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Think of how men are marketed to and you'll see the difference. It's not a name brand or a lifestyle, almost everything marketed to men has some sort of pragma

• jamesaguilar 14y ago
  Again: would you like to provide anything other than anecdotes? These are worthless to me (and demonstrate your biases fairly obviously, see next paragraph). I'm amused at your implied claim that men aren't advertised to in fashion, since I can barely turn on the TV or radio without hearing an ad for Men's Wearhouse. Disney absolutely sells the prince metaphor to little boys too, and the fact that they grow into men who wants princesses is a big part of why that whole thing has stuck around so long. And if you think diamond advertisements aren't at least partially to men who don't know their wives and are at a loss for what will please them besides jewelry, then you simply aren't paying attention to the imagery in these ads or the types of shows they get placed on (e.g. the god damn Superbowl).
  • Zimahl 14y ago
    You are stretching on all of you examples. The Men's Warehouse commercials are as I described before, they talk about looking good for a function - work but life also. This is the pragmatic men's marketing. It's not the 'expensive so it must be good' branding that is on a lot of female products. When was the last Disney 'prince' movie? Aladdin? Lion King? Meanwhile, Disney has now deemed Mulan and Tinker Bell as a princesses, there is now an African-American princess (Princess and the Frog), they added another pretty, white princess (Rapunzel from Tangled), a Scottish princess (Brave) and Disney is adding a hispanic princess[1] (although light on the hispanic). Girls have been sold the knight in shining armor. Boy could care less about princesses they just want be an action hero. Diamond advertisements that talk about 'investment' are for men, but there aren't many of those. It's all about 'forever', 'love', etc, which are emotional pleas to women. And the Superbowl has A TON of women watching[2]. It's sexist to think otherwise. The NFL is openly courting women as a way to increase viewership[3]. [1] http://www.examiner.com/article/disney-s-princess-sofia-the-first-the-first-hispanic-disney-princess http://www.examiner.com/article/disney-s-princess-sofia-the-... [2] http://jamiedunham.wordpress.com/2013/02/03/marketing-to-women-women-watching-super-bowl-too/ http://jamiedunham.wordpress.com/2013/02/03/marketing-to-wom... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/sports/football/nfl-hones-message-for-its-female-fans.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/sports/football/nfl-hones-...
• mikeash 14y ago
  > As much as you don't need it, a $2000 60" HDTV is still more functional than a purse that costs the same amount of money. Are you serious? Is this a joke? A purse actually serves a useful function. It doesn't serve $2000 of function, but it's useful in that it lets you carry around important items. A TV serves no useful purpose whatsoever. None. Zero. There is nothing useful in your life that the TV lets you do. I think your bias might be showing here just a little bit.
  • Zimahl 14y ago
    You are saying that a TV that probably costs to make at least a portion of that $2000 is worth less than a purse that can be knocked off to look EXACTLY THE SAME but cost 2 orders of magnitude less are the same? I won't bother arguing the value of a TV. I think there are many that can argue the value of a designer purse.
    • eli 14y ago
      What does the cost of manufacturing have to do with an item's utility? You can get a cheap knockoff TV that looks the same as the expensive brand too... It will look the same from a distance, anyway. Just like a cheap knockoff purse.
    • mikeash 14y ago
      We're not talking about worth. The exact words were, "more functional". A purse is obviously more functional than a TV.
      • g8oz 14y ago
        It could be argued that killing time is a function.
        • mikeash 14y ago
          Of course, in exactly the same way that it could be argued that "showing off your wealth with designer accessories" is a function.
• princess3000 14y ago
  > Think of how men are marketed to and you'll see the difference. Keywords being "marketed to." Marketing is a perverse beast and should not really be taken as proof of anything. I mean, the DeBeers story which eventually lead to the article here is specifically about how you can create, from whole cloth, a societal tradition simply with quality marketing. I think you assume masculine things are functional while feminine things are not but that's not entirely true. You're completely overlooking, say, cleaning product and vacuum cleaner ads directed straight at women, and that masculine marketing is just as vapid in as many ways (e.g. Monster Cables, energy drinks). While diamonds don't really "do things" in the way that a car or a TV does, there are incredibly rational social reasons for buying the former and incredibly irrational, marketing-driven reasons for purchasing the latter. I also think it's incredibly silly to assume we can learn anything about how men and women are wired by looking at marketing. A century or so ago pink was a color for boys and blue was for girls, and at that time you could have made some assumptions about what each sex innately prefers and you would have been just as wrong.
• thejsjunky 14y ago
  What you are talking about is tangential to your point. Purely for the sake of argument let's accept your premise for the moment that men are more concerned with pragmatism than women. It does NOT logically follow that men are less influenced by marketing than women. You are pretty easily refuted by basically every beer commercial ever. Likewise the trucks you point to - show me a truck advertisement where an engineer comes out and explains exhaustively why this truck is better designed. That basically never happens, instead you get shots of the truck driving over mountains while "fk yea" rock music plays in the background and the truck is shown hauling giant weights around. There certainly are differences in the way men and women think about things (in a general overall sense)...and I have no doubt that the WAYS in which things are marketed differ between men and women (in a general overall sense)...that doesn't mean women are somehow "more susceptible" though. The fact that advertising to men is just as common as advertising to women suggests they are about equally effective. If you want to suggest otherwise you need to provide actual evidence.
• super-serial 14y ago
  "Sexism" has become a dirty word. There's nothing wrong with thinking women and men are wired differently. There have been studies on chimpanzees showing that female chimps choose girly toys (dolls etc), and male chimps choose male toys (weapons, trucks etc) without any outside influence. Yet people act like the human species is different. They believe people only become who they are because of indoctrination into their respective gender roles. Then when you call BS on that... you're called a sexist. Then when you say "YES I AM A SEXIST" you're called a misogynist. I don't see how treating women differently (better in many cases) leads to "hating women." As for marketing - I think women do choose products differently than men. It's because they're wired differently. They are more likely to choose products based on sentimental or perceived social value. If you look at the majority of Meyers-Briggs personality types among women, there aren't as many INTP,INTJ or other engineering types. Even if you don't agree with Meyers-Briggs... that there exists such a strong difference between the male and female population that an INTP (my type) is 4 times as likely to be a male, it should prove there are major differences. The end result of these differences is that you should buy the woman you want to marry a diamond. As an INTP I know it's illogical - but I can accept it since I believe women and men are wired differently. I feel sorry for the men on HN who believe otherwise and are going to argue against diamonds with their future wife. (good luck with that - unless she's an INTP)
  • mattstreet 14y ago
    The end result is you should talk to your partner and find out what they want and discus it. If I had bought my wife a diamond ring it would have showed her I really didn't know her. Pull out whatever study you want that says men are wired X and women are wired Y - that study is based on samples and statistics. You'll find plenty of girls that like trucks and boys that like dolls. Treat the people around you like individuals who can have both male and female traits and their own unique personality.
  • xymostech 14y ago
    > There's nothing wrong with thinking women and men are wired differently. And nobody is disagreeing with you. It is sexist to say "women are more influenced by marketing" when they are not. If men and women are influenced the same, then making a statement about the difference between them is being sexist. So, if someone can actually provide some data that shows whether or not women are more influenced than men, instead of everyone continuing to provide anecdotes (as you have), then we can either stop saying false things, or we can accept that different genders work differently.
• dcalacci 14y ago
  your claim implies that if a certain product (or products related in a theme such as 'pragmatism') A is marketed towards a consumer group B, then B must naturally be inclined to desire product group A. This leads to the assumption that innate behavioral differences between genders is directly responsible for the discrepancy seen in cultural representations of gender in marketing, media, or even language. this assumption is not only intuitively wrong, but it is directly contradicted by decades of sociological research. Almost all of our perceived gender differences are constructed through our use of language and perpetuation of harmful, inaccurate stereotypes[0]. This means that a gender concept such as heterogeneous masculinity is self fulfilling. It simultaneously provides a standard of behavior (men should build stuff, men should be powerful, men should make lots of money, men should 'have' a woman) and is constructed by men's behavior (I made stuff, I am powerful, I make lots of money, I 'have' a woman, therefore I 'am a man').[1] In regards to it being intuitively wrong: You mentioned that many items that are marketed to men have a 'pragmatic' function. I'd argue that they're not always pragmatic (you mentioned sports cars), and instead, the overarching theme of most products marketed towards men(and, often by extension, most advertisements) is power. An immediate example that comes to my mind is toy advertisements that are targeted at children. Most toys that are marketed towards boys feature an element of construction, violence, or critical thinking, while most ads targeted towards girls feature homemaking or visual arts. I don't feel the need to provide a footnote here as the google search 'gender differences in childrens' advertisements' provides a wealth of information. These differences in advertisements are not because children who have a feminine gender identity are bad at or naturally averse to thinking critically. The disconnect between advertisements targeted at children is a clear example of marketing agencies accomplishing gender on a large scale. This is a particularly potent example because not only does it show that there _are_ differences in the way that gender is constructed, it shows that there is actually a power differential created between the two genders! This is not to say that the marketing agencies are evil in any way - they are simply playing into a market separation that already exists because of our current construction of gender roles. However, by 'doing gender' and continuing to perpetuate our harmful stereotypes, they are in fact doing society a great disservice. [0] West & Zimmerman, 1987, 'Doing gender' [1] Mumby, 1998, 'Organizing Men: Power, Discourse, and the Social Construction of Masculinity(s) in the Workplace'