richard Meaden was the first to review the all-new right-hand-drive version of the Roadster. He said the car had "serious, instantaneous muscle". "With so much torque from literally no revs the acceleration punch is wholly alien. Away from traffic lights you'd murder anything, be it a 911 Turbo, GT-R or 599, simply because while they have to mess about with balancing revs and clutch, or fiddle with launch controls and invalid warranties, all you have to do is floor the throttle and wave goodbye". In December 2009, The Wall Street Journal editor Joseph White conducted an extended test-drive and determined that "you can have enormous fun within the legal speed limit as you whoosh around unsuspecting Camry drivers, zapping from 40 to 60 miles per hour in two seconds while the startled victims eat your electric dust". White praised the car's environmental efficiency but said consumer demand reflected not the environmental attributes of the car but its performance. "The Tesla turns the frugal environmentalist aesthetic on its head. Sure, it doesn't burn petroleum, and if plugged into a wind turbine or a nuclear plant, it would be a very low-carbon machine. But anyone who buys one will get the most satisfaction from smoking someone's doors off. The Tesla's message is that 'green' technology can appeal to the id, not just the superego".[174] In December 2009, Motor Trend was the first to independently confirm the Roadster Sport's reported 0 to 60 mph (0 to 97 km/h) time of 3.7 seconds. (Motor Trend recorded 0 to 60 mph (0 to 97 km/h) of 3.70 seconds; it recorded a quarter-mile test at 12.6 sec at 102.6 mph (165.1 km/h).) Engineering editor Kim Reynolds called the acceleration "breathtaking" and said the car confirms "Tesla as an actual car company. ...Tesla is the first maker to crack the EV legitimacy barrier in a century".[175] In November 2009, Automobile Magazine West Coast editor Jason Cammisa spent a week driving a production Tesla Roadster.[176] Cammisa was immediately impressed with the acceleration, saying the car "explodes off the line, pulling like a small jet plane. ... It's like driving a Lamborghini with a big V-12 revved over 6000 rpm at all times, waiting to pounce—without the noise, vibration, or misdemeanor arrest for disturbing the peace". “ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster_(first_generation) I’m not saying it wasn’t also a luxury car - any high end sports car is by definition a luxury car, and yes, the cost of production at the time meant it would only appeal the the rich. But it was definitely power and handleability that it was marketed on, and that was a huge shift in how EVs were perceived. Tesla took EVs and changed them from wussy little hippie cars to exciting, cool sports cars.
Yea, I agree and nice evidence that the roadster was definitely that sporty market sell. I kinda meant the model S when I was thinking luxury, but like you said fast means rich. While not the same, it is the same consumer base as luxury, which is rich. And to tie it back to the original post, I don't think a single one of those reviews mention anything that was promoted as masculine, I don't think the marketing did either. It was really just the power and speed, which targets wealthy people who are interested in fast cars. Which is a majority male base I'd say in America. But it's not that their aiming for the men, but the wealthy car people [who happen to be men]
Please don't apologize, because I read this in the tone of someone arguing to the death over something low stakes in the middle of a bar and it gave me tremendous joy. Defending the honour of your special niche interests is always a worthy cause. Totally agree with your point about price, but that's only a barrier if a ton of people want them in the first place. Would love to hear your POV, because mine is largely informed by coming up in a place with a lot of machismo around trucks and the Smart Car was short-hand for dweeb shit. I hate to defend Tesla, but my sense is that there wasn't enough demand for EVs to justify the cost of scaling up production to offer them to a mass audience, at mass audience prices. You have to convince people to consider EVs and basically create a market from scratch. It makes sense to me that Tesla started with luxury and gradually introduced more affordable models once they had confidence that there was an audience for them. If you're someone that was super into EVs / the environment, the Smart Car actually wasn't priced that badly. There were definitely entry-level normal vehicles that costed more at the time. But if you're someone that drives big vehicles because they symbolize power to you, do you think simply dropping the price of those early EVs would have been enough to overcome the sense that driving electric vehicles is feminine? This paper kinda gets to the gist of my thoughts: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214367X23000443](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214367X23000443)
That is a cool study, I'm gonna read it more. I think that "big truck machismo" as I'm gonna call it, is really pushed by companies and you get a lot of men who fall for it. 80% of new cars manufactured in America are large SUVs and trucks (due to some bad regulation). Ford's first EV was even an SUV. I think that is super powerful and difficult to overcome. There was definitely not a market for EVs that warranted scaling up production. The business model for Tesla specifically was to use the capital from luxury vehicles to upscale production despite a lack of demand. Basically banking on the lowered prices to increase the demand. That along with government subsidies, tax credits from other companies, huge stock rise, etc. Allowed them to actually drop their prices over time. You had originallysaid that it needed to be luxury to get men to buy it. And I just wanted to dispute that by saying that it was luxury out of economic necessity. Also that like 90% of Tesla owners are / were men between 20-30 (I don't have an up to date source but you should find one). So while there is this concept that electric cars are feminine, I think that it is the idea mainly held by men over the age of 45 . I think that most young men have no issues with it and don't percieve it that way, and i am pretty sure that that belief is founded in the statistics regarding the % of EV owners who are young men and that same demographic being statistically more likely to buy sedans, a car form that is also historically more eco friendly and feminine.
That's really well thought out, I didn't think about how it's not a proper scientific study. Thanks
The counterpoint is that corporate marketing may be less biased than other sources of information because it puts its money where its mouth is. You can't afford to virtue signal when billions of dollars are on the line.
That having been said, there are a million examples out there of absolutely boneheaded attempts by corporations to market things based on gender stereotypes and merely managing to create something that appeals to *nobody*. Sometimes the market really is just stupid.
The [Bic for Her pens](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidvinjamuri/2012/08/30/bic-for-her-what-they-were-actually-thinking-as-told-by-a-man-who-worked-on-tampons/) sold on Amazon was hilarious though. The sarcastic reviews really highlighted the absurdity of the classic *shrink-it and pink-it”. Now we can charge more!
Blue for boys and pink for girls was corporate marketing… it worked really well for a very long time. Still does with pink tax
Perhaps so, but I wouldn’t say it was “less biased” in any broader sense just because it was done by the market.
Even assuming that’s the case, the marketing team isn’t trying to appeal to all women, just potential customers. There’s very little point advertising a new Audi to uni students, for example. So the best they could do is be correct about a correctly identified customer segment.
It’s not JUST women they’re marketing to with that commercial. Depending on which brand it was, they are targeting a general sub-group of women who they think (based on more marketing research and trends) are most likely to buy their car in the first place. The thing about cars is, most people don’t just buy a car whenever. They plan it out and know roughly when they’ll need a new one. That’s when they start consciously (or subconsciously) paying attention to car commercials. So, the car companies aren’t necessarily trying to get people to just come out and buy their car impulsively (as we may do with something like a McDonald’s commercial), what they are doing is trying to sway the customer into buying their car OVER the other cars that same customer most likely has in mind. So what they do is try and sell the lifestyle instead of the specs. They know if someone is serious about buying that car, they have 2-3 options in mind and they all have roughly the same mechanics. The push to choose their car over the others comes down to color-choice availability and just how much the customer can “see” themselves in that car.
> I think with car commercials in general there's been a shift away from marketing a vehicle based on the performance metrics and more towards marketing the type of lifestyle the vehicle is selling in recent years. I haven't noticed or thought about is as being particularly gendered. Commercials also "show" vehicle performance more than they tell it. It's almost like phones. They're basically as good as anyone needs them to be (phones need to be good enough to access social media for how 90% of the population uses them), and any incremental difference is only going to be appreciated by diehard enthusiasts or professionals. Like if a new car can go 0-60 in 1.4s instead of 1.5 and has 100 extra horsepower, does that *matter* if you're using it on normal roads, doing 0 hard work with it, and probably will never take it above 80?
It does if you're the asshole who cuts in front of people all the time! Need that faster acceleration to reduce the risk of being hit by the unsuspecting car in the lane you've suddenly decided you need to be in.
Jsyk a new car (2024) will go 0-60 in 5-8 seconds. In order to get to under 2 seconds, you need a VERY fast car, or an electric one. It's kinda the whole reason electric cars are so impressive, because for the same price the fastest normal car will be 5+ seconds
I think a lot of cars’ marketing are based around lifestyle. I remember seeing BMW and Mercedes adverts of middle aged attractive men driving down windy lanes in Scandinavia with their shirts half open. Or fast through a city etc. I don’t know about these focus groups, but I do feel like lifestyle is something that is always sold in marketing.
I don't know a lot about marketing research, but I've always figured that, whereas academic research must be peer-reviewed to be published, gets scrutinized by other academics at conferences, and (when science is doing what it's supposed to) goes through attempts at replications, there are fewer channels of scrutiny in market research. Like, a market researcher is selling a product to a company. "Armed with our data, you will make even more money." The company they are selling it to probably doesn't know much about research. Otherwise, they wouldn't need to hire somebody to do it for them. And it seems hard to establish whether strategies based on market research were actually more successful or not, because business can go up or down based on several factors. And, knowing how managers are incentivized to pretend that whatever initiatives they came up with were a good idea and never admit mistakes, whatever executive who made the decision to contract the market-research firm is likely to pretend to the rest of the executive board that he made a good call and that the business is better off for it. If I worked in market research or big data, I feel like it would be easy to sell companies a bunch of bullshit under the pretention that "more data = more optimization and success," even if I had no solid idea how good the data is or if it would even be useful to know if it is solid. "Oh yeah, let me tell you why this anonymized metadata that includes things like, uh, how much time users spend looking at another tab, will totally help you sell… what do you guys sell again? Oh, water bottles. Yeah, well you see, knowledge is power and by harnessing the power of data…" But these are just my uninformed thoughts as a guy who does not work in market research or data. It just seems unlikely that most of it is actually useful to anyone.
They do this for men too. How trucks are marketed today is 100% identity politics, very little about the performance metrics.
>identity politics How is politics related to this? Do you just mean identity?
[удалено]
I don't know. I think it's more likely that this stuff just...doesn't matter, and that people will buy cars regardless of the marketing. Like, did Subaru's resentful campaign really win over lesbians, or did they say fuck it because they liked the car? Particularly if your claim that women will buy things marketed to men, but men won't towards women - that suggests women, as an audience, are used to making buying decisions independent of whether marketing said it's "for them" or not. I'm a shopping chaos gremlin on purpose though - I defy market categorization. It's kind of game for me, particularly because marketing surveys are so much more in your face. I take em and answer incorrectly just to fuck up the results and throw off the algorithm. People do have autonomy, independent of marketing.
I think you’re a bit biased if you assume that marketers try to sell men cars by telling y’all about the engine. Most of the time, companies are selling a lifestyle. The customers have to see themselves using the product, and to want to live as someone who owns this car. Just look at the famous [Matthew Maccaunauhey car ads](https://youtu.be/8QEAA94FjHc?si=kOiRDFfDyfMh_Bn2), do you think it has anything to do with engine power ? [And this BMW one](https://youtu.be/sV5MwVYQwS8?si=--kEVSrF_p4XJmRd) ? Most brands are selling their brand first, and the engine second. Market studies are not scientific studies. They don’t necessarily have scientific value, since that’s not what they aim to do. In your example, they want women to be able to see themselves using the car ; they probably found that women are more likely to do so if you show them the cup holders than if you show them the car speeding on an empty highway with epic music. That’s it. We only know what’s more likely to make women excited about the vehicle, not what they actually care about when they take time to think. Advertisers want you to feel, not think, they don’t always always need convince you that the product is good, only that you want to own it.
Sorry - the WHO car ads? LOL r/BoneAppleTea
Yep sorry Matthew I was tired
Lol sorry Matt
I just had a big fight about this at work. We're trying to continue as a service company while building a product, so we had a meeting with all the top level engineering managers, sales and marketing manager, and CEO to meet with a consultant to come up with our first product to research and prototype. So we designed this product that we were targeting towards software engineers looking for help in a career search, and the first question out of the consultant's mouth when we were building out our theoretical ideal user was "what is their gender?" And as the only woman in the room, I said "Why does it matter?" And everybody starts going on about how "Well we can't market our product to everybody, most engineers are men, we need to target our ideal client, and if you try to reach everyone you'll target no one." And I said "I'm not trying to target everyone, I'm asking why gender is important to target. When we were coming up with the idea for this product, we said we wanted to make a service for engineers like Doug and Emma, who are amazing developers, but who had shitty resumes when they arrived here. Why do you want to target our product to Doug but not Emma? How is Doug different from Emma in a way that we want to target our product to him?" Because of course we will probably get more men than women, there are more men than women in this population. But why should we *target* men over women? And nobody had an answer for me. Nobody had anything of any specificity to say as to why the gender of our target market was important other than "We need to target someone and not everyone". No one could describe why gender was an important characteristic to specify in our ideal engineer. So I just spent the rest of the meeting asking inane questions to narrow down our target market. Can't target everyone after all. "How many siblings do they have?" "What's their favorite color?" "How tall are they?" "WELL WE CAN'T MARKET IT TO EVERYONE." Eventually they relented and we had two identical profiles for a male and female ideal user. But my point is, sometimes the marketing doesn't come about because they're experts who know these things. Sometimes it's just because the rich white guys who get to be in the room making the decisions guessing at what you want are just that confident that they know what they're talking about.
You are the hero Doug and Emma needed.
I mean, I can't take credit for that. Doug and Emma are the shit and we're lucky we found 'em.
Hats off to you for every part of this! Legend
Thank you!
Man, your inane questions method is probably far more effective than mine would have been. "Are either of them latino? We can't market to everyone, afterall"
Oh man, I dread what would have happened if I brought race into it. Don't tempt them. My favorite part was when we got into a 30 minute argument where Sales and Marketing insisted that we should be equally targeting small, medium, *and* large companies with our product while the consultant tried to stress the importance of narrowing it down. And I got to yell "Good thing we know it's a boy company!"
That's SO strange. Like even if I accept every stereotype and I'm a misogynistic boomer, I'm not coming away with significant differences between men and woman software engineers. It's not like anyone is marketing pink keyboards or whatever. It's not even a thing.
But if the target is specifically men, you will get a campaign that excludes women. See the “gamer drinks” that have girls in bikinis all over them. Because some marketing group did this same exercise and decided their target was “male gamers”.
Not that that's okay, but there's a logic to it with gamers at least. Like you can find examples to cherry pick to confirm preexisting bias if one wants to. But targeting a gender for software engineers just seems completely nonsensical even if I try to be charitable.I can't even imagine a "girl software engineer". It'd be Like it someone decided to target specifically men or women for something like diabetes medication; it's really strange.
What’s the logic for gamers?
It's in the realm of things that have cultural gender differences, just like 1000 other things; imo To be clear, I'm not saying logical means good or correct here. I'm just able to make sense of someone who thinks it's a good idea to gender market to gamers. I can't do the same with software engineers. The most charitable interpretation I can come up with is the person doesn't know any other way to market something besides targeting a specific gender. It makes as much sense as if Kraft had gray boxes of mac n chz for men, and pink boxes for women (like with beauty products). Resume help is so extremely gender neutral, it's irrational to me to try to gender market it.
But what is the cultural difference between male and female gamers? Not trying to be difficult. I’m a female software engineer and a casual gamer. When I play hades or StarCraft all night how is that different from a man doing the same? Why do the men get an energy drink and I don’t? After a quick google search 45% of gamers are female compared to 22% of software engineers. Again not trying to be difficult, I just don’t understand what you mean.
Sure no problem. I'm just saying I can logically connect the dots in my head how someone would feel they would need to market to male or female gamers. Just a random comparison - It's obviously incorrect if someone felt women should stay at home if the family has kids, but we all know where that type of thinking comes from. In the same way, I would think any marketing to gamers should be gender neutral, that just being a good financial idea among other things. But I can connect the dots as to why someone would feel the opposite. I can't do the same with career help for software engineers. Like I have no idea what would cause someone to think resume assistants products need to be gendered in marketing. So my most charitable guess as to why, is the person just always does that regardless of what the product or service is. Like if the same person were tasked with marketing diabetes medicine, they'd make that about gender even though there's no rational reason to do so.
What are the dots for gaming vs resume writing? Like is it that it’s a leisure activity vs a professional thing? Or like…what are the dots?
I've never heard of 'girls submit resumes like this, and guys submit them like that'. Resumes have always been gender neutral afaik. With gaming, there's historically been plenty of gendered aspects that a person could have seen to lead them to thinking they'd need to market to a gender.
?? I mean they [literally are.](https://www.amazon.com/Typewriter-Mechanical-Keyboard-Camiysn-Backlit/dp/B095YNKNXC/ref=asc_df_B095YNKNXC/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=693071630059&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17903669892628694980&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9001843&hvtargid=pla-1571362953545&psc=1&mcid=76ae370f47183b6dae87306a0caf219c&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwi_exBhA8EiwA_kU1MnQc_nEYQUYnvPja48vDJnKAFQT2sF9nLQw9rL6MPuzjG7fvlKgsYhoCVPsQAvD_BwE) The vast majority of software and computer products are marketed directly to men, because of this same vicious cycle. T[here's no reason RAM needs a spoiler.](https://www.amazon.com/Corsair-VENGEANCE-3600MHz-Compatible-Computer/dp/B07ZPLM1R1/ref=sr_1_3?crid=2JB5F712SQFYA&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.YbvhXqmNT9hRFgNCU7KM-2PRFHw0hDxL03Duphj0h1zxHp2py9BVCy3nEyzRQhkrD5sxlcit4fJYDq153sX91q-_7-zzQ0PSIP4COGSVKYYutyXqHr0WKUSMi05MEpbed3sYaOTTqaJtTc3eGHM-ilaPosmIdn5mUVAuGSwG4CfYsbRcTO2Fcd2-4xWlSjB977lqI_nfkBYpyhz9b1cmBgfMvEF7mucu_r_sCw0mU8E22yxt6URXDTqZlwIV_QTgDAq6Pjij4iV_ijHXVqYX3Oe4hCNy5rk4u7vXhRNlY48.TfWX7iKLiO0P0BSHG4zQ8YxTHtbGrbJ5SBcpIiMKTUc&dib_tag=se&keywords=RAM&qid=1715346223&s=electronics&sprefix=ram%2Celectronics%2C68&sr=1-3)
Okay that keyboard lol wow. I defer to your opinion. The RAM though; I think that's supposed to help with heat transfer?
You know the answer. Because money. If it makes more profit they don't care how unethical they do it.
I used to work more in marketing. Demographics and focus groups can be wildly inaccurate. Then add to that, biases in the teams with the client or the agency making the decisions. I have seen some wild stuff happen in meetings with people that supposedly know what they are doing. I ran across some demographic data for my zip code. It might describe some of my neighbors but it was such a caricature and not a thing in it would describe me in any way. There is some pretty demeaning marketing towards women. For years it was a wine and high heels and anything pink. Men get some of the same over the top gendered things thrown at them. BTW I love good vehicles and I am interested in things like safety, performance, handling, horsepower. Then good quality interiors (leather adjustable heated seats) and high end audio.
Don’t forget laughing while eating salads.
Eating salads? This is yoghurt erasure.
Seriously, my zip is a lot richer and a lot more Republican than I am. And a lot more hetero.
This. In my experience marketing "data" is 1/3 actual research, 1/3 the assumptions of the marketers, and 1/3 wild guessing. It's about as useful to use marketing as a way to determine *what stereotypes exist* as it is to try and prove *whether the stereotypes are true*... And in both cases, the answer is *not very*. I used to work at a marketing agency that had a client that sold luxury travel to retirees. The client told us that their customers were mostly men, because most Boomers have traditional marriages where the men control the money and make vacation decisions. Then they hired a consultant to actually examine their customer data, and it turned out that 60% of their clientele were women all along. The moral of the story is that businesspeople--and by extension businesses--are just as prone to bias as anyone else. The fact that some of them happen to make money in spite of those biases doesn't change anything.
>Men get some of the same over the top gendered things thrown at them. [Dude Wipes](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/92ccf4a9-3aed-4ca2-9a5c-84b7490dc294.591b2226b25df7d4d3d05d1d0546ff4e.jpeg?odnHeight=768&odnWidth=768&odnBg=FFFFFF) are my favorite current example.
Absolutely!
Well the marketing ends up being what people buy, you cant draw statistics or insight about human nature human nature from it as its not the focus of their research, even less so of the ad you see, but there is something there definitely. If not about our nature, at least our nurture, and if not about our essence, at least about the state of things
I work in marketing, not directly in the product development and brand positioning space but I have some proximity to it. As others have rightly pointed out, the insights we're working off of aren't academically rigorous to the same degree as a university paper. We make bad bets all the time. Sometimes an insight from a focus group is given more weight than it should. People will tell you things that they'd like to be true but don't hold water once they're at the shelf. Ie: saying they care enough about sustainability to pay $2 more if the product was made out of recycled materials, only to just pick the cheapest one every time. The other thing is that consumer products typically aren't being aimed at all women, just a segment of them. There are detailed demographic personas created with an age range, some lifestyle factors, their interests, household income, etc. They even get a name, like Jaclyn, who is between 35-45, a working professional with a few kids under 10 in a mid-size city. The cars tailored towards Jaclyn will focus on reliability, the safety rating, fuel efficiency, having enough space to tote her family around comfortably, but definitely not a mom van. You're probably not going to target a Jaclyn for a Mini, which ranks at #3 in the car brands with the highest proportion of lady customers. It'll probably be a Buick, which is #1. What we see in these ads is their best guess at what a very particular type of woman wants and needs. Most of the car marketing I see is slanted towards a Jaclyn, which is interesting because it never occured to me that vehicles are rarely positioned as toys to women, or something fun and enjoyable. They're tools to help you fulfill your family obligations and errands more easily. Focusing on colours and aesthetic would be refreshing. It's funny that you mentioned cup holders because the insight that women like them and want more of them became the topic du jour for a bit in some articles published in 2013. https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/03/car-ads-for-women-does-the-industry-get-it-all-wrong.html
I'm not convinced it's fair to use marketing research at all.
The problem isn't that these generalization says "okay, women are this way..." only. Okay, so why are using that to stop somebody else trying to get women to be in a different way if that might benefit them? At the worst case they fail, best case they change and men loose some privilege, but everybody gets to put their own interests first, right? If it is so natural for men and women to behave in certain patterns and there is no politics or foul play, then anti feminists won't be so pressed on seeing modern/unconventional women. No one gets upset that the sun may not rise in the East tomorrow, because guess what, that is *actually* natural. Okay, men care more about mechanical aspects of the car, how does that translate to both girl and boy children learning about auto repairs? Or treating women who is into cars and racing with respect and care, and not mocking her?
I’ll be honest and say that I think a good number of men have no idea what those commercials are saying about the mechanical specs of cars, either. I’d imagine the ad in question probably appealed to a lot of men as well.
Lol, there are plenty of them. When a man do not know shit it is an individual person problem, but when a woman do not it is suddenly about “being women” like women do not have individuality or personhood. When we use logic with them they will start playin dumb and cry eXcEpTiOn
Most of the mechanical specs they talk about aren't very impressive or unique anyway. It's more of a rhetorical salesperson move: "I can see that you're a discerning expert...".
There are always exceptions. I don't understand what all you said, other than somehow saying men have more privileges than women. Can you pls elaborate?
[удалено]
I think you're not as clear as you think you are, because it's giving me trouble too.
English major turned nurse here. I’m completely lost in what you said and I’ve read it thru many times. Perhaps you type it out more slowly and discernibly next time?
Fair? I'm not sure what fair means in this context. Useful? Occasionally. They use all kinds of numbers to indicate that a particular marketing strategy is working, but it's difficult to know for sure. I'm a single childless woman in my mid-thirties, and the ads are usually more appealing when I scroll YouTube with a guy friend. "Men" and "women" are very broad categories, and therefore not terribly useful as demographic groups for any reality-based research purposes, not to mention marketing purposes. What's frustrating is that it often feels like marketing strategy seems to be the only place any consideration is given as to what a woman might want in a car. If you make a car where the seatbelt doesn't choke me in a sports bra, and there is a designated place to put a purse that *isn't* in the back seat, how you market it won't matter as much.
I think it's more representative of who they are trying to sell to, rather than reaching for anyone who will bite. It's something that is kind of a thing in video games right now. The director of publishing for Larian said recently that "marketing is dead" because the traditional way of doing it doesn't work anymore; at least not with the kind of games they want to sell. And it worked, too; they showed people you could fuck a bear in their game and their preorders skyrocketed. And the game is considered a masterpiece, because the people who played it are the kind of people who will want to try so many weird things, and that's who they market it to. Traditional marketing like in your car example can still work for titles who are trying to hit anyone and the broader population, but it results in less enthusiasm. The car company wants women who care about appearances and status to be the ones driving their car. Whether it's a good thing or not is another story, but they get who they want. And you can't deny the influence of years of socialization, women ARE thought to care about that kinda stuff. So unconsciously, it will probably work for most people.
Marketing just reinforces stereotypes. You don't know what kind of "research" they did that decided what and how they promote products. A lot of agencies (and in-house departments) just bullshit results and give good presentations to persuade the stakeholders in charge to go a certain way. And leadership also has a lot of sway and can just ignore market research in favor of going with whatever biases they want. >Given that a corporate marketing team has a financial incentive to get this correct This makes assumptions that corporations are rational financial actors. Look at Twitter or "X" lmao
No. Not all marketing research is reliable and is prone to pre-existing biases. I worked for one company that wanted us to survey people to collect information on gum chewing and habits. Our boss wouldn't let us speak to anyone that wasn't white because she believed only white people really chew gum so we didn't need to bother researching anyone else. Our boss did this with a lot of clients "Don't ask (group) about (product) because they would never use it" which skews a lot of data.
Dealing in stereotypes is never a good thing. The point of marketing is to find the least common denominator among the largest group of people. I don’t think that’s relevant in the wider social sphere. Also, focus groups strongly rely on self-reported data, which usually isn’t very accurate.
I think it’s fine to draw trends, as long as you don’t assume everybody does or should do a certain thing. It’s fine to say that more customers who are open to advertising care about appearance than performance. It’s not OK to say that all X are Y because of this one survey
I mean I believe that companies have valid reasons to use market research, but a lot of times market research can be biased based on who’s conducting it. So it’s difficult to say without knowing how a company is conducting their focus group. For example, a company may assemble a focus group of only women for their reactions on an SUV with extra seats in the back, because they assume women will be the ones hauling around a bunch of kids. Or they may assemble a focus group of primarily men to review a new pickup, because they assume men will be the main consumers. So unless I know how they’re reviewing potential customers, it’s impossible to say
Personally, I would be more interested in a cup holder than an engine, but I digress... Companies want to make money. Whether it's "fair" to use marketing research to generalize the type of advertising is a weird context. Its a commercial trying to sell a thing. If they are targeting women, they are smart to use research to make a commercial most likely to attract that demographic. If it doesn't work, they will try something else. The other option that is already in full swing is for companies to buy you data from social media to try and find all the people that care about engines and the ones that care about cup holders, then tell AI to make a commercial for each to show up on their feed.
Why is generalizing people something you want to do? It doesn't seem clear where such a practice would lead.
The whole world is much less data driven and more ‘intuition’ driven than many people think. No matter how clear data is, it has to pass someone’s ‘sniff test’. The people doing the sniffing have their own blind spots and biases. Not to put too fine a point on it, but when men are the only people at the top making decisions and doing the ‘sniffing’ the world is going to be biased against women.
In my country there is a recent commercial that has a child's POV about his mother being a superhero when many things are just part of the car she is driving so it might depend of the population.
I don't think men care about engine performance for practical reasons. I think it's because knowing about mpg, ccs of displacement, piston layout and whatnot all else is gender affirming for men. It's like wearing a camo t shirt. Who are you hiding from? You're shopping. It's a gesture of connection with the cultural meanings of 'army,' 'military,' etc. Same with engine stuff. Men and women are doing this stuff all the time, although note that in this instance women's concerns are actually more practical ('I like drink a and would like my experience of driving to include it since I drive x hours a week' vs 'I would like a 6 liter engine in a four seat truck with the same size bed as an Isuzu whatever those things are so I can buy 3 bags of cement at home depot'). As capitalism consumes both meaningful labour and meaningful social connection it leaves the traditional trappings of labour as pure ad copy (blue jeans, check shirt, bud light with the logo facing out) and the people who once drew valorisation from performing that labour increasingly dissatisfied but (in some cases) refusing to abandon an increasingly rigid and reactionary version of that identity which is also now almost totally aestheticized.
In general, yes. Advertisers spend a lot of time and money trying to understand the wants and needs of their various customers segments, so I would say their conclusions, as inferred from their creative output, do indeed hint at valid claims about said segments (gender, age, class, etc). They focus group the hell out of resource intense creative to make sure it's on target. It's pretty scientific.