Why are classic boring advertisements always aimed at women?

Have you ever noticed how these days the quality of advertising has improved?

The commercial break often is more entertaining than the TV-shows that are interrupted by them. It’s because marketers feel like people have become so overexposed to advertising that people have become extremely hard to influence.

To respond to this marketers have adopted a new vision on their customers. They no longer see their customers as people that need to buy their products. They see their customers as people that need to enjoy their brand and products. They try to make as intelligent, original and entertaining advertising as they can in order to influence their potential customers.

Have you ever noticed how about 95% of this new original, creative and entertaining advertising is directed to men (or both men and women)?

Have you ever noticed how about 95% of the old classic boring advertising is directed at women?

Marketing actions directed to women are usually clearly made by marketers that seem to assume that their customers are a brainless herd that needs to be directed in the right direction, their direction.

It often excels in a lack of originality. If you’ve seen one advertisement for washing products you’ve seen them all. If it’s something you haven’t seen a zillion times before, it usually is because it wants to give you something new to be insecure about. ‘You may not smell how much your house stinks, but other people do.’ ‘Have you ever thought about how ugly your armpits are?’

On top of that advertisements that are aimed at women, usually have a woman that you are supposed to want to be. In Italy where everybody has brown hair, this woman you should aspire, usually is a blonde. In Asia, Africa and Latin-America she usually is fair-skinned. So the message of these advertisements is: ‘you may not ever be able to be blonde like me, but you do can have a house that smells like mine’ or ‘you won’t ever be white like me, but you do can get lovely armpits like mine.’ One of the few examples of a diverse advertising campaign is the Ikea-catalog, Ikea, coming from the country with all the natural blondes.

Advertising directed at women often assumes women are stupid. It encourages old insecurities and creates new ones. The marketing industry is not dominated by men. There are nearly just as many men as women in it. In companies aimed at women there usually are more women than men working in the marketing department.

So the problem isn’t that men use marketing to make women feel down so they can more easily suppress them. The problem is that there are too many women and men in the marketing industry that see (other) women as idiots. The problem is that there aren’t enough women and men that are brave enough to create a marketing strategy aimed at making women enjoy their brand.

Be pretty, happy

Why do luxury brands claim they want to appeal to successful, intelligent and self-confident women and at the same time seem to address their advertising to the dumbest and most insecure women? I don’t believe that successful, intelligent and self-confident women can be persuaded into buying something by an ad of a 15-year old model looking at them as if someone just farted.

If all other industries wouldn’t constantly promote that beauty is important to be happy, I don’t think the beauty or the fashion industry would sell much.

How do other industries promote this message?

Well, advertisers believe that when they put pretty and happy people in their ads that you will after a while associate their brand with pretty people and with happy people.

What they seem to forget, is that their ads are always accompanied by other ads. In one commercial break you see a lot of pretty and happy people, all of them with other brands and products. So it's more likely that you will associate beauty and happiness together, instead of associating beauty and happiness with all these different brands and products.

And even though I have never done a survey on this, I do believe that people indeed are more convinced that beautiful people are happier, than that for example drinking coca cola will make you happy and pretty.

But is it true? Do you really need to be pretty to be happy?

 You often see psychological studies claiming that beautiful people are more successful and happier than ugly people. However it often are studies that only compare (extremely) beautiful people to (extremely) ugly people. Studies that compare ugly to average looking to beautiful people, usually find that average looking and beautiful people are more successful and happy than ugly people and that there aren’t any significant differences between beautiful and average looking people. So it aren't only beautiful people that feel happy, but average looking people feel just as happy. Ugly people unfortunately do globally are less happy.82T3PCQCAM

 82T3PCQCAMUD